Monday Night Mangia!

Tonight, we have a quick, easy chicken piccata with a side of creamy polenta with kale.  It came together rather quickly and was really tasty to boot!  So let's get started...

You'll want to strip the kale off the ribs, and slice up a few cloves of garlic.  Cook up the garlic in a little olive oil, just until it's fragrant, and then add your kale so it cooks down a bit.

While the kale is sauteeing, bring to a boil some water, milk and butter.  Once it starts boiling, whisk in the polenta.  Keep whisking until it thickens.

Once the kale has wilted down a bit, you can coarsely chop it, then add it to the polenta.  Make sure you continue to stir your polenta every once in a while.

 

Let the polenta continue cooking.  Right before you're ready to serve it, stir in the ricotta and let it heat through.  To put our own little spin on the dish, we added a little crushed red pepper flakes for a little heat.

Now, on to the chicken!  The meat tenderizer was at Justin's place, so instead of pounding out our chicken breasts, he cut them into thin cutlets, and simply breaded them in pan searing flour, salt and pepper.

These just got pan fried in some melted butter and olive oil until they were cooked through.  To keep them warm and crispy, we placed them on cooling racks on a baking sheet and put them into a warm oven.  Keeping them elevated on the cooling rack lets the air circulate underneath and keep them crispy on all sides.

For the sauce, we used the same pan we cooked the chicken in, and just added a little more butter, white cooking wine, some water (or you could use chicken stock), and a little lemon juice.  Since we had some dill and thyme on hand, we added that to the pan as well, for a little extra flavor.

Once those flavors had a chance to meld together, we added a little flour to thicken it up, as well as the capers for some saltiness.  And that's it!  Super simple, and only used a couple pans.  What more could you ask for?