We’re trying to make the shift to sourcing most of our food locally; while it’s less convenient than one-stop trips to ye olde Giant Eagle, Fox and I think it’s worth the effort. It was in this spirit that we found ourselves making a trip to Donatelli’s Italian Food Center, a little grocer in Bloomfield. Our goal? To make a tasty Italian dinner where everything we got was locally sourced.
We settled on doing chicken parmesan, pasta, and bruschetta, along with some biscotti for dessert. The chicken, we’d already gotten from Marty’s Market; the rest (pictured above) came from Donatelli’s. We even opted to get a pre-made sauce from the shop to let ourselves off the hook a little on cooking time: Grandma’s plain sauce.
The bruschetta was your pretty standard blend of chopped tomatoes and onions tossed in olive oil, basil, and balsamic, and I won’t bore you with instructions on how to cook pasta, but here’s how I did the chicken parm: first, I sliced the chicken breasts into cutlets and removed excess moisture from them with paper towels. Then, I dredged the cutlets in a bowl of flour. After that, I dipped them in a bowl of whipped egg until they were coated (the flour helps the egg stick). Then, I dredged the cutlets again, this time through a bowl of garlic breadcrumbs mixed with a little dried oregano. After the cutlets were prepped, I pan fried them in olive oil for about two minutes on each side — just enough to brown them. I covered the pan’s handle with aluminum foil, tossed some shredded Parmesan onto the chicken, and put the pan in the oven at 400 for about 10 minutes. (It may need to be longer if you’ve got thicker cuts of chicken).
While the chicken cooked, we heated up the Donatelli’s sauce, put the bruschetta on toasted Italian bread, and assembled our plates. Here’s what tje meal looked like in the end.
All told, working as a team, it took us about 40 minutes to put dinner together. And the sauce from Donatelli’s was excellent!
Once we finished our entree, we settled down for a little dessert — tender, crumbly, apricot-raisin-cranberry biscotti with black coffee. It was a great way to end the meal.
We’ll be highlighting a handful of other stores with a particular ethnic focus throughout the year — here’s hoping the results are all as good as the ones we got with Donatelli’s!