Kitchen Adventures: Copy and Steal Everything

My cooking skills are pretty limited unless I have a recipe to follow. I've always wanted to be one of those people that could just grab a bunch of stuff out of the fridge and make it into something, but I don't have enough base cooking knowledge or experience to make that happen -- at least not yet.

So in trying to branch out my ability to experiment in the kitchen, I thought the best place to start would be taking a component of a recipe I knew worked and trying to do something else with it. The Ina Garten pasta salad recipe I did the other day worked out so well, and I had left over ingredients, so I thought that would be a good place to start.

I took the basic formula for the dressing from Ina's pasta recipe and quadrupled it to make sure I had enough to marinate 5 boneless, skinned chicken breasts. In hindsight, I probably could have gotten by with tripling it. Depending on how much chicken you're cooking, you can decide what proportion to use.

Here are the base level amounts of everything before you multiply the recipe.

5 sun-dried tomatoes in oil, drained
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
6 tablespoons good olive oil
1 garlic clove, diced
1 teaspoon capers, drained
2 teaspoons kosher salt
3/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

I marinated the chicken for 30 minutes in the refrigerator, then put the chicken in a baking pan and spooned some of the marinade over each breast.

Thirty minutes in a 350 degree oven later, I had some nice baked chicken to serve over pasta!

 So the experiment was a success, and I have a new recipe in my repertoire. Now I just need to work on my plating skills...