Chicken Crapiccata

Having a cooking blog isn't just about sharing successes. It is also important to share failures. Not only does it keep a person humble, but it's a great way to spread the misery of a terrible meal. Perhaps someone can offer some advice on how to enhance this mongol-food of a meal.

Granted, I have never really liked Chicken Piccata. I've received it by accident at a restaurant (honestly, I wanted Jamaican Chicken), and I've had it at a restaurant where I used to work. Both times I was neither impressed or satiated. In fact, I was very put off by the meal. Evidently all of this had slipped my mind as I got excited about making a "white wine and lemon sauce."

Ingredients:
4 chicken tenders
rosemary, sage and thyme
lemon pepper
1 large lemon (1/2 c lemon juice and 1 Tbsp lemon zest)
1/2 c Chardonnay
1/2 c chicken broth
olive oil
3 cloves of garlic
spaghetti
parsley
oregano
flour

Cut slits on each side of the tenders, lightly dash some lemon pepper on both sides of the tenders and place in a small tupperware dish with olive oil, lemon zest, some thyme, rosemary and sage. Put a little bit of lemon juice in there as well. Cut up one clove of garlic and scatter that in there too. Let the chicken marinate for at least an hour.


After the chicken has marinated, pour the contents of the tupperware into a saucepan. Add a little bit of oil if necessary until the surface of the saucepan is covered with oil. Turn the heat on med-high and let the chicken cook evenly.

While the chicken is cooking, put some spaghetti on to boil. Combine the wine, lemon juice, and chicken broth in a container, adding the parsley and oregano. After the chicken is done cooking, remove it from the saucepan. Add the chopped up 2 cloves of garlic to the remaining olive oil (shouldn't be very much, but drain it if it is).

After letting that simmer on medium for a short while, scatter a couple of Tbsps of flour onto the saucepan, letting it absorb the oil. Then slowly pour the lemon juice/wine/chicken broth mixture in, turning the heat up to high. Stir continuously until a thick sauce forms. At some point during this you'll want to drain the spaghetti.

Once the sauce forms, pour it over the chicken and spaghetti.

It's a pretty easy recipe, and maybe that is part of the problem. Perhaps I left out some extremely vital step to making this tasty. The worst part was the sauce, hands down. The best part was the awesomely marinated chicken. So I just scraped the sauce off of the chicken and ate that. The pasta was too far gone.

I dare encourage you to make this dish and tweak it somehow. Let me know how it goes for you. Or don't tweak it all and see how you like it. Maybe I just don't like chicken piccata. It wouldn't be the first time.