At this point in my life, I don’t find myself cooking dinner often, and especially not lemon chicken. I love making desserts (especially cookies), so I thought it was about time I start learning how to cook actual meals.
I love looking at recipes and often save ones that spark my interest. I searched through my saved recipes and came across one for lemon chicken with asparagus. It seemed easy enough for me to do, so I decided to be ambitious and give it a shot by making it for me and three others.
I assembled all my ingredients on the counter, and started by chopping the asparagus. To do this, I took a steak knife and chopped each asparagus stalk in three. I placed all my cut asparagus in a bowl and put it to the side, so it would be ready when I needed it later.
Next, I decided to combine all the dry ingredients (flour, salt, pepper, garlic powder) in a shallow bowl, once again, so it would be ready when I needed it. So far so good. Chopping and mixing ingredients is the easy part. Next came the chicken—this was the challenge given my lack of experience.
I used boneless, skinless chicken breasts. This meant I didn’t have to go through the effort of cleaning the skin off the chicken (thank goodness). All I had to do was rinse the chicken before placing it in a gallon size bag. Then I had to pound it with a mallet until it seemed to be about 1.5 centimeters thick (no, I didn’t measure this exactly).
Once the chicken was pounded, I turned the stove on and heated the butter in a skillet. The butter melted in seconds, so I quickly covered the chicken with the dry ingredient mixture and placed it in the pan.
The chicken started to cook, but what I didn’t anticipate happening was the butter in the pan starting to crackle a bit and splatter on the stove. I placed a lid over the skillet to prevent the hot butter from spraying everywhere and to keep the heat in the pan.
Side note: the chicken was somewhat stressful because I needed to make sure it was cooked through without being too dry. All while I had to be extra careful about not getting the hot crackling butter on me. Aside from these concerns, it wasn’t too bad.
Once the chicken was cooked through, I added a little more butter and tossed the cut asparagus in the pan. After those were cooked, I placed some sliced lemons in the pan. They were mostly just for garnish, but also added some flavor.
Finally, all the cooking was done and I was ready to plate my food as if I was presenting it to the judges on Chopped. Thus far I did all of the cooking myself, but my mother decided to make a rice to accompany the dish. However, if I did decide to include rice myself, I could have easily used a quick one-minute rice.
Moment of truth was when my parents, the judges of this evening’s event, took their first bites. They both liked the presentation and were pleasantly surprised by the flavors. They also commented on how the chicken was moist (I did it right). My father, who can be critical of foods—especially meats, told me that he would even have the dish again.