Potato Risotto and Caprese Chicken Salad

My roommates invited an old friend over for dinner the other night. I had never met this friend, but I have this uncontrollable need to impress people with my cooking. I am not gifted at singing, acting, or sports, but I can cook a mean meal. I wasn't sure what to cook for this mystery guest, but I was in a creative mood as I sculpted my menu.

I watch Top Chef almost religiously. In the one of the first episodes of the new season the chefs are challenged to create something awesome out of potatoes. Mike Isabella chose to make a potato risotto. I had never heard of risotto being made out of anything aside from rice, but there it was. Being the arrogant and adventurous cook that I am, I decided that I too could make potato risotto. To go with the potato dish I decided to do a play on the classic caprese salad. The salad would traditionally have fresh mozzarella, sliced tomato and basil. I decided to make my own pesto and coat chicken in the pesto and then stuff it with mozzarella and tomatoes.

The plan started to go wrong when I started making the pesto. Typically this would be done in a food processor, which we do not have. I have used a blender to make sauces before so I tried to make the pesto in the blender. The problem with the blender is that it doesn't actually reach all of the ingredients sitting in it. Especially when the items are small like basil leaves. Long story short, the garlic got chopped up very finely but the rest of the pesto didn't process as well. This resulted in a pesto that was overly pungent with garlic.

The plan for the potato risotto was to put a very fine dice on potatoes and then saute the pieces in oil before slowly adding liquid to cook. All the recipes I found called for using a julienne setting on a mandolin, I don't have a mandolin, but I do have a julienne peeler from Pampered Chef. Let's just say that these two items yield very different results. The peeler did not work easily, and did not yield thick enough julienne strips to dice. The tragedy continued from there when the potatoes did not cook as the recipe said that they would. What resulted was something between hash browns and potato soup.

With the potato disaster, I ran out of time for my elaborate stuffed chicken plans. I ended up dicing the tomato and the mozzarella and serving a tomato cheese salad of sorts on top of baked pesto coated chicken.

All in all, this was one failure of a meal. I learned a valuable lesson. When you are having company over for dinner, stick to what you know. When I was younger we would make what we called Mike's Lucky Chicken whenever we had people coming to the house. It was so tasty and easy, we had perfected our version of the recipe and it was a crowd pleaser. Stick to a menu you know you can execute well.