Chicken Baked with Lemon

 

(adapted from Loukie Werle's Italian Country Cooking)

I love when I actually manage to make a complete, balanced meal - you know, with multiple food groups, side dishes, etc. Like this meal, lemony baked chicken served with aglio e olio and a side of broccoli rabe. It barely all fits in the photo!

The most fun part about this dish was making the "aromatic salt"...or, you know, seasoned salt. It's kind of a recipe unto itself, and it makes a lot of it - so you can keep it around for a few months, refrigerated, to use in other dishes. I'd call it a lemon-garlic salt, but you can taste a good bit of the rosemary in there. You should pay better attention to Werle's recipe than I did, though - in her introduction, she notes that you just need a teaspoon of salt to flavor six chicken thighs. I used four thighs. What can I say, I got excited about the aromatic salt.

4 chicken thighs, bone in and skin on

1 lemon, thinly-sliced

1 lemon, squeezed

1.5 tbsp olive oil

1/3 cup white wine (the recipe called for water, but wine sounds better for deglazing the pan, right?)

AROMATIC SALT (halve this if you want - it makes a lot, and certainly more than you need for the chicken):

3 cloves garlic, peeled and 2 chopped

1 cup coarse salt

Zest of two lemons

1.5 tsp chopped fresh or dried rosemary leaves

1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper

1 bay leaf, if you have it (I didn't)

For the salt, place all of the ingredients except the 1 non-chopped, reserved garlic clove and the bay leaf into a food processor and chop until the salt is ground. Store the mixture in an airtight container, with the reserved garlic and bay leaf buried in the salt. Refrigerate if storing.

Place the chicken on a plate, season with the aromatic salt, and cover with plastic wrap to marinate in the fridge for 2 hours or overnight.

Preheat the oven to 425. Place sliced lemon in an ovenproof dish. Heat a pan over medium-high, add the oil, and add the chicken with the skin side down. Brown well on both sides, about 6 minutes. Place the chicken on top of the lemon slices in the ovenproof dish, skin side up.

Add the lemon juice and wine to the pan in which the chicken was browned and boil, scraping up any brown bits, for about four minutes, or until it gets slightly saucy. Pour over the chicken. Put the chicken in the oven and bake for 15-20 minutes, or until the chicken is cooked. (I forgot the next step, myself:) Remove from oven and place on a heated platter, cover loosely with foil, and let stand 5 minutes before serving.

Lemon Chicken

(adapted from my father, SPQR)

We should probably find another name for this dish that more adequately captures how unbelievably delicious it is. Chicken Scallopini with Lemon? With Lemon-Butter Sauce? Getting closer. Anyway, growing up it was lemon chicken, so lemon chicken it shall remain.

This was one of my most frequent requests for birthday meals at home. And it very nicely fits our current meal requirement: low-budget. Got flour? Lemon? Butter? Done. Plus, check it out - I actually made a balanced meal, with sides and veggies and everything! It's not just pasta!

So, here's what you need for two people:
2 decently sized/thick chicken breasts (or 3 smaller ones, or 3 if you're just really hungry), thawed
Flour
Salt
Pepper
2 tbsp butter, divided
Olive oil
1 large lemon

(Sides: I made the rice and asparagus first so I could focus on the chicken. If you're better at timing things than I am, you could of course do them all at once. I blanched the asparagus, drizzled it in olive oil, and sprinkled it with a little salt.)

The first step is to turn the chicken into scallopini. The key is really to have a good, sharp knife. Place a chicken breast on a cutting board, put your hand on top of it, and slice it sideways to make very thin filets. You'll end up with some small pieces, some long, some large - this is fine. Just make sure they're thin.

When that's done, put some flour on a plate and dust each filet with flour individually on both sides. You want it coated, but not thick - just a thin layer of flour around each filet. Set those aside.

Take a large frying pan, nonstick preferred, and drizzle a couple/a few tbsp of olive oil into it along with 1 tbsp of butter. Turn the heat to medium-high and let the pan get hot. Add a little salt and black pepper.

When the pan is good and hot, use tongs to cook batches of the filets/scallopini. They will cook FAST. Flip them so they cook on both sides. Remove the cooked filets from the pan and set them aside on a plate (in the winter, to keep them warm, you can put them on a plate in the oven).

Once all the chicken is cooked, squeeze the juice of one lemon into the pan you just used - keep the heat the same. Also add another 1 tbsp of butter. Stir around to combine and melt, then add all the chicken back to the pan and stir around to coat the chicken on both sides. Transfer to a serving plate, add more salt if you want, pour the sauce from the pan over it, and garnish with parsley.

Gnocchi with Lemon and Asparagus

(adapted from "Italian Country Cooking" by Loukie Werle)

Yes! I was really happy with this dish - particularly since it didn't get off to such a great start. It called for homemade breadcrumbs (almost broke my food processor on that one), my store-bought breadcrumbs were, well, just a little old, and I wasn't sure how it was going to work with gnocchi rather than spaghetti. Turns out the answer is: pretty dang good! In fact, I'm fighting the urge to eat my tomorrow's-lunch-portion right now.

So, to continue the carb fest:

1/2 bunch asparagus, bottoms snapped off and cut into 2-inch pieces
3/4 lb gnocchi
1/4 cup olive oil...maybe less
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1-2 tbsp or so chopped parsley
Freshly-squeezed juice of 1/2 lemon
Grated cheese (parmesan or romano) for serving

Bring a pot of water to a boil, salt it lightly, then add the asparagus. Cook until it's bright green, about 3 minutes, then drain and run under cold water (this apparently preserves the color).

In a saucepan, combine the oil, garlic, and parsley over medium heat, and let it get fragrant - about 2 minutes. Then add the asparagus and stir until it's coated with the olive oil. Since the gnocchi cooks really fast, you can add them back into the water you boiled the asparagus in at the same time you add the asparagus to the olive oil. You may want to turn the heat down on the asparagus a bit, and you can add a squirt of lemon, if you want.

When the gnocchi is done, drain it and add right to the pan with the asparagus, keeping the heat on low. Add the lemon juice and toss for about a minute.

Serve with breadcr- grated cheese!

Lemon Meringue Pie

(taken from "Comfort Food" by Rick Rodgers - Williams Sonoma)

Went out of my cooking comfort zone yesterday - and today - to bake my first pie! I'm usually not one for anything that takes more than a half hour of prep, but it seems to have been a success.

I started this on Saturday night, ran out of time, and had to finish the next day. Also, I took some shortcuts on the crust. Advance warning - this is a long one - both length of the recipe itself and the time it takes to make.

OK, here goes:

CRUST
Flour, 1 1/4 cups
Sugar, 1 tbsp
Salt, 1/4 tsp
Unsalted butter, 5 tbsp, chilled
Vegetable shortening, 2 tbsp, chilled
Ice water, 1/4 cup

Whisk together the flour, sugar, and salt in a large bowl. Cut the butter and shortening into chunks and scatter over the flour mixture. Using a pastry blender (what?) or 2 knives (I used my hands, frankly), cut the butter and shortening into the flour mixture just until the mixture forms large, coarse crumbs.

Pour the ice water over the flour mixture and toss it together with a form until the dough forms moist clumps.

Form the dough into a disk, wrap it in plastic wrap, and refrigerate it for at least 30 minutes or up to two hours. (Note - I was running out of time, so I stuck it in the freezer for about 10 minutes. Then I ran out of time while I was rolling it out, so I ended up refrigerating it, formed into the pie dish, overnight. Turned out good enough despite all that.)

FILLING
Crust (above)
Eggs, 8
Sugar, 2 cups plus 2 tbsp
Cornstarch, 1/4 cup
Fresh Meyer lemon juice, 1 cup
Salt, 1/4 teaspoon
Unsalted butter, 4 tbsp, cut into tbsp
Finely-grated Meyer lemon zest, from 3 lemons

Unwrap your dough onto a floured work surface and dust it with flour. Roll it out with a rolling pin into a round about 12 inches in diameter and 1/8 inch thick (you don't have to worry about it being too even, because you'll have to trim the sides anyway). Transfer to a 9-inch pie dish, fitting the dough to the bottom and sides of the dish. Trim the over-long edges off, leaving a bit of an overhang. Fold the overhang under itself, then "flute" the edge with your fingers: give it ridges just along the edge. Use a fork to pierce the dough all over. Line it all with aluminum foil and freeze for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, position a rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat to 375. Put the dough-lined dish on a baking sheet and fill it with pie weights. (What? I know. Turns out you can just fill it with rice. It keeps it from getting bubbly. Note that the aluminum is still on at this point.) Bake about 12-15 minutes. Take it out, remove foil and weights, put it back in until it's golden brown - another 12-15 minutes. Take it out and let it cool while you make the filling. Raise the oven temp to 400.

Beat the 3 eggs until blended. Separate the yolks and whites of the remaining 5 eggs, adding the yolks to the beaten whole eggs and putting the whites in a separate large bowl. Cover those whites and set them aside at room temp. Beat the yolks into the beaten eggs. In another bowl, whisk 1 1/2 cups of the sugar and the cornstarch, then whisk in the beaten eggs, lemon juice, and salt. Transfer this to a heavy saucepan over medium heat, and heat it until it comes to a full boil, whisking almost the whole time. It should get nice and thick. Reduce the heat to low and let it bubble for 30 seconds. Remove it from the heat and whisk in the butter. Strain through a coarse mesh sieve into a bowl to get rid of any pieces of cooked egg white. Stir in the lemon zest, then pour it all into the baked crust.

OK, almost done! Using a handheld mixer on high speed, beat the egg whites until soft peaks form. Beat in the remaining 1/2 cup plus 2 tbsp sugar, one tbsp at a time, until it becomes very thick and shiny. Use a spatula to spread this over the filling, making sure the meringue touches the crust on all sides. Swirl the meringue around and make peaks. Pop it in the oven until the peaks get golden brown, about 5 minutes. Take it out and let it cool for at least 3 hours. If you like it nice and cool, put it in the fridge.