Movies on the Menu - Aurora's Chicken Pepperoni

Welcome to Movies on the Menu! This is a new feature we'll be doing in the NSC blog as the mood hits us. The idea is simple: Watch a movie where the characters are cooking something, try to figure out what goes in this dish based on what we see on the screen or what they say, and then try to cook it ourselves. Now, this does not mean we're not going to cheat by using the Internet as reference or alter it based on common sense, because, hey, we have to buy, cook and eat this stuff.


The first movie we picked for this feature is one of our personal favorites: Seems Like Old Times. This movie stars Chevy Chase, Goldie Hawn, Charles Grodin and Benson. This movie is classic Chase and if you haven't seen it, you need to immediately. The story goes like this:

Chevy Chase plays Nick Gardenia, a writer. He's kidnapped at gunpoint by two guys and forced to rob a bank. A fugitive, he looks to his ex-wife Glenda (Hawn) to help him. She's a public defender who also happens to be married to the current DA (Grodin). But you see, Glenda has a heart of gold and she begrudgingly helps Nick because she still has love for him. Awww. Of course, hijinks ensue.


One of the key scenes is the dinner scene. The governor and his wife have been invited to Ira and Glenda's home for one of the governor's favorite dishes: Aurora's Chicken Pepperoni. Aurora is the maid who makes this fabulous dish. But guess what? She can't cook that day because she has to go to the hospital to get her feet scraped. Oh no! What will they do? The governor's coming, presumably to make Ira the state's attorney general, but he certainly won't now that Aurora's chicken pepperoni won't be served! They HAVE to serve this chicken pepperoni!


Glenda spends the entire day trying to figure out how to make this dish and this is where our adventure begins. We freeze frame the screen and see the following ingredients:
Tomatoes
Red wine
Olives
Parmesan cheese
A-1 and some other bottle of sauce, looks like Worcestershire
Green peppers
Various dried spices
Bread crumbs
Rice (Minute Rice, Uncle Ben's, Rice-a-Roni)
French bread


As the guests arrive for dinner, the chaffeur Chester (TK Carter) has been put in charge of watching the sauce. From what we can tell, he's stirring what looks to be plain spaghetti sauce and liberally adding a bunch of red wine to it.

Of course with this scene being the climax of the movie, Nicks shows up in the kitchen and it's just in time too, because Chester's too drunk off the red wine to do anything. After Nick comes on to Glenda and promises that he's going to turn himself in after dinner, we see him removing breaded chicken breasts from the oven. He then pours the red sauce over the chicken breasts. Chester ultimately passes out so Nick the Fugitive serves dinner to the governor and his wife.

Even though it's called chicken pepperoni, we couldn't see pepperoni in any of the scenes. It doesn't appear to be in the sauce, on the chicken (hidden inside?), on the counters, nowhere. I looked up pepperoni and found out on the Wiki that:

"The term pepperoni is a corruption of peperoni, the Italian plural of peperone. While in Italian peperoni refers to bell peppers, in Italian-American cuisine the word "pepperoni" evolved to indicate a kind of spicy sausage that actually originated in Turkey, but it goes by another name in Turkish."

Earlier, when Glenda was cooking, she remarked that she had found Aurora's recipe but it was in Spanish. This leads us to believe that the pepperoni isn't sausage, it's the bell peppers we see laying around on the counters. (Yes, we're making this up as we go along.)

We decided to go about our chicken pepperoni differently. We used thighs instead of breasts and we decided to throw everything in the crock pot for a day of simmering. That means we did not bread and bake our chicken, nor did we cook the sauce separately on the stove. And, we took a lot of liberties with the sauce. One of them being the addition of actual pepperoni to the sauce:


Red and green bell peppers
Tomatoes (fresh and canned)
Pepperoni
Red wine
Olives
Dried spices (oregano, basil, italian seasoning)


Basically, we threw everything in the crock pot and let it cook for 10 hours. We served it on a bed of Texmati rice.


All in all, it came out O.K. It tasted like a homemade red sauce with chicken on top of rice. It sort of reminded me of the ground beef/tomato sauce/white rice stuffed green peppers we used to have when I was a kid. It's not a bad meal, but hardly one I think the governor would promote anybody over.

Movie rating: 9/10
Food rating: 5/10

P.S. Have any suggestions for the next Movies on the Menu? We would love to hear all about it.