This Chicken Piccata with Angel Hair and Asparagus Is a Weeknight Showstopper
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Lemons are my biggest heroes in the kitchen. In my youth there were many days when I’d get home late and there’d be no ingredients in the house, so I’d shrug it off as a “not the right time” for cooking, and just order dinner. (Sushi if it was close to payday; pizza if it wasn’t.)
But over the years I’ve learned that if there are lemons in the house, I can almost always cook something. With the right recipe, I can even have dinner plated before my delivery app would have even switched my meal from “processing” to “on its way.”
This chicken piccata with angel hair and asparagus from Brooklyn Supper is exactly that kind of recipe. It’s fast and easy, but it’s also an elegant, classic dish with big flavors. I took one look at it and said, “I need to make that.”
“The chicken is topped with a rich pan sauce that delivers wonderfully complex, concentrated flavors with notes of briny capers, punchy lemon rinds, and creamy butter,” blogger Elizabeth Stark writes. “Knowledge that all this deliciousness comes together so quickly is enough to earn this chicken piccata a recurring slot on the weeknight menu.”
Weeknight cooking has a bit of a reputation for being the time when speed takes precedence over flavor, and when everything turns out a bit boring as a result. But that’s completely unnecessary, as some of the brightest, boldest flavors take barely any time to put together at all. In this case, it takes about half an hour from start to finish.
First you slice chicken breasts into cutlets and pound them 1/4-inch thick, then you salt and pepper and dredge them in flour before being sautéed until they’re golden-brown and crisp. Then all you have to do is make a pan sauce of chopped shallots with white wine, lemon, capers, and butter, and drizzle it on top.
Serve the chicken with angel hair pasta and asparagus and pour the lemon-caper sauce all over everything. I also see this served with good Italian bread instead of pasta, so you can sponge it all around the plate and soak up any last bits of sauce.
This chicken piccata looks like a restaurant meal, or something fancy and special to make on weekends when you bring out the good plates. But the recipe actually goes from the grocery bag to the dinner table in just 30 minutes, which means it’s the kind of thing a person could use as a weeknight staple. It’s enough to make a person want to bring out the good plates anyway.
→ Get the Recipe: Chicken Piccata with Angel Hair Pasta and Asparagus from Brooklyn Supper
