Chicken Piccata

Chicken Piccata is a wonderful, classic Italian dish. I've always enjoyed eating this dish because it has a nice, fresh tang which comes from the lemon-based sauce.

While I have ordered it several times at restaurants, I have never attempted to cook it. It wasn't until my good friend Lucille (who happens to be a fiery Sicilian) had me help her prepare it for a typical Italian family dinner. It was easy enough to cook the dish with her, so last night I decided to cook it for myself.

Here's what I did (and apologies in advance that I don't have exact measurements. I did, after all, steal this recipe from a family):

Ingredients

chicken breasts

flour

butter

garlic

white wine

mushrooms

lemon juice

parsley

capers

If the chicken breasts aren't thin enough, use a tenderizer to pound them until they are thin. Afterwards, lightly coat each side with flour. In a pan coated with butter, cook the chicken breasts thoroughly and set aside.

Throw more butter in the pan and sautee the garlic and mushrooms. Afterwards, pour in the lemon juice and white wine, letting it simmer until the ingredients thoroughly mix with each other. Both Lucille and I--on separate occasions--added too much lemon juice, and we needed to balance out the taste by pouring in more white wine. So, be sure to constantly taste the sauce!

Add more flour to thicken the sauce. Lastly, throw in some Italian parsley and capers, and let it simmer for a few more minutes. Once the sauce is done, pour it over the chicken, and serve the dish with pasta (I prefer to have Piccata with linguini).

Tip: Make enough sauce to pour over your pasta. Also, don't forget, be easy on the lemon juice.

Buon appetito!

Read more...

Amateur Cooking Hour: Poulet Au Paprika

Perhaps it's because I'm an amateur in all things food, but it took a couple of tries to cook the rather simple French dish, Poulet Au Paprika or Paprika Chicken. The recipe I followed came from Phaidon's I Know How To Cook, and it called for a 2 1/4 lb. chicken, butter, stock, crème fraiche and paprika.

My troubles started when I couldn’t find a chicken that was exactly 2 ¼ lbs., and I assumed that the slightly heavier poultry I purchased would need to be accompanied by more of each ingredient. So, I estimated how much more butter to include, which inadvertently led to estimating how much more stock, crème fraiche and paprika to add.

After an hour of cooking the chicken in the oven, I quickly combined the leftover stock with the remaining ingredients to make the sauce. In five minutes, the meal was served.

The result was soggy chicken drenched in a thin, white sauce. And the sauce itself tasted like stock bothered with the sourness from crème fraiche. If it weren’t for my dislike of wasting food, I would have thrown the whole thing away.

Now, there were two things learned from this experience. The first is do not estimate the measurements for ingredients, especially for a dish that you never tried cooking. The second is patience. In this case, the chicken needed to sit on the pan and brown before putting it in the oven for an hour. The sauce needed time to boil and thicken, even if it meant adding an extra 30 minutes or more to the overall cooking time.

Last Sunday, I gave cooking Poulet Au Paprika another try. This time around, I stuck with the measurements and patiently waited for the chicken skin to brown to a slight crisp and the stock to truly merge with the crème fraiche and paprika.

The end product was exactly what I expected it to be the first time around: tender chicken coated in a butter cream sauce. The sauce itself reflected the mild, smoky flavor of paprika. Delicious.

Read more...