Chicken Piccata

Before

I know that my mom was not a very good cook when I was a kid. I don't think she ever expected to have eleven children and a husband who loved to eat. As Catholics who couldn't eat meat on Fridays, Mom followed a  rotation of meals over a period of three weeks. Week one, fish sticks. Basically, trash fish coated with bread crumbs and slathered with ketchup. Week two, spaghetti in a sauce made exclusively from Campbell's tomato soup. Until I entered high school, that's how I thought spaghetti was supposed to be made. Then I experienced Spaghetti Day in the school cafeteria and my life was changed. On week three Mom made pancakes without ketchup or Campbell's tomato soup. That was my favorite, I liked breakfast for dinner. Besides Fridays, meals the rest of the week weren't much better.  Mom's hamburgers were like hockey pucks, and steak night meant it was time to bring out the power saw. The only meal I liked was fried chicken night. Not Mom's, she often under cooked the chicken. No, I loved my dad's fried chicken. Dad's fried chicken was gold.

I'm kind of like my mom. I hate to cook. What I do cook is not always that good. My hamburgers are much like Mom's, hockey pucks. Unlike Mom, I have figured out a way to tenderize steaks after watching America's Test Kitchen on PBS. So that makes steak night okay along with the mashed potatoes that I learned to make from reading the instructions on the side of the box. Anyway, since Mark's health has come to the point where he almost never cooks anymore, I have had to be the guy. What Mark will do is find a good recipe on the internet, print it out, and then I try to execute that recipe. That's what I did last night. I made chicken piccata, and it was not bad at all. In fact Mark told me that it was good. That is the highest praise he has ever bestowed upon my cooking. Isn't it amazing what frying chicken in a quarter pound of butter will do?

After