The cooking course is going well. That doesn't mean that all of the recipes have gone well... but nothing has turned out inedible yet! Anyone in my family can tell you (and give multiple embarrassing examples) that when cooking I have a tendency to either mix things up or make gross calculation errors. Luckily, I haven't substituted salt for sugar in a few years.... or months.
On the menu earlier this week was Lemon Chicken Italiano. It wasn't too complicated: coat chicken in flour, fry on the stovetop, place on bed of marinara sauce & top with a lemon sauce. Of course, I downsized the recipe from 6 or 8 chicken breasts to two. Amazingly, I calculated right and everything was fine. Well, everything except one small thing was fine. The first step in the recipe told me to pound the chicken breasts until they were thin.
First of all, we buy the giant chicken breasts from Costco: utterly unpoundable. Second, I don't own a chicken pounder of any kind! (Yes, mom, I know that's not what it's called :) Third, my chicken pounder-less chicken pounding was less than enthusiastic, because I'm afraid of upsetting the neighbors with pounding noises... (They used to bang on the ceiling if we were even a little bit loud).
So, I struggled for a while with these:
My chicken remained huge and didn't cook all the way through in the frying pan. Thus, instead of having two lovely pounded chicken breasts in the pan, it looked like this:
It wasn't bad, but not too great either. Next time, I'll be sure to give the chicken breasts a good pounding and season a bit more as well.
2 comments:
I also don't like pounding meat. Sometimes if it's really big I will slice it in half to make 2 thin breasts. Does that make sense?
Yeah! I discovered that on the next recipe. Definitely a better way to go.
Post a Comment
Whatchya thinking?