Chicken Piccata

My families Valentine's dinner is a nice Chicken Piccata and sides of seared sumac carrots with a Romaine and Arugula salad with strawberries and honey butter toasted walnuts. I did attempt to get a little fancy with the photo plate. I mean come on, if you butterfly a chicken breast and it looks like a heart you gotta go for it!? (and yes I did trim on it a bit.)

My recipe is one I've adapted for years after learning on the fly as a line cook in a local restaurant. I could attempt to write it all down for you but instead I found one that is as close to mine as I can get. Chris Morocco from the Bon Appetite test Kitchen has a wonderful recipe, that I have used from time to time. However, I view recipes as guidelines not law. (Baking is the one exception to this, that's a lot of science and math and I do not mess with those things.)

I'll note that the one difference that you can see from just the pictures in my version and Chris's is that my sauce is thicker. The way I see it, this is a preference thing. It's also an in the moment thing. Sometimes my sauce comes out thinner and I'm find with it because I'm going to serve it over risotto or pasta or potatoes and that sauce will only add flavor to the whole plate. In this case, I made it a bit thicker because I wasn't serving it that way and, here's the biggie, since I cook on the fly and by instinct sometimes my seasonings are a bit off. After tasting this sauce when it was thinned down, I realized it just wasn't right. After working with it a bit more and adding more of the same ingredients, it became a big thicker.

I liked it, my family liked it. That is all that matters.