Steal of the Week: Chicken Piccata

I think every person might have a dish that he or she loves to eat when at a restaurant, and then you think to yourself, “could I make that?”. I have two of those dishes and the one of them is chicken piccata (The other is wild mushroom ravioli and I am not sure if I am quite ready to leap into homemade pasta!). When I saw that Cooking Light had a feature on Meyer lemons and one of the recipes was chicken piccata, I was super excited.

The downside, hubby had no interest in chicken piccata. My instinct tells me it’s a capers thing (you know for the longest time I thought “capers” sounded like it must be some sort of seafood!) but he wasn't specific. I offered it up as a menu option, he declined. So, I waited for a night when it was just me for dinner and went to work.

The Cooking Light recipe is for 4 servings and I only needed 2. I don’t consider this type of dish one that holds up to reheating so I decided to halve the recipe. This turned out to be fortuitous because I only had 2 lemons!

I prepped my lemon juice, capers, flour and then set to work on the chicken. At this point I am more convinced than ever that I need a fillet knife. Halving chicken breasts to make cutlets is hard enough without having to use a ceramic santoku as your tool!

Prepping the wine was also important! As the saying goes, “I love to cook with wine, sometimes I even put it in the food”. In all honesty, white wine is a rarity in my house with us being big red fans. However, hubby and I loved this Phileo from Barboursville Vineyards that we had at a wine tasting dinner so much, we bought a couple bottles. It is crisp like the recipe calls for but also has a little sweetness…for me I thought it would add nice flavor to the sauce.

Next came the simple process of cooking the floured cutlets. I went heavy on the pepper and light on the salt when I seasoned my chicken because I don’t use the lower-sodium chicken broth.

The remaining steps are super easy. The deglaze with the wine and the addition of the broth all go quickly. In fact, it all started to smell so delicious, I don’t know if I waited long enough to get the sauce down to the small amount the recipe suggests. 

As a result, my plate looked like this.But the sauce was VERY tasty, so a little extra was okay with me. I will definitely make this again…and maybe this time I can convince hubby to try it!