
The retrospective of FYCE offerings continues. This post is from January, 2021:
I always get a chuckle whenever I make chicken piccata because the Italian word for “sin” is “peccato.” There’s nothing sinful about this. It involves a small amount of wine but wine has been part of the Christian—never mind. The word “peccato” will be coming up again.
I’m going to forgo the usual ingredients list I put up front because it’s tedious. Read the recipe and follow along. Make sure you have what you need. Then read it through again. Then begin.
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Open a bottle of white wine, preferably dry, and pour yourself a glass.
Remove two chicken breasts from the fridge. If you bought them frozen make sure they’re thawed. Make sure they’re not room temperature.
Slice them in half horizontally. Wrap them in plastic wrap and pound them so they’re about 1/4” thick. Use a meat mallet if you have one or use a pasta pot and press; you’ll need the pot later in any event. This is important, because you don’t cook the chicken that long. There are ways to do this that involve oven baking but no one has time.
Rub in some salt and black pepper, finely ground. The chicken should absorb this. If you use coarse salt, for example, you’ll get these granules clinging and you don’t want that.
Heat up the largest skillet you have and pour in some olive oil. Dredge the chicken in flour on a plate or a shallow bowl. Don’t do the flour/egg/breadcrumb dredge, because that’s the oven version.
Pick up each 1/2 breast and wiggle it (that sounds naughty) to get rid of excess flour and put it in the large skillet with the boiling oil. Try not to crowd them too much and don’t overlap them. Fry them for 2 or 3 minutes, leaving them alone, and flip them over for another minute. Move the chicken to a separate plate.
Because you’ve floured the chicken it won’t have thrown off enough juice, that why you do this, to keep the chicken juicy, so add a little more olive oil to the skillet. Add AS MUCH GARLIC AS YOU WANT. I use a large head. Dice this finely. Sauté the garlic. This goes pretty quickly, a couple of minutes, but stir it because the oil is very hot at this point.
Throw in a few capers. You can omit this if you don’t have them or you don’t like them but they’re kind of intrinsic to the spirit of the dish. Splash in a glug of your wine. How much is a glug? You keep saying this Mattie.
Open the bottle and pour while saying “perdona i miei peccati.” This is my little joke to myself. It’s the Italian phrase for “forgive me my sins,” and sounds like “piccata,” although those are two very different words. Any nine syllables will do. “I love Mattie’s chicken piccata.”
Believe it or not you don’t want much of this. Cook it down until there’s hardly any left, a few minutes, but no more than five, and don’t let the remnants burn.
Now, add a little water and, if you’re me, a very little more wine, and at least 1/2 stick of butter chopped and softened. The butter is important, the wine is optional. Swirl this around until the butter melts, this doesn’t take long. You also might want to let some of this cook off because:
Turn the heat down to a simmer and get your patient, lonely, chicken breast halves. Plop them in there and let them simmer for a few minutes. This is kind of tricky. You don’t want to poach the chicken and you’ll know they’re done pretty much when the liquid is the consistency of…motor oil, for lack of a less disgusting but easily recognizable term. When in doubt, slice a little piece of chicken in the middle and see if you see any pinkness. You shouldn’t. There’s a reason why there’s no such thing as chicken tartare or chicken medium rare. If you do, sigh, pour yourself another glass of wine, crank up the heat, and let it cook for a little more.
You’re not done yet. Move the skillet off the heat and let it rest. It’ll keep cooking and the sauce will thicken further a little bit.
Start boiling water in a pasta pot. While you wait for that, slice two lemons in half and squeeze the life out of them over the chicken. Stir this around and put the skillet in your oven to keep it warm.
When the water’s boiling add very thin spaghetti, like angel hair (spaghettini). As much as you think you want to eat. Don’t use big flat noodles. They’ll be done in about five minutes, or even less, if you like al dente. Drain them in a colander as best you can. Do the Mattie trick and put 1/4 of the spaghetti on each of two plates (1/2 the spaghetti total), one halved chicken breast per, add some of the lemon-butter sauce. Slice another lemon or two and adorn. Then if you want seconds go back to the oven and the colander and help yourself.
If you want something less carbo-loaded don’t bother with the pasta and serve with a salad. If you’re a lemon fan use a lemon vinaigrette dressing. Vitamin C, important in winter. If you’re making this for four, make the chicken, the sauce, and a side salad as I’ve described and everyone gets a little less but it should be fine. You could make a little antipasto tray as an appetizer.
The chicken in that photo looks nice and crispy brown, but the recipe says it’s finished in sauce. That seems like a good result but I’m not sure how that happens.
To me, the header photo looks unusually dry for a piccata. I’m sure Matt’s dish looked better because there should be a discernible amount of sauce there.
I don’t post photos of my own food because:
1. I have a really crappy phone.
2. The Better Half is an intensely private person and he’d wonder why I was photographing a random dinner I’m making for the two us. My Deadsplinter activity is unknown to him and if he knew half of what I was posting concerning him and our shenanigans I’d be searching for “alternative housing” soon enough.
3. I am a disaster at plating. I roam the Web for images I think I can get away with using that approximate what I make but always are much more flattering. So I’m deceiving you and it’s one of the reasons why my header images are sometimes vintage but I think they’re funny.
I can certainly understand #2. Mrs. Butcher has shied away from applying her considerable intelligence in technological matters in order to focus them elsewhere. So, she doesn’t really understand that what I post under an anonymous username on a teeny, tiny website without any other social media presence is not actually doxxing us for the world at large. She would have a fit. As it is, I’ve been gently introducing her to the idea that there is a community website which I frequent and even that got her hackles up.
Regarding #3, I’m not the best plater without access to all the fancy kitchen stuff, but I say “fuck it” because I know that I’ll never find a picture online that can approximate what I’m cooking.
That’s unfortunate. I’m so proud to have you all as friends that I tell everyone…
…well I would tell everyone.
I’ve told all my houseplants about my friends here.
Same. My wife is aware of Deadsplinter but has no interest in seeing what I post here. She thinks it’s largely politics (which, to be fair, I post about A LOT). Which honestly is a plus for me. I bitch a lot about my mother-in-law and while my wife knows my opinions of her (and shares them) she might balk at me using the Internet as a outlet for my frustration.
I chuckle at #2. Mrs. Cleverer Name Here dba “La mia meta migliore” is also very private but she accepts that I have this group and will just ask “Are you writing something for your Internet friends?”
He’s gonna be terribly surprised when we all show up on your doorstep for dinner post pandemic!
But seriously, I never really divulged my level of Kinja participation so I understand. I finally did when Deadsplinter started up, I’m not even sure why.
You and the faithful hound are welcome to the finished half of my basement! I only have 1 bathroom in the house, though, so scheduling could be necessary.
This is one of those dishes which we cannot have in our house. Mrs. Butcher loves capers, while I–a reasonable and sane person–despise them with the heat of a supernova. So, there is no middle ground for us on this one.
Capers are the devil. And inevitably someone will say “well they’re very salty/briny”, but that’s not the problem. I love salty, briny olives. Capers are something different… something evil.
I know what you mean and I can’t describe it either. I think it’s partly the mouth feel, like you’re eating pebbles. There are a lot people who are revolted by eating oysters unless they’re fried and sliced. I have a friend who won’t eat bananas because the mushy texture makes her uneasy. It’s very strange and not restricted to humans. Our huge dog won’t eat the large version of his kibble, we get the exact same thing but in small sizes. At first I thought it might be a dental problem but our vet says his teeth are in excellent shape and that this is common in dogs but the reasons why are somewhat unknown.
Fun fact: before capers are capers, they are Nasturium seeds. Nasturiums are edible flowers which are something of an acquired taste–a taste that I have since un-acquired.
Goddammit, I misspelled “Nasturtium” twice. WTF.
I love capers – always a jar or two in the house – they are great in a sauce. As butcher would say, fight me?
We always have capers on hand too. A while back The Better Half decided he’s Tevye from “Fiddler on the Roof” (he’s not Jewish) and has me make bagels at least three times a week for breakfast. I don’t mind, they’re easy and I love them too. Plain or rye bagels only, plain cream cheese, salmon, and they must have capers.
Oh look, here I am again! I should really write a cookbook called “Skillet, Chicken, Pasta, Eat, Love.” It would have to be heavily edited though because otherwise it would grow to the size of a medieval Bible.
As an aside, I’m making chicken cacciatore tonight if I have the strength and the mental fortitude. It’s not difficult at all. Tomorrow, for Meatless Friday, I’m thinking of making trout almandine. It’s not trout season but I’m sure the Forager-in-Chief can procure some somewhere. I was leafing through past FYCE posts and there aren’t a lot of fish recipes. Shellfish, yes. Fish is really easy to make, and very quick. I shied away from it for quite a while because I couldn’t believe it could go so quickly but it does and I haven’t poisoned anyone yet.
Up until just the end of last year, we would go on semi-annual “fishing trips.” We’d take a large cooler and drive to Portland and buy a cooler full of fresh-off-the-boat seafood. They would pack it in ice in the cooler for us and then we’d drive home, portion everything out into freezer bags and pretty much live off of it for the next six months. It was glorious. However, Mrs. Butcher seems to have lost her taste for seafood, so even without Covid, we probably wouldn’t have made the drive at all in the past year. It’s too bad, because I’ve got some recipes for bluefish, halibut, salmon and scallops that are quite good.
Yeah, OK. I’ll have some of this.
Yes, please! But hold the capers.
You can give me Hannibal’s capers.
Oh no. @elliecoo , that was THREE YEARS AGO. Time flies when you’re dealing with your tingling leg and fighting off a pandemic!
I can’t believe I described this as “easy.” I mean, it was for me, at the time. I used to do all kinds of crazy multi-step cooking projects. It was memories from my Julia Child phase. Which lasted for about 30 years, or more I guess. But once we stopped having people over (pandemic, yay!) and I went into my decline (not lethal, thankfully) like @bryanlsplinter ‘s tortoise I retreated into my shell. And went a little crazy. But to err is human and forgive, divine.
Turtle, Mattie. Turtle. Tortoises and turtles are not the same thing.
Oh. I thought at one point I…I know what it was. In a DOT there was a photo of a tortoise with a big lumpy shell and you explained to us that it was a tortoise, not a turtle, and the shell was actually a bad thing and due to a bad diet. So I always associate you with tortoises.
I’m glad you guys are re-running these, because I seem to have missed an awful lot of the earlier ones.