Week 47 - Pan Sauces

Week 47 of the challenge was another one of those technique weeks. This time, the focus was on pan sauces. A and I have both made pan sauces before, and I had even done them before for the challenge (among them, the pan sauce that went with the roll-ups back in Week 27). I decided to follow this recipe for Mark Bittman's chicken cutlets with quick pan sauce that I found on Serious Eats, since it looked relatively simple and straightforward. A ended up doing most of the work on the chicken and the pan sauce, since I spent most of the time tackling this massive bunch of parsley to prep the herbs for the sauce and the next day's dinner (and making the kale side dish). Without his help, we probably would have eaten an hour later than we did.

This parsley doesn't look like much but imagine all these leaves on their stems...

For the chicken recipe, we needed:

- 2 pieces of boneless, skinless chicken breast ($2)

- olive oil ($0.40)

- butter ($0.75)

- salt and pepper ($0.05)

- flour for dredging ($0.30)

- 1/2 cup white wine ($0.75)

- 1/2 cup water ($0)

- about 1/4-1/3 cup chopped parsley ($0.10)

- 1/2 lemon ($0.17)

- sage ($0.05)

The chicken cost a little over $4.50, which was really affordable for chicken for 2. Add to that our kale side dish, which was probably about $3, and dinner for both of us was less than the price of a single Chipotle chicken bowl. (That's usually how I end up comparing our dinner price, for whatever it's worth.)

Making chicken cutlets and pan sauce

We followed the recipe pretty closely to make the chicken and the pan sauce. Basically you pound the chicken to the desired thickness, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and then dredge through the flour. Then heat up the olive oil and 2 tbsp of the butter in the pan, and then cook the chicken. While the chicken is cooking, you set the oven to 200 degrees, which will be used later to finish off the chicken. Once the chicken is almost done, move it to an ovenproof plate and stick it in the oven until the sauce is done.

To make the sauce, first add the wine and scrape the stuff off the bottom of the pan, and then when that has evaporated about halfway, add the water. Once it has thickened up, add the butter, and then turn off the heat when the butter has melted. After that we added seasonings to the sauce. Some salt, pepper, and sage. A also added the lemon juice to the sauce itself instead of just serving the lemons with the chicken. The last thing to be added was the parsley. I probably put in a tad bit too much, but parsley's good for you, so it was fine.

Please excuse my poor plating and laziness in not cleaning up my poor plating

The sauce was rich with butter and wine flavor, and it was a perfect accompaniment to the chicken cutlets (and the kale, even if it made our balsamic kale much less healthy). The technique involved in making the chicken and the pan sauce here is so simple that you could really do this on any weeknight for a quick meal, which was exactly what we were looking for. We would definitely make this again.