Roasted potatoes and chicken piccata

I went on a big grocery shopping excursion today, which meant I cooked a ton of food for lunch and dinner. Poor Dave is sick, so I tried to make some nutritious fare to speed his recovery.

Mustard Roasted Potatoes

For lunch, it was burger melts and mustard roasted potatoes. The potato recipe is from Ina Garten's Barefoot Contessa at Home.

You cut up the potatoes and onions roughly, then mix olive oil, whole grain mustard, salt, pepper, and parsley.


The whole thing took about as long to prepare as it took the oven to preheat, which was nice. Then the oven does the rest of the work for you:


The potatoes were good - I like her crisp, oven-roasted potatoes. It's healthier than frying and they turn out really good pretty much every time. (One of my favorite recipes of hers is a similar version of this recipe, but with garlic instead of mustard.)

The mustard isn't too strong, and I enjoyed the potatoes. They were almost like having fries with the burgers! I will follow the recipe more closely next time, though, about the onions. They really have to be bigger in order to make it through one hour of 425-degree roasting.

Chicken Piccata

Then for dinner I made chicken piccata and broccoli. Again, a recipe from Ina Garten's Barefoot Contessa at Home. (Can you tell that I was flipping through this book before I went grocery shopping?)

I was interested in trying this recipe because I had this for dinner at my friends Jamie and Julie's wedding. It required a new cooking technique - as Dave put it, "pounding the chicken within an inch of its life." When I pointed out to Dave that the chicken was already dead, he seemed kind of sad.

Anyway, I don't have a meat pounding mallet, funnily enough, so I used the back of a ladle and beat the boneless, skinless chicken breasts between two sheets of wax paper. The ladle worked just fine.

To bread the chicken, I set up stations according to Ina's direction: (1) a mixture of flour, salt, and pepper, (2) eggs and water, and (3) seasoned bread crumbs.

After each chicken got its breading, I fried it in some olive oil. Then I put them all in the oven to stay warm while I made the sauce.

The sauce is really the "wow" factor in this dish. You make it in the pan you just made the delicious crusty chicken in, adding butter, lemon juice, wine, parsley, salt, and pepper.

The way I work parsley in dishes like this is like so: if I have fresh parsley and the time to cut it up, I use it and add it at the end like Ina says. However, if I don't, I use dried parsley, but half as much as the recipe calls for in fresh parsley, and I add it earlier in the dish so it can get soft in the sauce.


As Dave put it, the chicken "exploded with flavor." That was the sauce, and especially the wine. I thought this light dish went well with the broccoli, too. Got to get veggies into that flu patient husband of mine!