This dish was absolutely delicious (as good as Olive Garden's) and surprisingly easy! I did modify the recipe slightly. Here are my cooking notes:
- Because I threw this together at the last minute, I did not have time to marinate the chicken at all. I just pounded it thin, breaded it, and fried it in the skillet. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. And I'm a last-minute, easy-cooking kind of person, so this will most likely be the way I always prepare this dish.
- I added about 1 T. Mrs. Dash garlic & herb seasoning to the flour mixture to compensate for not marinating in the Italian dressing.
- The first time I made this, I doubled all of the sauce ingredients so we would have extra sauce for our mashed potatoes, but we still did not have enough. In the future, I will triple the sauce because it's just that delicious! I would happily drink it out of a glass. :)
- I used a slightly more expensive bottle of marsala (about $8 for Florio 375ml) because I wanted to start with the good stuff. My hubby, a wine drinker, thinks the cheap stuff may be just as good for this purpose. I'm skeptical, but we'll try it next time.
- After adding the marsala wine, I allowed the sauce to simmer for 2 minutes as the recipe instructs. Upon tasting it, however, the alcohol on the finish was still quite strong, so I increased the simmer time to 5 minutes before pouring the sauce over the chicken in the casserole dish. There was still an aftertaste of alcohol (I'm very sensitive to that), but I just crossed my fingers and prayed it would cook out in the oven. And it did! Our final product was a gorgeous sauce with just the wonderful, rich flavor of the marsala and not a hint of alcohol to mar its perfection.
Overall, this recipe is a winner. The whole family loves it, and it's relatively easy to prepare. Now, if I could just figure out how to stuff the chicken with cheese like they do at Olive Garden, I'd be in heaven. :)