Category Archives: Food, Glorious Food

Meson Sabika: Flamenco Holiday Party

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We went to the holiday party last night for David’s office. In recent years, it’s been an enjoyable enough affair, especially after they stopped booking the DJ nobody liked… but the experience we had was somewhat beyond our wildest expectations of a nice evening.

Meson Sabika was the setting, a large mansion in Naperville, which is one of the few Chicago suburbs with a sense of its own history. First settled in 1811, it’s set in gently rolling country, with a vibrant and architecturally appealing downtown, with public space and art everywhere. We drove down after work, and I was in my typically grumpy “I HATE GETTING DRESSED UP” frame of mind on the way. All that changed as soon as we walked in the door.

The Willoway Mansion was built in 1847 and sits on a pristine four-acre estate near downtown Naperville. After a meticulous renovation that brought back the mansion’s original charm as well as added modern conveniences to the restaurant, Meson Sabika opened it’s doors in 1990.

It goes without question, that the restaurant offers an unmatched dining experience. Guests can dine indoors and enjoy the grace and charm reminiscent of a European Villa or can choose to sit outdoors on the terrace while enjoying the ultimate alfresco experience underneath 150-year-old oak trees which cover the estate.

Guests will find that each item on the menu offers a taste of Spain. Whether it’s enjoying hot and cold tapas, sangria, an entrée or a vintage wine – there’s always a pleasant combination of exceptional food, friendly service, and unique atmosphere where family and friendship can live life in celebration.

The entrance is the original foyer of the mansion, with a sense of rooms and people and festive celebration taking place in rooms all over the house. The hall was gorgeously decorated, with a beautiful old wooden staircase leading to the second floor. We checked in with the staff and they took our coats away. We were ushered through lace curtains separating the former front parlor from the hall, where familar faces told us we’d found the right room. We were a few minutes late, and the drinks service had just started. Handsome waiters moved smoothly through the room, distributing glasses of wine and cocktails (open bar). It was a lovely old room, with 4 long dining tables set for dinner, in two rows with a central aisle. We filled it, with each department tending to keep to itself. So at our table, we were the Dev people, and the Sales people (always a boisterous bunch) were the next table down.

The first appetizers came out, a couple of variations on potato salad; each table got two big platters to pass down each side, serving ourselves family-style. The hot appetizers, same drill.

And then a guitarist began to play, another set of lace curtains separating the parlor from the big bar area were opened, and the flamenco dancer began to stamp out her passionate rhythms. The old wood floor was perfect for her snapping, gunshot-loud steps.

It was an extra-special evening, with a wonderful holiday mood set by the beautiful old home, the decor, and the family-style seating. I’d definitely like to return.

The food was amazing – also, they had Spanish beers and wines. My husband David’s co-conspirator had been to Spain and was really pleased to find Spanish beer on the bar list. It seemed like conversation flowed more easily at this party than at previous years’ shindigs; something about the antique-y, homelike setting put us all at ease. Even those of us spouses (or spices) who only see these people once a year.

David even won a gift card, well done. If you check the link, you’ll see the holiday menu choices for groups. We had the third option, which was plenty of food (although rather heavy on the dairy, and light on vegan choices).

I was stupid not to bring my iPhone. I thought I would be tempted to play with it “when I got bored.” That would not have been the case, and I could have gotten some decent shots of the hall and the dining room.

David took the picture of the dancer. The lighting was not optimal but this pose came out pretty well.

Via Meson Sabika’s Holiday Menu

Just Do It: My Turkey Anxiety

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I admit it, I have Turkey Anxiety. I’ve never actually cooked a complete Thanksgiving meal, and in fact I very, very, very rarely cook at all. David handles most of the day to day stuff, although I have a few things that I make for the two of us. We never entertain, because the house is almost never company-ready. There’s too much stuff to put away and no place to put it, and yadda yadda.

But every now and then, I get the wild urge to make a turkey dinner around the holidays, with the side items that are my favorites that I haven’t had in more than a decade and a half.

Just Do It | Tackle the Turkey – The Moment Blog – NYTimes.com

Why all the turkey anxiety? One friend has never cooked a whole bird, and is still haunted by memories of her aunt’s dry turkey. Another says his oven was inconsistent, not to mention that it takes too long to cook. The third wants to focus on the sides, and the turkey takes up too much oven space.

By addressing each of their concerns, I was able to convince them that roasting a turkey is easy enough: Rinse bird, pat dry, massage with butter, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Place on a rack in a roasting pan and plop in the oven.

That sounds fairly simple, and I did have good success with the roasting pan and rack we bought a while back (we made roast chicken in it once). The gravy-making method sounds simple enough:

4. Prepare the gravy. Strain the juices through a fine-mesh strainer, pressing on the solids. Skim off the fat. It should measure 2 cups. (Add water as needed.) Melt the butter in a small saucepan. Stir in the flour and cook over medium-low heat until brown and nutty smelling, about 5 minutes. Whisk in the strained juices, add the bay leaf and bring to a boil. Simmer until reduced to the desired consistency (preferably until it lightly coats the back of a spoon). If it gets too thick, loosen with water. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Remove the bay leaf.

Okay. Then that leaves the stuff that I hanker for that doesn’t seem to appear at my husband’s family Thanksgiving gatherings: green bean casserole, homemade cranberry sauce, and light, fluffy, buttery mashed potatoes. And then there’s the desserts, some of which I’ve made before and others I haven’t: Baba au Rhum, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, and Stollen.

But the thought of actually “making a turkey?” Very fraught. We’ll see how I’m doing for time closer to the Christmas holidays.

Cheating On Shirley Edelman

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Being part of the family here in Chicagoland (actually, Northwest Burblcavia) means that I get to partake of some seasonal delights and occasionally take a stab at cooking them.

Take latkes. Please! Take another! I like them a lot. But they can be really greasy and high in calories. A few years back, I had run across a really great recipe that makes a huge amount of latkes, but it also calls for a boatload of oil. It also comes with philosophical musings: The Constitutional Foundations of Shirley Edelman’s Latke.

However, I happened across the following recipe in my news feed, from the Salt Lake Tribune of all that’s good and holy. I notice this doesn’t call for matzoh meal – this recipe might need its own First Amendment.

Healthy Plate: Satisfying latkes with less fat, calories – Salt Lake Tribune

1 1/2 pounds Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and grated

1 medium sweet onion, grated 3/4 cup

2 medium shallots, grated 1/4 cup

1/4 cup all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

1 large egg, lightly beaten

8 teaspoons canola oil

Heat the oven to 450 F. Lightly coat a baking sheet with cooking spray.

Spread the grated potatoes, onions and shallots on a clean dish towel or a large piece of cheesecloth. Roll up the towel and squeeze over the sink to extract as much liquid as possible from the mixture. Transfer the mixture to a large bowl.

Add the flour, salt and pepper, then toss to mix well and coat the vegetables with the dry ingredients. Add the beaten egg and 2 teaspoons of the oil to the potato mixture, then toss well.

In a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat, heat 2 teaspoons of the oil.

Using a 1/4 cup measure to scoop the potato mixture, make 4 latkes in the skillet. Use a spatula to flatten each mound of potato batter into a 3-inch pancake. Cook until crispy and lightly brown, 2 to 3 minutes per side.

Transfer the latkes to the prepared baking sheet. Repeat using the remaining oil and potato mixture to fry 2 more batches.

When all of the latkes are fried and arranged on the baking sheet, place the sheet in the oven and bake until the latkes are crispy and hot, about 10 minutes.

Nutrition information per serving values are rounded to the nearest whole number: 89 calories; 25 calories from fat; 3 g fat 0 g saturated; 0 g trans fats; 21 mg cholesterol; 13 g carbohydrate; 2 g protein; 1 g fiber; 205 mg sodium.

Servings: 12

Twelve servings is a pretty reasonable number. Shirley’s recipe feeds anywhere from 2 to 10 people in theory, but when we made it we had a huge bowl of potato mixture and it seemed like we could have fed a regiment. I think these could also be frozen between layers of wax paper and reheated later, but they’re much better served hot and crispy, with sour cream AND applesauce (my husband David is an applesauce-only guy).

Sorry, Shirley, we may have to cheat on you just a little bit. But we’ll honor the spirit of your recipe if not the letter of it and throw in some matzoh meal.

At the End of the Day

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My life doesn’t really run to a narrative. There’s the basic “get up, go to work, come home, eat something, do something, go to bed” framework, but there’s no grand sweeping Story of my Life. It’s just a collection of random moments.

That being said, some days are a little out of the ordinary in minor ways. Today started out normal, got different, then got normal.

It was very slow at work – as in, frighteningly, “when are they going to start training us on other accounts” slow. Not terrifyingly “when are they going to start to pull in the last-hired people into a conference room” slow, though. I had left a number of messages for a bunch of different hotels in Atlanta, trying to find some block space for a group, but didn’t expect to hear back from all of them until after the Thanksgiving holiday. This event isn’t for about 5 months so it’s not a huge rush, but it’s during the time of a major convention and a large meeting-planning organization had sucked up all the available properties behind a kind of “paywall” arrangement. The person asking me to arrange the block wasn’t willing to give up a credit card number for a guarantee just to find out IF her first through sixth choices were available, at some unknown price. So I was trying to find someplace that wasn’t contractually obligated through the convention’s housing bureau. I’ve worked with the particular meeting-planning outfit running the housing desk before and frankly, wasn’t looking forward to it as they were hard to work with and this is the largest size group I handle.

At least I’m no longer covering for my co-worker, the air groups person. In addition to taking normal travel arranger-type calls, we both specialize slightly in aspects of group travel, and backing her up is not difficult, but occasionally there’s a huge spike in workload. It was mostly a caretaker job this time, though, while she was out for 3 weeks. Handled it all and got it done.

So, all that time I couldn’t avail myself of downtime when it was offered, because I didn’t feel it was right to take it when something might come up and no one else was really up lined up to back groups up.

I was just thinking “Man, TOO SLOW. Lunch in 5 minutes, seems like 5 hours.” And then a team leader came up and offered immediate downtime on the spot. Normally, it’s much more formal – there’s a sign up list, they don’t decide until after lunch, and it’s not a snap decision like that. No, today the call volume was low enough in the morning that they needed to get some people off as soon as possible.

Nobody on my team looked all that interested, amazingly enough. Perhaps no one wanted that much unpaid time. I raised my hand and said, “Well, I could go; I’m waiting for callbacks that probably won’t come in today, I don’t have anything pending, and this project is really low priority. “I can authorize you to go right now, if you like. Log out and change your schedule and it’ll be approved,” said the team leader.

Okay then, I’m out of there at noon. What to do? With the T-day holiday looming, I decided to go to Meijer’s and stock up on staples, since we’re low on a few things, and also get some of the baking supplies I’ll need for making dilly bread. And off I went, and started loading up on mostly normal staples, plus a few seasonal things texted to me by David or remembered, more or less, by me.

I had the most interesting conversation in the tea-coffee-cocoa aisle. I had a taste for hot chocolate the other night, so I was comparing ingredients on various “instant cocoa” products. I was trying to find one that didn’t have a lot of milk product in it, in case David wanted some, but then decided “what the heck, he doesn’t even LIKE chocolate, it’s all about ME and what I like here!” A woman standing there doing the same thing laughed and said “What is it about women and chocolate?” and proceeded to tell me a story about how she went to downtown Chicago and was in a very upscale chocolate place – like maybe Godiva or some other boutique chocolatier – and seeing an extremely well-dressed, posh woman with 4 or 5 little girls there.

All the girls were also extremely well turned out, and this woman was “introducing” them to fine chocolate, very deliberately. According to the lady in the cocoa aisle, they were all sitting around dressed in their finery, with freshly lacquered nails, and they had wee cups of fine cocoa and were being schooled in the niceties of properly sipping one’s drinking chocolate. She said there was something disturbing about how these kids couldn’t simply be handed an ordinary candy bar, they had to make it into some kind of special event (it was probably a birthday party). But we both pondered how one of a certain income bracket might have one’s children and one’s friends’ children properly introduced to chocolate.

“Imagine that… they couldn’t just hand the girls a Hershey bar, or even a good quality chocolate bar, and add the usual warnings about not eating too much at one time,” I said. “In an economic crisis, it’s kind of offensive to me that someone would want to ‘introduce’ young kids to such… elitist consumerism. There are people who’ll have trouble feeding their own kids and staying employed and housed.” I added something about it not being a good idea to bring up kids that take such stuff for granted. The grocery lady agreed and we chatted on for a few more minutes in that vein.

In the end, though, she and I both picked the “organic” chocolate, although it was the house brand. The “name brand” stuff was more expensive, and it was full of crap like xanthan gum. How terrible for the poor Xanthans! How do they manage to eat?

Anyway, after loading up on more stuff, yet having the nagging suspicion that I was forgetting something critical for either tonight’s dinner or Thursday’s breads, I proceeded to the checkout area. I was kind of wishing I hadn’t gone to Meier and gotten so much stuff, because I thought there would be a long line for the “live” checkout lanes, and it would take forever to scan all that stuff myself and have to stuff bags in the “loading” area one at a time. But lo! they’d installed some high-volume self-check lanes! So you can scan something, send it down a conveyor to a holding area, and immediately scan something else rather than to have to stop and bag each item. Whee!

I fancy myself as a pretty good scanner now. I bet if I had to, I could get a part time job in a grocery store. Yep. That’d last about two days until my back, knees, and wrists gave out.

So then it was Off Toward Home. But first, there was a nasty accident to pass along the way. Which begs the question… how the heck do you overturn a large SUV on a major suburban arterial, where the speed never gets above about 40-45 mph? There must have been some involvement with the central median to get some tipping action, but there it was, on its side, with a bunch of cops and fire trucks all around. And then I saw a fireman hustling himself through the opened/broken sunroof, and I realized “Holy God, there’s still someone in there.” And crossed myself as I passed by, marveling at the large number of cop cars. I mean, there were at least 5 or 6, plus two or three fire trucks. Most of the cop cars were behind the SUV in the opposite lanes… had there been a chase? Don’t know, hasn’t made the local news outlets.

Once home, what to do? Cleaned out the refrigerator a little and wiped it down. Put the food away. Had hot chocolate, played with the cat, surfed the Internets tubes.

For about an hour or so, I had an extremely bad day as I screwed up the transfer of music from my iPhone to this computer after downloading and installing iTunes on it. Thus, my pretty good day went horribly borked as I basically had to restore the phone to factory defaults… that is, wipe it clean and start over. Thank GOD, I had recently synched it to my normal iTunes install on the laptop. So, geeky angsty yadda yadda, it remembered everything and who I am and all my music and all my apps and games and I didn’t have to re-enter all my contacts from scratch or remember how to do it via Outlook. Whew.

Once David got home, it became a more “normal” day. Watched Chuck. Eventually made dinner out of the beef I originally bought to make stroganoff, because I forgot to get egg noodles. We ended up finding a kind of “easy casserole” recipe that we adapted that turned out to be… really very good. Served it over cracked Yukon Gold potatoes – next time, either smaller potatoes, or cut in smaller cubes. I’d stilll cook them separately in the same skillet I browned the beef in before we put it in the casserole, though. Beef had a really good flavor, and so did the potatoes. We’ll try that again, maybe with big sliced portobello mushrooms in the “easy casserole” mixture.

Pretty much a normal/not normal/normal day, though. Oh, and Chuck was teh awsum.

Oh, and sometime between now and Thursday morning, I need to pick up some yeast cakes. Because, yes, forgot them too. And the cottage cheese. And need to see if we already have all the other spices and herbs, too, because usually I just buy another little jar or bottle of ginger or dill weed and then get home to find that I have 2 or 3 jars or bottles already.

Yeah. That’s how I roll!

So goodnight. Maybe I’ll go shopping tomorrow.

Teppanyaki Woo-Woo!

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Oh, yeah! PvPonline! I used to read the strip a lot more consistently. I should try and get that set up in Google Reader, I had it when I was reading via Bloglines.

This reminds me of a wacky experience we had at our favorite sushi-teppanyaki joint, Kampai (which is conveniently located close to O’Hare, visitors stranded at the airport!). They have a very large location, with the floaty-boat sushi bar at the left hand end (with its own entrance) and the steakhouse/”hibachi place” restaurant at the right hand. They actually had two full-size dining rooms on the main restaurant side, one of which has now been converted over to a more expensive “Asian Fusion” style restaurant. But about 3 or 4 years ago, my husband David and I managed to eat in both dining rooms in the same evening.

Our friend Steve wasn’t with us for this memorable dining experience; it’s kind of become legendary in the telling and re-telling in our small circle of friends and it’s hard to separate fact from embroidery. But the gist was this: we decided to eat on the steakhouse side and were seated in due course. The restaurant had just done a big remodel on that end of the eatery, and it was all freshly redecorated and repainted, with fancy new fans over each cooking surface to deal with all the smoke and vapors that result from doing stir-fry on big, flat, hot cooktops. There were even silk flowers wound around the brand-new fire retardant-spraying nozzles situated at each corner of each table-sized griddle – and there were probably 8 or more full-size tables in the main room, each seating 8 people.

All the tables were full that night, with chefs cutting and slicing and making salt shakers go clackety-clackety, and doing the flaming volcano/smoking choo-choo trick. They were clearly competing with each other, showing off to see who could get their volcanoes to flame up higher and higher. And that’s where the problem lay, because they weren’t used to the new smoke units. Just because they were actually “hoodless,” without a low-hanging flange around the fans, didn’t mean that the fire-detection sensors were thus farther away from the surface of the cooktops. No, the new units must have been more sensitive, to make up for the increased distance between the peak of each Onion Volcano and the intake grille of the smoke fan.

Fwoosh! Fwoosh! The crowd was loving it at each table as the flames reached eyebrow-endangering heights. Several tables were at roughly the same point in the meal, so there was some serious competition, and the guests were egging them on with shouts, laughter, and yes, people overdoing the jocularity and making with the “woo-woo!”

Which is when the fire alarm went off.

And then the fire-retardant foam sprayed out of the delicately flowered nozzles from the table at Ground Zero, and from several of the other nearby tables around it. It went all over partially sliced, diced, grilled food, including some sad little Onion Volcanoes. And all over the unfortunate chefs, and their guests. Oh, calamity!

We were a couple of tables away, toward the door, so our foam-nozzles never went off, and we were just going through the “fried rice” part where the chef does the tricks with the egg on his spatula.

Everything stopped and we waited to see what would happen next. Nobody ran for the exits or anything, there was just this crowd sound that was a combination of dismay (people whose food and clothing got doused) and hilarity (people whose food and clothing were unscathed).

The fire department came, made us move outside for formality’s sake (it was darn cold) and then waved us back in when they determined there was no fire, once the smoke cleared.

The amazing thing was that the restaurant had enough room in the secondary dining room (which they used for overflow or catered parties, I guess) for everyone to pick up their drinks and move in (although the heat wasn’t turned up and it was really cold at first). The crew brought out fresh set-ups for everybody’s dinner orders and within about 10 or 15 minutes of moving over, the chefs were starting everybody’s dinners. Everyone got free drinks in the meantime. The manager, rather than tearing his hair out and firing the flamebug(s) on the spot, remained calm and philosophical, even laughing at the absurdity of his situation, as he had a huge mess to deal with in his brand-new main dining room. It was all very organized and there was very little chaos.

Everyone left smiling and talking about the experience, and I’m sure lots of people told their friends about how the new dining room at Kampai got… “seasoned.” So they probably made up for it within a week or so. And every time we go back, we make with the “woo-woo” and watch to see how high the volcano flames go.

Crap, I’d Better Eat More Broccoli

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BBC NEWS | Health | Broccoli ‘may help protect lungs’

A substance found in broccoli may limit the damage which leads to serious lung disease, research suggests.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is often caused by smoking and kills about 30,000 UK residents a year.

US scientists found that sulforapane increases the activity of the NRF2 gene in human lung cells which protects cells from damage caused by toxins.

The same broccoli compound was recently found to be protective against damage to blood vessels caused by diabetes.

Brassica vegetables such as broccoli have also been linked to a lower risk of heart attacks and strokes.

Hmmm. With my family and personal health history, it sounds like I might want to eat more broccoli. Technorati Tags: ,

Pizza At the Beginning and End of All Things

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This morning when I got to work, I had a notice that one of the hotels where I’ve got a group booked was going to be in the office with treats. After dealing with some morning stuff (why can’t people plan in advance?) I wandered in to the board room where they were set up.

MMmmm! Breakfast pizza! That’s nice and fattening and full of calories and sodium!

(and it was delicious too).

This evening, after futzing around meal-wise, David and I decided to forage in the cupboards and fridge. I had a vague idea I’d heat up some soup.

“Oh, hey, we’ve still got leftover pizza!” called out David from the kitchen.

MMmmm! Leftover pizza! Why yes, you can heat me up a couple of slices!

And so our day beginneth and endeth with the pizza.

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Dinner 2nite: Cracked Potatoes

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Flickr

My sister-in-law made these the other night for Easter dinner, and the “whack-a-mole” method of dealing with the potatoes seemed like a good stress-buster. Besides, we have a long-handled meat tenderizer with a flat side, which worked extremely well at smacking the potatoes (we didn’t cut them in half, as they were smaller than the ones the other night).

However, the cutting board did not survive; it already had a couple of splits and was not very high quality, and it split right down the middle as we whacked away at the spuds. It did work really well to hold them in place, though. Oh, well.

Cracked Potatoes

12 small-medium Yukon potatoes
1/2 cup olive oil
2 sprigs fresh thyme, plus 1/2 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme leaves
Coarse salt and freshly cracked black pepper
1 clove garlic, sliced

Special Equipment: a rolling pin or heavy pan

Using the rolling pin or a heavy pan, gently smack the potatoes, 1 potato at a time, until the skin begins to split, exposing the interior of the raw potato.Over low heat, add the olive oil to a medium-sized heavy-bottomed saucepan, then add the potatoes and thyme sprigs and season generously with salt and pepper. Place the lid on the pan and allow to cook, undisturbed, shaking the pan every 5 minutes or so, until the bottoms of the potatoes are browned, about 10 to 12 minutes. (Check occasionally to make sure the potatoes aren’t browning too quickly and adjust heat accordingly.) Turn the potatoes to their second side, replace the lid, and continue cooking undisturbed a further 5 to 8 minutes.

Remove the lid and cook a further 2 to 3 minutes, for the condensation to evaporate.

Remove the thyme sprigs and add the sliced garlic and chopped fresh thyme and cook until the garlic is caramelized and chewy, about 2 minutes. Serve hot.

The other item is stufed bell peppers with Italian sausage – something I threw together with a little Bertie Wooster and an entire head’s worth of whole garlic cloves. They had something like it for 3 times the cost at Meijer but it had cheese in it, a no-go for my husband David, so we’ll see how this version comes out. We’re just waiting for the potatoes to get done now, about another 10 minutes.

Ginny
I can has iPhone?

Via: Flickr Title: Dinner 2nite By: GinnyRED57
Originally uploaded: 26 Mar ’08, 6.48pm CDT PST

Ginny
I can has iPhone?

Career: IMPOSSIBLE

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My husband David will be so disappointed to hear this:

‘Fraudulent’ British celebrity chef faces sack from US TV show after claiming he made Diana’s wedding cake | the Daily Mail

A celebrity British chef who has his own TV show in America faces the sack after he was unmasked as a fraud. Robert Irvine claimed he had helped make the wedding cake for the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana. And in a bid to impress Americans the former royal chef said he was knighted by the Queen – and even boasted that he had been given a castle as a reward for his work in her kitchens.

Irvine, who presents a show called “Dinner: Impossible” on the Food Network channel, has now admitted he cooked up huge parts of his CV. He claimed to have cooked at the White House and received an award for his work from a prestigious US based cooking academy. But following a failed business in St Petersburg, Florida, which left a trail of bad debts he has now been exposed as a liar.

We’re big fans of his cooking show, but I have to admit I’d wondered a bit at how he’d managed to cook for both the British Royal Family and at the White House, as a relatively young man, and still have time to do all the other things in his breathlessly delivered bio at the top of the show. It takes a lot of time to work up to a point in your career where you get to enter such famous kitchens, unless you manage to slide in as a young sous chef on a lucky internship.

Turns out Irvine had been a chef on the royal yacht Brittania for a decade, but not in one of the royal residences… he had been a Royal Navy cook at the base where Prince Charles was based, and must have been but a pup at the time. And he still had to fit in his time in culinary school, which took place around the time of the Royal Wedding.

I hope that he manages to satisfy the Food Network as to his credentials, and comes clean about anything that he may have fudged, but it may be that his show won’t return. Damn, it’s been a fun show to watch, too.

h/t ***Dave, forgot to mention before.

Also, I should have wondered more about Irvine’s working-class accent, which is actually a bit of a cachet these days. It might have mattered more when he was starting out as a chef-in-training on the Royal Yacht, though.

[tags]Robert Irvine, Food Network[/tags]

Chicken Piccata Recipe | Simply Recipes

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Chicken Piccata Recipe | Simply Recipes

Ingredients: all we need are capers!

  • 2-4 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves (1 1/2 pound total)
  • 1/3 cup flour
  • 2 Tbsp grated Parmesan cheese
  • Salt and pepper
  • 4 Tbsp butter
  • 4 Tbsp olive oil
  • 3 Tbsp lemon juice
  • 1/2 cup chicken stock or dry white wine
  • 1/4 c. brined1/8 c. capers in balsamic vinegar
  • 1/4 cup fresh chopped parsley

When I got to the store, all they had were capers in either plain vinegar, or balsamic, not brined (unless that’s the same thing… ).

The recipe calls for either butterflying thick chicken breasts, or pounding them out to about 1/4″ thick. This makes for a really satisfying Monday night meal, because the sauce is really rich and savory, and you get to whack the heck out of the chikkins!