Learning to Appreciate the Faux Marsala Monday

I won’t be excessively high-brow and say that I don’t find pleasure in an occasional trip to Olive Garden. Yes, on a one-to-ten scale of real Italian food, it’s probably around a 2.3. Yes, it is always packed with families and their loud-mouthed kids or tense teenage couples on cheap first dates. But there are just certain inevitable things about life that we have to learn to make our peace with, things we can never hope to change. And with Olive Garden, I’ve accepted the fact that I shouldn’t go there expecting great ambiance or top notch food. I go for the company.

So it came to pass that this past Monday, on a mixed whim of laziness and a general desire to get out of the apartment, Nick and I trolled down to Olive Garden for a late evening dinner. The place was bursting at the seams when we got there, so we had to bide our time at the bar. Two glasses of red wine for me, and one coke and rum for him later, we were at our table feeling good, smiling a lot, and happily tuning out the turmoil around us.

Stuffed Chicken Marsala

To a cynical eye, this is where the evening turned afoul. To me, this is where I came to fully appreciate the skill that Nick and I have managed to hone when it comes to cooking. He ordered the stuffed chicken marsala (Oven-roasted chicken breast stuffed with Italian cheeses and sun-dried tomatoes, topped with mushrooms and a creamy marsala sauce. Served with garlic parmesan mashed potatoes) while I opted for the good old regular chicken marsala (Sautéed chicken breasts in a savory sauce of mushrooms, garlic and marsala wine. Served with Tuscan potatoes and bell peppers).

Chicken Marsala

His dish came looking fairly good and smelling even better. Mine came looking good and smelling oddly like Teriyaki chicken. First bite proved that my Teriyaki assessment was spot-on. The poor cook at the Manhattan Beach Olive Garden is obviously laboring under the misapprehension that chicken marsala is supposed to be cooked with profuse amounts of ginger. To me and my taste buds, we know better.

Click to see other Dolcini flavors

If I were a more short-tempered person, my night would have gone to pot and there would have been no salvaging it. But my chicken, however gingery it may have been, was still edible. My potatoes (and you know I love my potatoes!) were particularly yum. A third glass of wine, a chocolate mousse with dark chocolate cookie crust dolcini (at left), and the increasingly pink-cheeked company of my Nicholas assured an all-around lovely time.

But I’ve learned my lesson. Olive Garden is good for stuffing your face with bread sticks, downing several glasses of wine, and feeling both in love and oddly cheap at the same time. But for good chicken marsala? I’m afraid I’ll just have to look to my own kitchen from now on. And next time I go to Olive Garden? I’ll just stick to some capellini.

Follow the jump to get our recipe for some tasty, tasty, tasty chicken marsala.

For the Love of Art and Pizza

Note: If you're my Facebook friend, you can view the full album of our Valentine's Day adventure

According to Nick, several of his work buddies sassed him over the fact that he planned to take his girlfriend out for pizza on Valentine’s Day.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go to Geisha House or something?” he asked after they convinced him that going through with his original plan would make him the worst boyfriend in the world.

“Geisha House? Are you kidding me?” I retorted, reassuring him that his co-workers didn’t know me like he did, reassuring him to trust his first instincts, making it abundantly clear that, to me, pizza at Folliero’s in Highland Park is the peak of romance.

So we set off for our day of mutual adoration, stopping first at one of our favorite spots in the whole city, the Getty Center. Although, judging by the ridunkulous traffic waiting for us on Sepulveda Blvd., a lot of other people in L.A. were thinking along the same lines. After being diverted away from a full parking structure toward a remote lot, and then proceeding to wait for full shuttles to take us back the way we already came, we made it up to the beautiful Getty where, thanks to sprawling grounds and people’s general disregard for art, it wasn’t all that hard to find peace amid the crowds.

It was a beautiful, sunny day. Not too hot, not too cold. The clear skies allowed for an uninterrupted view of the city below, and Nick and I reveled in the cuteness that so often irritates many of our friends.

But after having made our way through most of the galleries, and having enjoyed a security guard telling off some ragamuffin kid for climbing one of the Getty trees, we decided to move along to phase two of our Valentine’s Day: Folliero’s.

Before moving back to Palms in November, I was a happy Highland Park resident for nearly four months. Although the bus/train commute to school, my unpredictable hours in the wretched Digital Lab in Annenberg, and the emotionally trying times I was going through facilitated my eventual relocation, the months I did spend in Highland Park were some of the most gastronomically glorious of my entire life. The crowning jewel of this experience, of course, being Folliero’s.

When my sister first gave me her driving tour of Highland Park in the weeks before I initially moved in, I spotted Folliero’s and its cute brick front as she zipped up Figueroa, pointing out the original Forever 21, the happy ethnic families, and the encroaching hipsters. Of course, I was oblivious to all of them. I was busy making a mental note to go back to that adorable restaurant and sample their wares. Sample I did, and it was love at first bite.

We came, we saw, we conquered

Now, several Yelp reviews will tell you that Folliero’s has “slippery” pizza. I don’t deny this. The cheese almost refuses to stay on the bread, and through some trick of pizza engineering, the cooks at Folliero’s decided it would be a much better idea to bury your toppings under the cheese than leaving them on top. Trust me, though. None of this matters! Their sauce is light, fresh, not too salty, not too thick. Sure, it has a touch of soupiness that might be unappealing to those who prefer a chunkier sauce, but with Folliero’s pizza, the soupier the sauce, the more you’ll just end up wanting to drink it all up after all your pizza is gone.

After reassuring Nick a few more times that this is really what I wanted on Valentine’s Day, we rolled up and saw, much to his pleasure, that we were not the only couple celebrating Valentine’s Day there. On came the salad, on came the garlic bread, on came the beautiful, large, pepperoni, mushroom, and bell pepper pizza with love in every bite.

Needless to say, that poor pizza didn’t stand a chance. Barely born from the oven a few minutes earlier, it was unceremoniously devoured a few minutes later. I didn’t need to be overcharged for drinks and micro sushi at Geisha House. I didn’t want to be wined and dined over roses and candlelight. I didn’t need impressive displays of money-wasting in any sense. I wanted my Nick. I wanted a day with my city. I wanted Folliero’s. It was the best Valentine’s Day I could have ever asked for.