Relish It

Don't let the Valentines fool you, this was not my sad Valentine's Day dinner. I had this tonight. It was inspired by a recipe for chicken with tomato relish from Everyday Foods magazine. Very lightly inspired, I should say. First, I used fresh tomatoes instead of the canned the recipe called for because I hate the way canned tomatoes taste when they aren't being used in a cooked sauce. I used everything else in the relish recipe--lemon juice, parsley, capers, olive oil--but it probably would have been better if I let it sit overnight, to turn into more of an actual relish. As it was, it was really just a tomato salad. Which is fine.

As for the chicken portion, I wanted the chicken to be crispy since it was being paired with something kind of mushy, so instead of just pan searing, I decided to coat the chicken in flour, egg white, and Panko, and lightly fry it. ("Lightly frying" sounds like an oxymoron, but I really didn't use that much oil). Pounding out the breasts yielded two pretty big pieces, resulting in the virtual feast you see pictured. I also skipped the spinach portion of the recipe because I thought I didn't have any spinach. (Turns out I did. Derrrrr.)

I forgot to put a lot of salt and pepper in the flour coating, so the chicken was badly in need of some seasoning once on the plate, but other than that, it was really good! I mean, come on. It's basically fried chicken. You can't go wrong!