Chicken Piccata

This is another one of those immensely useful basic protein dishes that you can plug into your menu rotation, in the category of “what else can I do with chicken cutlets?”

This is from Bluestein and Morrisey’s 99% Fat-Free Italian Cooking.  I follow their instructions exactly*; I would make only one recommendation:  choose a wine you’re willing to drink.  Just so you know–that holds true any time you’re cooking with wine.  If it doesn’t taste good in a glass, it probably won’t enhance your food (except for the crappy vermouth you buy in the grocery store; it seems to be okay in most things, in a vermouthy sort of way).

When I made it a few days ago, I served it with rice a green veggie and plain Japanese rice.**  The wine and lemon juice make a little bit of a thin sauce, so if you don’t like your rice plain, like I do, drizzle some of that sauce over it.  But it would also be delicious with mashed potatoes, or pasta, or polenta–whatever carby-grainy sort of side dish you happen to have lying around.

Chicken Piccata
Serves 4

1/4 cup flour
4 3-oz chicken cutlets
3 1/2 ounces shiitake mushrooms, cleaned, stemmed, and sliced
Olive oil cooking spray
salt to taste
1/2 cup dry white wine
2 T. freshly squeezed lemon juice

Put the flour onto a plate.  Pat the chicken in the flour to coat very lightly all over.

Preheat a large nonstick skillet over medium heat.  Add the mushrooms and cook until they begin to soften, 2 to 3 minutes.  Push the mushrooms to one side of the pan with a wooden spoon.  Spray each cutlet lightly on both sides with the pan spray and place them in the pan in a single layer.  Cook until the edges are cooked and firm, 1 to 2 minutes.  Turn the cutlets and allow them to cook through, about 2 minutes longer.  Lightly salt the chicken, add the wine, and continue to cook until you can no longer smell the wine, about 2 minutes more.  Stir in the lemon juice and remove from the heat.

This is approximately 174 calories per serving, with 0.74 g. of fat per serving.

*Except that I leave off the parsley garnish.  For the record, most of the recipes I post call for a parsley garnish, but I never, ever use it, because I think parsley tastes like grass.  If you like the flavor of grass, feel free to sprinkle it over your food as much as you want.  It’s bound to be good for you, with all that green-ness.

**We’re eating a lot of plain rice these days, because I came home from the Asian market one day recently with a fifteen pound bag of Tamanishiki.  It’s a short grain rice that’s often used to make sushi.  I’m slightly in love with it.  Yeah, I’m weird that way.