The best part about Carol & Mike is that they give good recipe advice. I realize I’ve been remiss about passing that along, and due to laziness and rather slow intertubes, I doubt that will change. D:
I came home today with a spring in my step, a gleam in my eye and a desire to cook with garlic, lemon, white wine and butter. Somewhere the conception and realization of such a dinner, Mike walks in, nods sagely, announces a quite fancy name for such a simple dish and also suggests adding capers. Capers! I had never eaten them before! With a bit of testing, salting, peppering and capering, we then creating a delightful meal!
Anyhow, this is easy to make and awesome.
Dredge thin, flat strips of chicken in a mix of flour, salt and pepper and sear in a large pan with a thin layer of smoking olive oil. The salt and pepper mixed into the flour should be to taste. The flour helps keep the chicken juicy. Both sides of the chicken should be a golden brown. Remove the chicken from the pan.
The pan is now full of little chicken bits stuck to the bottom. Before they char, turn down the heat and pour oodles of white wine to deglaze the pan. Scrape all the bits off the bottom of the pan, because they are delicious. The white wine will reduce and serve as the base of the sauce.
Add a few cloves of garlic! Fresh garlic is better. If you do not have a garlic press, please imagine me glaring at you. Harshly.
Add the butter to the White Wine/Garlic mix! It’ll melt and brighten up the flavor. I used roughly a tablespoon and a half of butter per pound of chicken. Butter is part of my strict daily anti-hypothermia regimen. However, if you enjoy shivering and turning blue while swimming in the ocean, you might use less!
There is now a pile of golden brown, seared chicken in a bowl, and a simmering collection of white wine, butter and garlic in the pan. Turn up the heat add the chicken and reduce the sauce. The excess flour on the chicken will thicken the sauce. I’m not sure how to explain when the sauce is reduced enough, but it should be ‘Slightly Gooey’, in an appetizing way.
Now, go out back to your lemon tree and pick a good looking lemon. Slice it in half and squeeze the juice over the sauce & mix it up. There are now only three trials left to accomplish before we can enjoy the fruits of our labours: Salting, Peppering & Capering. The key to success is tasting the sauce. In the beginning, the wine will overpower everything. (DON’T PANIC.)
I added a sprinkling of salt, quite a few pinches of pepper, and a crash of capers to the mix. I don’t have a set recipe yet & every dish is more of a process than a formula.
Knowing why a dish is made is so much more valuable than memorizing simply how to make it. Even though someone already invented Piccata, figuring out the process on my own was a lot more fun than blindly following a proceedure. Also, this experiment ended successfully, which is key!
Sounds tasty! I shall have to try it.
Since I come from the school of Alton Brown and Anthony Bourdain who regard it with scorn, I do not own a garlic press and never will, but I do agree that fresh garlic is the best!
What’s wrong with a garlic press?? Do you dice by hand instead?
Alton Brown is the man, I need to see more of him.
Tasty, AND simple!
I mostly go with Alton’s criticism that it’s a unitasker and not any easier to use than dicing by hand XD I have a hard time imagining needing to prepare garlic any faster than I can do it right now, is all!
Also, garlic presses = terrible to wash. My brother bought me one for Christmas, alas, and I still regard it with scorn (or just ignore it).
I’m going to agree with Sophie and Gloria! I bought a garlic press and basically I have never used it except the first time. Also I would think that because you are applying pressure to the garlic instead of just chopping it, that more of the tasty garlic juices are somehow lost, but I have no scientific evidence to support this intuition. YET
I tend to clean most of the paper off of the clove and slice a bit of the bottom off before I press anything and it’s not too terrible to clean. It is a tool only useful for one thing, but it does a Good_Job of it! If unitools were inherently bad, my stock in Sporks, Inc. would’ve taken off by now!
When you press the cloves directly into whatever you’re flavoring, the garlic juices you would be losing on the cutting board instead spray directly into the dish. You could want a less homogeneous mix with packets of garlic but I enjoy the overall wave of flavor.
The pressing itself is also indispensable when creating a rub for the grill: garlic is sticky and the garlic spray coats the raw _whatever_ and all of your other spices stay on your food that much better!
I do still dice garlic, I don’t think I’ll ever go back to pre-minced refrigerated stuff, but pressing has a place near & dear to my heart of hearts. When you need garlic for a vinaigrette, a sauce, and other multiple dishes, it can even save time. I’m sure there’s loads of rationalization here as well as actual reasons for a press as opposed to dicing.
I hear that one Mr. Joshua Bosworth cannot light his own grill.
Admittedly, neither can I.
But that’s why I don’t use a damn outdoor grill.
PS: what are you doing that your garlic is spraying anything? o_o Sure, a little bit of liquid is lost on the board, but unless you’re taking a food processor to it and straining it, a noticeable amount of that liquid gold is not coming out. If you want a rub for your grilled thing, just halve the clove and rub it on what-have-you. You get the essence of it and it doesn’t look like you went Spanish Inquisition on it.
Pioneer Woman has a recipe for scallopini similar in many of the procedures and ingredients. Just made it and I can attest to its awesomeness.
http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2009/03/chicken-scallopine/