Chicken Picatta

Of course, when I made this, I didn't measure anything. Unless I'm baking, I rarely actually measure, and even then I play fast and loose with teaspoons and quarter cups. So, I'm basing  the proportions in this recipe on the pictures. And I'm promising to write shit down from now on. I will. Totally will. If I remember.

Chicken Piccata

What you need:

• 3 tbsp olive oil
• 2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
• 1/4 c flour
• 1 tbsp lemon zest
• 3 tbsp lemon juice
• 1/2 c parsley, chopped and packed into the measuring cup^
• 1/4 - 1/2 c white wine (or white grape juice, stock, or other liquid of your choice)
• 1 1/2 c chicken stock
• 1 tbsp capers
• 3 tbsp butter
• 1/4 c grated romano or parmesan cheese
• about 1/2 lb of pasta

Recipe Guy made this but used basil instead of parsley and highly recommends it as a substitute.

What you gotta do:

If you're working with one cutting board, and aiming to use only one, you're going to want to chop all the fresh stuff first, and then deal with the chicken later. Since one board used is only one board to wash, that's what I'm going to say I did. It's the most probable sequence of events.

** Put water on to boil for the pasta. **

Chop the parsley. Zest the lemon and finely mince the zest. (mince it finer than this pic).

Cut the lemon in half and juice both halves.

This is a little more like what the zest should look like. And yes, it's a gratuitious extreme closeup.

Okay, that's it for the fresh stuff. Fast and easy.

Now the bird. If you've never "butterflied" a chicken breast before, now's your chance. It sounds fancy but really, it's just a way to get the chicken thin enough to cook really fast, and go a lot further. Yes, you could pound the shit out of it with a wine bottle, but when you do that, you actually break the flesh apart; it will crumble in the pan much the way ground beef does. Not the goal here. You're going to have to find some other means of venting your frustrations.

So, to "butterfly" a chicken breast, you want to lay it flat on the cutting board and hold it in place with the palm of your hand. Hold it! You don't want it flying away on you.

With the knife parallel to the cutting board and your hand, start at the top of the breast and draw the blade, still flat (you tilt, you bleed; keep it flat) toward you.

When you get to the end of the knife, check your progress. Since you're being careful and going slowly, you're probably only half way through. Reinsert the knife where the flesh is still joined, and repeat until you make it just about through to the other side.

Now, if you were aiming for a real "butterfly" this is where you'd stop. Me I want a bunch of small thin peices of chicken, so I kept going and cut it into two pieces. Actually, because the breasts were a little thick, I re-butterflied them. I cut each breast into thirds. Doing this can make two chicken breasts go a long way.

Yes, that is only two boneless skinless chicken breasts. No they were not mutants. Those pieces are very thin. You'll see just how thin as they're cooking.

Wait, that's a different cutting board. Apparently I had to wash two.

Before the chicken get into the pan though, it needs to be dredged. Fancy schmancy food word for "coat in flour". So a few recipes I checked before I started (no, I wasn't totally winging it as I cooked, I'm just winging it as I tell you what I did) suggested adding either cheese or zest to the flour. I added both.

It was a total waste of cheese and zest. Neither actually stuck to the chicken. Don't bother. Just use flour, with a little salt and pepper if you'd like.

Before you start dredging though (you know, when I worked at the sawmill, dredge had a whole different meaning) you want to get your pan heating. Medium high, olive oil in it.

Once the pan is warm, dredge a tiny piece of chicken in the seasoned (but not cheesey or zesty) flour, and check the temperature. It should bubble around the edges and start to look cooked almost instantly.

No, that's not as much oil as it looks like, it's just a tiny piece of chicken.

So, since the oil is hot, start dipping your thin slices of chicken into the flour. Coat them all over, shake off the excess,

and lay them in the pan. Do the biggest peices first because they'll need the longest to cook.

 Even still, they'll be looking pretty cooked by the time you get the last pieces in the pan.

Once everybody is in, you're probably going to need to start flipping. These, I flipped a little early, they aren't quite golden enough, and I had to turn them a second time to finish the browning.

Ideally what you want is something that looks a little more like this second extreme food close up:

Golden brown and delicious. Now you see why the pan and oil had to be so hot. You want to get this browning in just a few minutes because those are some thin pieces of bird.

Once everybody is nicely tanned, take them out of the pan, and keep them warm somewhere.

If you aren't using wine, you can use an extra 1/4 c of stock, white grape juice, or a combination of lemon juice and stock in this step.

Pour 1/4 c of your chosen liquid into the hot pan. It's going to bubble and fiz and that's good.

That bubbling is lifting all the yummy golden bits of chicken and flour off the pan and into your sauce. Stir to encourage them off the bottom and into the liquid.

It's going to thicken pretty quick as you lose water to evaporation, so add the lemon juice to keep it liquidy.

Bring that to a boil and slowly add the stock. You want to keep this sauce hot and reducing in volume.

We're not aiming to be able to coat pounds of pasta with the sauce, but more to create a hot "dressing" for it and the chicken.

Once you've added all the stock, and it's simmering nicely, toss in the zest and the capers.

Now, you can turn the heat down to medium low. You've cooked your chicken, deglazed the pan, reduced your sauce and added the seasonings. The final step to finishing the sauce is ... butter.

Oh yes, butter.

This is the French influence on what appears to be an otherwise Itanlian dish. Finishing a sauce with butter gives it a certain smoothness and gloss. It softens the sharpness of the lemon, and sweetens the salt of the briney capers.

And, well, it's butter.

But you don't want to boil it, just melt it, that's why you've turned your heat down.

Yeah, looks a lot richer than it did a few minutes ago, doesn't it?

Once you've melted all the butter into the sauce, you can return the chicken to the pan. You just want it in there long enough to get coated. Now is also the time for parsley.

*goes back and edits earlier part of post to remind you to boil water and pasta*

Now that your chicken is done, and your pasta is cooked...

see, it is:

Put it all together on a plate.

Top with a sprinkle of cheese, and serve with a glass of whatever wine you used in the sauce.

Want a bite?

I really did have a few recipes handy as I was making this, I just didn't make a note of the changes I made to them. I do that kind of thing a lot. Sometimes it doesn't work, and sometimes, like with this, it does. Unfortunately, because I forgot to write it down as I was cooking, it looks like I'm pantsing my butt off here, when really, it was a perfectly plotted meal.

What do you make by winging it?

No, really, I can cook! - Urban Homestead Style**

Okay, so the chocolate cake in a cup was an epic fucking fail. I don't blame myself at all. It's a crappy recipe and nothing will convince me otherwise.

So, as proof that I'm not as klutzy in the kitchen as I am in an analytical laboratory (I still hold the record for most broken thermometers in a single day) I decided to pre-empt my intended post for this week and make something a little more challenging.

Crepes.

No, not pancakes. Not even really thin pancakes. Crepes and pancakes are totally different things. Pancakes are a quickbread. They include oil and a leavener. They're flipped during cooking, and meant to be served flat, and they are almost always served for breakfast.

Crepes on the other hand are more of an egg dish. They include a relatively small amount of flour for binding purposes. They don't rise, they don't get flipped, and they are served rolled or folded. And they're dessert! Yes, I know, some people take advantage of the egg base and stuff them with savoury things like ham and asparagus and pour bernaisse sauce over them for lunch, but I prefer them sweet and fruity.

And so I give you:

Raspberry Crepes

I made them for brunch and I was a little hung over so I forgot to include all the ingredients in the ingredients pic and I miscalculated how long the cream had been in the fridge so there's no whipped cream... um...

Back to the post where I know how to cook.

What you need:

2 eggs

1 1/4 c milk

1/2 tsp vanilla

3/4 c flour

2 c raspberries

1/4 c sugar

cream cheese and / or whipped cream

icing sugar for dusting

(yes, I know there's no milk or cream cheese in the picture; part of being hungover is forgetting what ingredients you need when you're collecting everything)

What you gotta do:

Rinse the berries, and combine them and the sugar in a small pot. The little bit of water in there is just what you need. You can mash the berries yourself, or let the heat break them down. Either way, you want them over medium heat.

 

With a whisk, whip the eggs, milk and vanilla until it's frothy. (this is the point at which I remembered I needed milk; thankfully, there was some in the fridge)

Slowly add the flour, a quarter cup at a time, and whisk well after each addition.

You're looking for a perfectly smooth and creamy batter here. No lumps allowed. It should also be quite thin, more like a creamy soup or thin gravy. You want it to spread out in the pan, not sit where you drop it.

This batter was a little thick, so I added a couple tablespoons of milk.

Check on your berries. The sugar and juice should be a nice thin syrup and there should be a bit of foam and bubbles on top. If you've ever made jam, this will be looking a little familiar. If not, this is what jam looks like when it's cooking.

Heat a wide, flat, nonstick pan over medium high heat. You want that pan hot.

Using a ladel or measuring cup, scoop about 1/2 cup of batter into the hot hot pan and immediately lift it up and tilt it.

Tip it around in a circle so that the batter spreads out super thin. I'm talking an eighth of an inch or less.

They cook quickly! They'll be dry to the touch on top, and barely golden on the bottom when they're done. No, you don't need to flip them. This is eggs over fairly high heat; it doesn't take much to cook them. Genly lift the edge of the crepe with a spatula, then peel it out of the pan.

I keep the done ones on a plate in a barely warm oven (175 degrees), and I cover them with a damp towel so that they don't get crispy and curl around the edges. Crispy is not what we're going for here.

Check on your berries. They should be thickening nicely. If you're worried about them getting too thick, you can turn them down a bit. You're going for something between the consistency of syrup and jam.

When you get a bit more experienced at pouring the batter into the pan, try pouring into an already lifted and tilted pan. You can get a wider, thinner crepe that looks beautifully lacey around the edges. Not like an octopus. Oops.

Able to cook. Totally am.

Right.

Moving on.

Once you've made all 6 crepes, it's time to start assembling. Spread a tablespoon or so of the fruit onto each one, then fold into quarters.

   

 

I love cream cheese so I spread mine with about a tablespoon of it, and then folded them.

The 2 cups of berries will make enough to fill all 6, with a bit left for the top. But since mine had cream cheese in them, there was lots to go on top.

If you want to dust them with icing sugar, put a teaspoon or so in a fine sieve and gently tap it as you move around over the plate.

A lovely breakfast with a bit of OJ and some dark roast coffee.

Unlike pancakes which are supposed to be fluffy, crepes are a little more on the tender-chewy side of things. But they're not dense at all; they have a strange lightness to them that only comes from swiftly beaten eggs. The folds perfectly hide the smooth cream cheese, and the berries are tart and tangy.

There's a breakfast place in town here that makes giant ones filled with Nutella and bananas. And I have made ham and asparagus ones, I just prefer them sweeter.

What would you put in your crepes?

** re the title: Some jackasses have managed to trademarke the phrase "urban homestead" and are pissing circles around it all over the internet. Including on my friends Kelly and Erik and their book "The Urban Homestead". The Electronic Frontier Foundation is helping them and others affected by this bullshit. And a few people are flaunting the phrase by using it everywhere possible. The Dervaes Institute can kiss my ass. Fuckers.