Food Musings

Enjoy this tasty restaurant favorite at home with a glass of white wine and fresh garden salad (I prepared homemade Green Goddess recipe for our salad). This Italian chicken recipe is sure to please your entire family.

With well over 250 recipes posted in the past few years you would think that I’ve covered all of the basics.  But as I read through some of my binders of recipes 

and cookbooks 

I realize that I’m just getting started!  And…that there’s many tried and true recipes that I haven’t even prepared in over 2 years!

So…I present to you my Chicken Piccata recipe.  Enjoy this tasty meal soon with family and friends!

Chicken Piccata

• 4 chicken breasts – butter flied and pounded thin or 8-10 chicken tenders
• Olive oil
• 2 TB capers
• 8-10 mushrooms, sliced thin
• 1 small yellow onion – French cut thin
• 2 cloves garlic, diced
• salt and pepper
• ½ c flour
• ½ c white wine
• butter
• lemon juice
• 8 thin lemon slices and chopped parsley for garnish

1. Warm oil in sauté pan
2. Sautee onion until translucent, then add garlic – remove from the pan.
3. Dust chicken with flour and salt and pepper
4. Sautee chicken until light brown on both sides.  Don’t worry about the chicken sticking to the pan as the flavorful brown bits will make the dish even more delicious. Place the chicken on a plate and cover to keep it warm.
5. Add wine and scrape up the browned bits – this is called *deglazing.
6. Reduce fire a bit, add capers and a little lemon juice
7. Add mushrooms and the cooked onion and garlic
8. Add a few pats of butter for flavor. Taste the sauce to see if it needs more of any of the ingredients.
9. Add lemon slices and chopped parsley
10. Then cook in sauce until everything is warm.

*Cooking Tip: Deglazing means to pour some cold liquid into a very hot pan to get up all the brown bits stuck to the bottom of the pan. Those brown bits are where all the flavors are, and it is called “fond.” Fond is French for “bottom”.

After you have browned the meat and removed it from the pan, remove the excess fat. Heat the pan over medium-high heat as you add about a cup of which ever liquid of your choice. The heat will help loosen and dissolve the really stubborn deposits as you scrape the pan with a straight edged metal spatula. The deglazing liquid can be wine, stock, almost any liquid, even water. The idea is to loosen up any bits of meat and all that “burned” on stuff that is stuck on the bottom of the pan and incorporate them into the liquid because they have lots of flavor.