Lemon Glazed Chicken

Ingredients
Chicken breast (strips, fillets, halves... whatever blows your skirt)
Lemons
Fresh parsley
Vegetable oil
Butter
Salt
Pepper

Thus sayeth Natalie Dee

After a slightly lengthy vacation/prison sentence, I'm back to the blog. I would apologize for my absence, but I don't care what the fuck you think, so... there's that.
When you go to the grocery store to gather lemons to make this (which you will do if you know what's good for you) make sure you get the best lemons in the pile. This requires a little fruit investigation. You want a lemon that feels heavy but not hard. When you squeeze it there should be some give... a hard lemon means a thicker rind, which means you get less juice. Obviously, you'll want to avoid any lemons that have brown splotches, but green splotches are ok. Lemons change from green to yellow based entirely on temperature, not age, so a bit of green is perfectly fine. You can expect about three tablespoons of juice from your lemon, but that doesn't mean you should substitute bottled for fresh squeezed. Bottled lemon juice, while fine for cocktails, doesn't have the same delicate flavor as fresh lemon juice, so buy the goddamn fruit.

Ladolemono Chicken Parmesan

Ingredients
Tomato sauce (2 small cans)
Tomato paste (1 can)
Pasta (penne or cut ziti will work)
Garlic
Basil
Chicken breast tenderloins
Feta cheese (crumbled)
Parmesan cheese (shredded)
Dijon mustard
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Oregano
Lemon juice


This recipe was inspired by a post on the excellent food blog Potter's Kitchen for a quick, traditional Chicken Parmesan. I'd wager that if you asked the average American what their favorite Italian food is, chicken parm would be in the top 5. Its deliciousness lies in simplicity of concept: pasta, sauce, breaded chicken, cheese. It's so simple a concept, in fact, that it's just begging for some variation and substitution. But what variation? Well, I'm Greek and it's Italian... plus, around 100 BC, those motherfuckers stole our gods. It's time to pay the fiddler, bitch.

Now, we could just dredge some chicken in olive oil and call it Greek, but we have more cajones than that. My second favorite traditional Greek sauce (after tzatziki) is a simple lemon and olive oil sauce called ladolemono. It's used as everything from a marinade, to a dressing, to a dip for chicken, lamb, and seafood and it's really fucking delicious. We can make a simple Greekish tomato sauce with oregano and basil, and we'll give feta cheese a headlining role beside the parmesan (or parmigiano-reggiano if you buy the real stuff).
Foodies like to bandy about the word "deconstruction", which usually means spreading the ingredients out on a plate and making you assemble it yourself. A deconstructed PB&J would be a half a loaf of Ethiopian rye bread, a glob of peanut butter mixed with almonds and avocado smeared "artfully" on a plate, and a small German shoe filled with apricot and owl vomit jelly. It's not so much deconstructed as it is unnecessarily fucked with, and not usually for the better. This is more of a logical reengineering.