A myriad of potential dishes ran through my head. My usual fare of mac and cheese was the first thing that came to mind and the first thing to be rejected. No, I thought, that's too usual, too Kraft for a unique meal. Next was chicken wings, which you know, if you've read my other blog posts, is my culinary shangri-la. Too risky, I told myself. There's no way that anything I could make would measure up to my demanding standards. I had to have something closer to me, something I'd never had in a restaurant, something that was great enough to justify an entire meal with it as its center. Finally, I knew. Chicken piccata.
Chicken piccata was a staple of my father's cooking and one of the few dishes that I loved and requested as often as I could back at home. Soft chicken with crisp sauted breading and the important part, a lemon juice, white wine, chicken broth and caper sauce. With the chicken, my father always made a plate of sauted green beans and almond slivers in lemon juice. This aspect of the meal could prove more difficult than the chicken. I remember my father either undercooking or burning the almonds at least three times before he managed to get the dish just right. I figured that the delicacy needed to perfect. The almonds along with the green beans would be too much for my novice cooking abilities and so I opted out of the finicky almonds.
Now that I had my meal, I needed a person (or a few people) to share it with. I thought and thought and, after realizing that the majority of my friends were vegetarian, decided on my close friend Ethan. Ethan and I had spent nine months in Israel together and shared countless teenager-cooked meals together there, the most memorable being a Columbian soup into which an extra hot pepper and another pepper's worth of seeds was accidentally added. I figured Ethan would be the most receptive to my culinary excursion from Kraft noodles and bagels with cream cheese. Another bonus; Ethan will almost never pass up a free meal.
Procuring the ingredients for my meal was a relatively simple task but one nonetheless fraught with tension. Most of the ingredients were simple; chicken, oil, beans, lemons, eggs. The problems came when I ticked “chicken” off of my grocery list and came to bread crumbs and capers. The amounts of these two ingredients that my recipe called for were miniscule in comparison to the bountiful containers in the supermarket. My brow furrowed when I realized I'd have to pay five dollars to use a tenth of both the container of bread crumbs and capers. What college student uses capers in any kind of meal? Oy vey. Sighing deeply at my frugality, I purchased both and hoped that I'd find some way to enjoy eating breaded capers in the near future.
I lugged the Meijer bags from my car, up the tortuous stairs and into my house. Surveying the freshly unpacked ingredients arrayed on the kitchen counter, I didn't feel so great about my decision to cook this meal. It was the chicken that got me. I allowed myself an inward wince of disgust, I knew that the chicken came from the worst of factory farms and was injected with a strange brew of antibiotics and chicken flavoring. The only harvest that I could picture the green beans as part of was my own when I grabbed handfuls of them from the plastic bin at Meijer. The core of my meal was unsustainable and a perfect feed-in to the American industrial food system. I had no easy alternative to the cheap accessible Meijer chicken. My rationalization was that my father used the same chicken in his chicken piccata. So, with my cognitive dissonance suppressed for a little while, I launched into the meal.
With all the ingredients assembled, it was time to start cooking. A few days earlier I had asked my dad to send me the recipe for his chicken piccata and he obliged, sending me the scanned page of “Dad's Own Cookbook,” complete with his written notes about variations on the dish and when to pound the chicken. Thinking ahead, I had defrosted the chicken in the fridge for about half a day before I started cooking my meal. When it came time to pull it out of the fridge and begin the long process of readying it for cooking, it was still a little frosted. I ended up letting it sit out for another couple of hours before undertaking the first step in creating chicken piccata, pounding. After wrapping the chicken in cellophane, I laid into it with a rolling pin, flattening it to about half its former thickness. According to my father, this was so that it cooked faster. I just had fun taking some of my sixth-week blues out on a piece of inanimate meat. Next, I dredged the pieces of chicken in beaten eggs and then breadcrumbs. At this point the chicken seemed pretty gross. Just slimy pink meat with crust of bread crumbs. Well, I thought, the only thing to do is throw them in the pan and see what happens. As the breasts sizzled in the frying pan, a wonderful cooked chicken aroma mixed with the heartiness of frying bread crumbs and olive oil filled the air. Things were going according to plan.
When both breasts had turned a golden brown, I took them out of the pan and poured my pre-prepared mixture of capers, chicken broth, white wine, and lemon juice into the same pan to cook down for around ten minutes. From my experience, this sauce is what really makes the whole dish come together. The sourness and cooked down chicken flavor work amazingly with the soft yet crunchy chicken breasts. The best part is near the end of the meal when all the sauce has been absorbed by the breadcrumbs and your last few bites of chicken have the whole shebang together inside them.
I did hit a snag with the sauce. The directions say that you're only supposed to cook the mixture down for 45 seconds, but after those 45 seconds my sauce hadn't achieved the strongly-scented brown thickness that I remembered from my father's piccata. I decided to cook it down for another five minutes but I had to add more of all the ingredients in the sauce so that I'd still have enough sauce after everything cooked down.
Where have the green beans been this whole time you ask? Boiling in a pot that I had prepared at the beginning of the meal. After they boiled for around five minutes I took them out, and delegated the rest of their process to Ethan because I was busy with the sauce. He strained them, washed them in cold water, and cooked them in a pan with butter. As the sauce finished, we juiced half a lemon on top of them and moved the whole meal out to the living room to finally be consumed.
This whole process made me realize just how much practice goes into perfecting just one recipe. My father must have cooked this dish multiple times before it attained the stature that motivated me to cook it myself. He passed a few tips down to me in the email he sent with the scanned page of “Dad's Own Cookbook”. They weren't anything incredibly secret or amazing, just a couple of recommendations for objects to pound the chicken with and a warning to not overheat the oil. There wasn't a secret spice I was supposed to throw in at an exact right time or a trick to breading the chicken that would make the recipe larger than life. The dish and my father's notes were perfect for “Dad's Own Cookbook;” not too difficult, down to earth, and unassuming.
Despite the humble tradition behind it, the chicken was wonderful despite. There were some slight differences from what I was used too. My father either bought smaller breasts than I did or cut the ones he had in half, but our servings were gigantic. I'm not sure how, but the chicken was cooked perfectly through even though I wasn't watching them very carefully when I was dashing around the kitchen. The sauce was great too, very lemony. It really deepened my enjoyment of the chicken. The green beans' sweetness and crunch was a perfect compliment to the soft chicken and the tart lemon in the sauce and the beans. I couldn't get many specifics out of Ethan but he said that he really enjoyed the whole meal.
The only problems we had were slight. The sauce could have been thicker and less lemony, the breasts could have been thinner or more manageable, and the chicken had cooled by the time we had finished cooking our green beans and sauce. Also, there was a lot of lemon in our meal. I'm totally fine with this and even enjoyed all the tartness, but I'm not sure how the whole meal would go over with someone who doesn't love lemon as much as I do.
With the chicken safely in our bellies, we turned to the monumental task of doing the mountain of dishes that amassed during the frantic scramble to cook one of my favorite meals. My dad's notes written on the recipe page and the texture and appearance of the breaded chicken brought me back home again, at least for one night.
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