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CatrionaGrace said:
Thin slices of chicken in thin gravy?
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Homer Potvin said:
Marsala wine and butter reduction... Olive Garden will have a processed knock off.
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I'm no drinker, but google tells me that Marsala is a fortified wine famous in Sicily, and Marsala sauce is a rich, earthy, and creamy Italian-American pan sauce made by reducing fortified Marsala wine with mushrooms, shallots, garlic, and broth (chicken or beef), often finished with cream and paired with chicken, pork or veal. Sounds delicious. 😋 Is that how you make it, Homer?

And I'm sorry, but the name "chicken marsala" reminds me of a chicken tikka masala. (Again, yum). 😋 ;)
 
Rath Darkblade said:
I'm no drinker, but google tells me that Marsala is a fortified wine famous in Sicily, and Marsala sauce is a rich, earthy, and creamy Italian-American pan sauce made by reducing fortified Marsala wine with mushrooms, shallots, garlic, and broth (chicken or beef), often finished with cream and paired with chicken, pork or veal. Sounds delicious. 😋 Is that how you make it, Homer?

And I'm sorry, but the name "chicken marsala" reminds me of a chicken tikka masala. (Again, yum). 😋 ;)
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Never been a fan of the cream variety and it's very rarely prepared with garlic in the US, though I have done it before. It's a "wine" in the sense that sherry is a wine, fortified and low alcohol that very few people actually drink. It's like cooking with brandy or sherry or port or whatever, where the alcohol burns off immediately.

There's nothing to it, cooking wise. All those wine sauces--marsala, piccata, scampi, frances, half of every Italian menu--are all made the same way basically. Olive oil to sear the protein (if applicable) and to cook the garlic or shallots or whatever, then the wine to deglaze the pan and provide a liquid base (plus stock if applicable), then butter which melts in to thicken. Basically you melt all that together, bring it up to temp, then reduce the heat. That's the reduction part. In theory, if you don't break the sauce, it then thickens as the rest of the ingredients simmer, like the mushrooms and the protein, which has already been cooked most of the way through.

The whole process takes maybe 10 minutes. If you're putting it over pasta, you wait until the pasta is already in the water before you even start the chicken so the timing lines up.
 
CatrionaGrace said:
I'm not fond of cream sauces, but the plain version sounds good.

(Scurries off to google unfamiliar cooking terms. I can hardly wait to break a sauce and casually mention the process in conversation.)
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It's when the fats "break" out of solution, resulting in oily, globby gook. Usually due to overheating or a bad mixture ratio. Very easy to do.
 
CatrionaGrace said:
Heck, I've already done that. Sigh. Another dream smashed. Eh, no biggy. I'll just talk about NOT breaking the sauce instead.
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Bring it to a bubble, drop the heat, serve relatively quickly. You don't want it reach a nice thickness and be like, oh, I wonder if the potatoes or pasta is done yet? You want everything plated about two minutes before you to pull the sauce. If done correctly, the sauce thicken on the edges and stop pooling before it reaches the edge of the plate. Kind of a maple syrup consistency.

My cookbook for writers will likely skip the sauteed reduction sauces in favor of the more forgiving fire and forget dishes. Like the salsas we were mentioning, you make like twenty of them from the same half dozen ingredients by adding one or two new ones. The tomato, tomatillo, and avocado each branch into ten others. Adding oils (or not) flips them from chunky tortilla salsas to more complimentary taco sauces. Charring the vegetables (or not) accentuates different flavors. And on and on and on....
 
Confessions of a green chili cook: I don't typically sear the peppers first. I am way too lazy for all that scraping of meat away from charred skins. My Mexican son-in-law always sears the peppers, and it does iresult in a different taste- even a better taste. but I still hate all that scraping, so I don't do it and settle for good chili instead of excellently nuanced chili. Yeah, no one is ever gonna hire me as a cook. In my family, the men and my daughter-in-law are the cooks. My daughter and I make admiring noises like mmmmmm and oh god oh god oh god.
 
You're all making me hungry and I just looked at the clock and was surprised to see it's already nearly 1. Time for lunch
 
I have a sinking feeling that the chapter I'm writing now in my historical fiction, where Emily confesses to both Amos and Robin that she was Kenny Weinacker this whole time... is gonna be in the middle of the book. A few chapters beyond
😑



It's either that, or we're introduced to Kenny (aka, Emily) in his intro chapter and immediately discover the identity in the end. I'm not sure which would be best.
 
I'm evaluating the .com stories today. I volunteered to be a judge this month. I've got 5 out of 12 done. Good stories!

btw - have you voted in the two short story contests currently open for voting here?
 
Well, .com is largely pro-AI and has been so from the very beginning. There is a particular staff member there who encourages it the most. This isn't really about calling out .com (I remember the no cross-drama rule) but it's more to say that this is just an aspect of them, and that any such rules wouldn't be that far-fetched.

Last I checked, they don't even have rules against AI members joining. I actually started a thread about this during the early AI era and the aforementioned staff member basically said to me that they aren't willing to go hard on AI rules because they wanted to see how "legitimate use" would develop throughout the years. I'm not really sure why that stopped them from having a rule to say no AI controlled profiles, but it is what it is.

Again, not mentioning this as a way to call them out, I'm just essentially saying that their approach to AI rules has been rather... unorthodox? novel? Something along those lines.

I really enjoy the strict no AI members and AI generated posts here. I like talking to humans, not robots.
 
ps102 said:
they aren't willing to go hard on AI rules because they wanted to see how "legitimate use" would develop throughout the years.
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That's actually a smart strategy that is aging well. Pervasive usage makes it legitimate by definition. Maybe not the genitive part yet but even that is probably bleeding into the mainstream.

So long as you're not using the shit to write for you, I have no beef. That would be foolish business at this point. Whether that's right or wrong, disappointing or not is irrelevant.

Not sure how you could tell one apart from some of the human dingdongs online.
 
I guess it comes down to individual preferences whether or not one uses AI to help them write.

I'd just like writers to find their own potential, instead of the potential of AI. It's more rewarding.
 
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