This fascinating dish presents yet another way to enjoy chicken. It is a duel purpose recipe as not only a great sauce for chicken, it is also a wonderful base for a brunch dish known as shakshuka! We use this to honor two lady pioneers of photography. The lovers were: Frances Benjamin Johnston and Mattie Edwards Hewitt. Each a phenomenal woman in her own right. They became the top of their fields around the turn of the twentieth century when it was just about unheard of for women to reach such prominence.
The secret to this dish is the sauce that balances the acidity of tomatoes with the creaminess of real butter. Go for the real thing here!
Ingredients
1 lb of chicken breasts (skinless - boneless)
salt and pepper
¼ cup olive oil
5–6 Roma tomatoes, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
one handful fresh basil, loosely packed, cut into ribbons
¼ cup Salted Butter
8 ounces pasta, like linguine, or elbows
Instructions
Do your cutting: dice the fresh tomatoes and mince the garlic.
Rinse the basil leaves and lay them on the cutting board, then run a pizza cutter through it a few times to cut into ribbons.
Sprinkle each piece of chicken generously with sea salt and freshly ground pepper.
Make the pasta according to package directions.
Heat the olive oil in a large skillet until a drop of water sizzles across the top. Add the chicken and pan-fry for several minutes on each side – the goal here is to get the chicken cooked AND get a nice browning on the outside. When the chicken is done, set aside.
Sauce:
Give the oil a few minutes to cool, add the tomatoes, and return to heat (if you add the tomatoes to the hot oil it will be a splatter-fest). Simmer to cook the tomatoes down into a chunky-sauce-like-mixture. Add the garlic and butter and stir to combine until the butter is melted.
Add the chicken back in to soak in the sauce for about 4 minutes to heat and soak in the sauce.
Just before serving, stir in the basil. Top servings of pasta with the chicken and the sauce.
Serves 4 Calories Per Serving: 600
Total Fat 29.7g Cholesterol 113.2mg Sodium 64.1mg Total Carbohydrate 49.3g Sugars 5.6g
Protein 34.6g
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Shakshuka
Shakshuka is a North African dish that is especially popular in Israel. It can be served with a side salad as a light evening meal. It is also a fantastic brunch dish. It’s super easy and versatile. It’s a vegetarian one-skillet meal that is easy to make, very healthy, and addicting.
Follow the above recipe to make the sauce with tomatoes, butter, and garlic. Lower heat to a simmer.
Crack eggs, one at a time, directly over the tomato mixture, making sure to space them evenly over the sauce. Usually, place 4 eggs around the outer edge and 1 in the center. The eggs will cook "over easy" style on top of the tomato sauce.
Cover the pan. Allow mixture to simmer for 10-15 minutes, or until the eggs are cooked and the sauce has slightly reduced. Keep an eye on the skillet to make sure that the sauce doesn't reduce too much, which can lead to burning.
When eggs are done to your liking, carefully spoon them out with a slotted spoon unto split English muffins on each plate.
Traditionally Shakshuka is a spicy dish so don't be afraid to add your favorite hot sauce to the cooking tomatoes.
So to honor two remarkable women of the 18th century, here is a two way recipe. Enjoy one way with chicken and another way with eggs!
So proud to serve this to my Master Indy.
socialslave
To satisfy and restore.
To nourish, support and maintain.
To gratify, spoil, comfort and please,
to nurture, assist, and sustain
…..I cook!
Please buy slave's cookbook:
The Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes by Dan White http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F315Y4I/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTM via @amazon
Frances Benjamin Johnston and Mattie Edwards Hewitt
Frances Benjamin Johnston, with Maddie, before a painted backdrop of the Cliff House in San Francisco, California, 1903
Frances Benjamin Johnston and Mattie Edwards Hewitt were two prominent photographers at the turn of the century. Frances was even the official White House photographer for Presidents Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, and Taft.
After becoming romantically involved, they moved in together and also started a business partnership. The fact that these two lovers each reached the pinnacle of their professions during this time in history was unheard of.
Frances “Fannie” Benjamin Johnston was born during the Civil War in Grafton, West Virginia. She was the only surviving child of wealthy and well-connected parents.
Her mother, Frances Antoinette Benjamin had married Anderson Doniphan Johnston. The couple had moved to the capital shortly after the Civil War.
Her mother Frances had started in journalism as a special correspondent on Congress and was recognized as one of the first women to write on national affairs.
The younger Frances Johnston was raised in Washington, D.C., and educated privately. She graduated in 1883 from Notre Dame of Maryland Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies. An independent and strong-willed young woman, Johnston wrote articles for periodicals before finding her creative outlet through photography. She was given her first camera by entrepreneur George Eastman, a close friend of the family, and inventor of the new, lighter, Eastman Kodak cameras and film process.
She received training in photography and dark-room techniques from Thomas Smillie, director of photography at the Smithsonian.
Fannie used it to help usher in a new era of photojournalism. Beginning with portraits of family and friends, she soon gained recognition and came to photograph some of the era’s greatest celebrities. Her subjects included Mark Twain, Susan B. Anthony, and Alice Roosevelt. She quickly became a truly self-made woman and a creative entrepreneur by the standards of the age.
Around the time she turned thirty, Fannie met Mattie Edwards Hewitt, the then-wife of the St. Louis photographer Arthur Hewitt.
Mattie Hewitt
Hewitt was born in October 1869 in Saint Louis, Missouri. After a period of studying art, she married Arthur Hewitt, a photographer. As his assistant, she quickly mastered the principles of photography involving processing and printing. She started her career in photography as a small operation in St. Louis. She continued to learn from the camera clubs and photography journals which then flourished during the late 19th century. She was also influenced by an article on photography by Frances Benjamin Johnston, published in the Ladies Home Journal.
Mattie was passionate about photography, so when Johnston first encountered Hewitt’s work, she was impressed and complimented it effusively. This mutuality of creative admiration soon blossomed into romantic love — a proposition particularly radical, and even dangerous, for two nineteenth-century women.
Letters from Hewitt to Johnston, found in the biography The Woman behind the Lens, join the ranks of other lesbian literary exchanges, including those between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Edith Wynn Matthison, and Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict.
“Mein Liebling —
… Just reread your letter, am I all the nice things you say about me, I wonder? Ever since you told me that I was indeed worthwhile, I have felt like another woman, and now if I have been able to make you truly care for me, well, I am very very happy over it. You do not know the wealth of tenderness there is in my heart for you, and shall I tell you why I have needed you so much and seemed so longing for love and affection? I have already told you of how little of the above I [received] in my home.
When I married that nice little man, I thought, of course, I should get all the love my heart had yearned for, but somehow he has always seemed too busy to stop long enough for such nonsense, as he calls it.”
“… If I have been the help you say I am to you, then I am more than glad. I have been so afraid from the first that you would think me a foolish sentimental woman and I was so happy when you told me the other day that you understood — If I have been proud of you and your work and put you on a pedestal, as you say, please let me keep you there, for you deserve it surely and that is my way of loving. . . .
I wonder why I expect you to understand me better than most people — is it because I love you so?”
In 1909, Mattie divorced Arthur and moved to New York to be with Frances, living and working together, and eventually making their creative collaboration official in 1913 when they opened a joint studio specializing in architectural photography. The only surviving record of their romance are those early letters from the years when they lived apart and wrote to each other.
After her divorce, Hewitt was dependent on photography as a profession for her living and pursued it with dedication, and had said: "it is the most fascinating of arts". Her photographic career was a "transition from an amateur in the 19th century to 20th century professional", when there was substantial innovation in photographic equipment.
Having grown up in a family that was in elite circles of the capital, Fannie Johnston built on her connections and familiarity with the Washington political scene: she was appointed as official White House photographer for the Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley, "TR" Roosevelt, and Taft presidential administrations.
Perhaps her most famous work, shown here, is her self-portrait as the liberated "New Woman", with petticoats showing and a beer stein in hand.
The Ladies' Home Journal published Johnston's article in 1897 of "What a Woman Can Do With a Camera".
In 1899, Johnston was commissioned by Hollis Burke Frissell to photograph the buildings and students of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia. This series, documenting the ordinary life of the school, is considered among her most telling work. It was displayed at The Exhibit of American Negroes of the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900.
She photographed events such as world's fairs and peace-treaty signings. Johnston took the last portrait of President William McKinley, at the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 just before he was assassinated there. With her partner, Mattie Edwards Hewitt, who was a successful home and garden photographer in her own right, Johnston opened a studio in New York in 1913. The firm was called "Johnston-Hewitt Studio", which functioned till 1917.
After the partnership with Johnston broke up in 1917, Hewitt ventured on her own and became famous in her own right as a commercial photographer. She set up her business establishment in photography with specific orientation to taking pictures for designers, architects, and landscape architects, recording interior and exterior views of home and business houses, and gardens. She continued in this profession until her death in Boston in 1956.
In the 1920s, Fannie Johnston became increasingly interested in photographing architecture. As New York changed under pressure of development, she wanted to document buildings and gardens that were being lost. As her focus in architecture grew, she became interested in documenting the architecture of the American South. Johnston was interested in preserving the everyday history of the American South through her art; she accomplished this by photographing barns, inns, and other ordinary structures. She was interested in photographing the quickly deteriorating structures in these communities that portrayed the daily life of common southerners. Her photographs remain an important resource for modern architects, historians, and conservationists. In 1928 she exhibited a series of 247 photographs of Fredericksburg, Virginia, ranging from the decaying mansions of the rich to the shacks of the poor.
Johnston was named an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects for her work in preserving old and endangered buildings.
Although her relentless traveling was curtailed by rationing in the Second World War, Johnston continued to travel and photograph. She bought a house in the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1940 and retired there in 1945. She died in New Orleans in 1952 at the age of eighty-eight.
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