Piccata Nightmare

Well, I finally made the Lemon Chicken Piccata last night. It was not exactly the stuff dreams are made of. But first, I should point out that I clearly wasn't ready to handle this dish and only made it under considerable pressure. I had company, to boot. In fact, it was my company's mother who encouraged/demanded I make this dish for her daughter. (Perhaps so she could enjoy a first-hand account of my failure?)

It started out innocently enough. I had to cut some slices from a lemon, and then squeeze the juice from 3 others. I put my company to work on that easy task. While she squeezed, I began to prepare the chicken pieces. First, I had to coat them with Miracle Whip. That sounds relatively simple, as well. But coating slippery chicken with equally slippery Miracle Whip is actually quite challenging. Because I was concentrating so hard, I realized too late that I was dipping my raw-chicken-coating spoon directly back into the jar of Miracle Whip, thereby contaminating the entire contents. Great. The next step was to coat the already coated chicken with crushed Ritz crackers. Since the chicken was such a slimy mess, I opted to sprinkle the crumbs over the pieces and then flip them over to repeat the process on the other side. Which didn't work. The Miracle Whip stuck to the plate instead of the chicken and no matter how many times I flipped those pieces of chicken, they never seemed to have any Ritz crumbs on them!

Moving on to the cooking part. The recipe suggested cooking the 4 small pieces of chicken in a frying for 5 min. per side. My pieces were apparently much larger or thicker than the recipe intended and took about 25 min. to cook. Which meant that the lovely Ritz cracker/Miracle Whip coating was burnt to a crisp and I had to keep scraping it out of the pan to avoid setting off the smoke alarms. It also meant my rice was done ages before my chicken. And finally, it meant I had destroyed yet another "easy" meal. At this point, I was meant to sprinkle the chicken on my platter with fresh parsley. Given that my decimated chicken was sitting on a plate surrounded by a pile of burnt scraps, and that my not-fresh parsley from a jar was actually 7 years old and an interesting yellow colour, I opted to skip that step altogether.

Interestingly, in the end everything tasted fine. It looked horrible, but I didn't have to order an emergency pizza. Still, I had such high hopes for that Piccata...

Just Add Water

Despite my recent experiments in the kitchen, I haven't really changed my basic cooking habits. Take, for example, Hannah's 4th birthday. As a Martha Stewart wannabe, this occasion was the perfect opportunity to do something special. Instead, I made an angel food cake. From a box. The only instruction: add water. Heck, even last year I did better than that by making little monkey cupcakes. If possible, I'm regressing!

For further proof, look no further than this morning. I have, in the past, made pancakes from scratch. And it's not hard. Yet, this morning I once again resorted to a pre-packaged mix of pancake batter where I could just add water. To be fair, I did throw in some blueberries...

Just add water? Is that really where I'm at? I absolutely must make that chicken piccata before I lose all forward momentum.