Thursday, April 12, 2012

The Chicken That Ate Northern Illinois

We eat alot of chicken in this house. The Farmer prefers dark meat but mostly I cook chicken breasts. I've amassed lots of recipes and our favorite is chicken picatta. The local Italian grocery sells boneless, skinless chicken breasts in large family packs. The chicken breasts in these packages have been huge lately. I stand in the meat aisle trying to envision how large this bird must be and further wonder how in the world the poor thing can hold itself upright. Some of these birds must be the size of a small turkey.


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 The spoon is in the photo for scale. I decided to drag out the postal scale just to see how much it actually weighs.

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 I put them in a plastic container. Heaven knows I have no desire to wash and sanitize the scale.

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 It reads 1 lb, 6.4 ounces. That's alot of chicken. In order to speed up the cooking process I normally slice them horizontally to make filets which are perfect for the picatta.

Here's the recipe I use, from Giada DeLaurentis.

CHICKEN PICATTA

Don't skip the capers. They make the dish.

 

6 comments:

Stickhorsecowgirls said...

Yummm--this sounds delicious! I do love capes too!
Weird about those HUGE chicken breasts--they must be pumping them up with hormones--why can't they just leave food alone?

Vee said...

That sounds great. I'm not sure about the capers... One sort of gets a sense of things when seeing all those red stars on a recipe.

We eat a lot of chicken around here, too. I finally finished up the roast chicken from Easter with a rustic chicken pot pie last night for supper. (Daughter doesn't like ham, hence the chicken and ham.)

Pam said...

I raise a small amount of broilers and they are bred, I believe to give you lots of white meat. They are so good though. Need to get an order in for some chicks as I have already had a few want to order some.
Will check out the picatta recipe.
Pam

Ruta M. said...

That's a very large chicken. And it was probably only 12 weeks old. That's the age meat chickens are killed in the UK otherwise they would get tough and also their leg bones break. I don't think our chickens are as big as yours because in the UK no farm animals are fed hormones in their feed while I understand this is standard practice in the US.

Martha said...

Those are really big chickens!

ROWriter said...

And here I thought I was the only one who noticed how large the chicken breasts were lately! And I buy Amish chicken, so there aren't supposed to be any hormones added. Makes one wonder... Recipe looks delish by the way!