Food adventures: lemon chicken

My dad got me a cookbook pretty recently, so I've been trying out a bunch of the recipes (if I can eat them, that is) and this was the first dish, besides the pho, that I made for other people. It was somewhat of a mini dinner party with my friends Matt and Ethan, and my housemate Julie. I was actually super worried when I was cooking because lately, I only cook for myself, and cooking for other people scares me. I can deal with my own failings as a cook but when cooking for other people I feel a lot of pressure. All my woes disappeared, though, when my dish was very well received, especially with Matt's apparent love for lemons and chicken, as well as the parsley that was included in the dish.

Here's what it ended up looking like.




The original recipe called for orecchiette, which I didn't have, so I used medium shells instead. The recipe itself is pretty simple, just some pan-fried chicken cooked in a sauce of lemon juice, oil, and parsley. I added more lemon juice than the recipe called for and it worked out great because then I had a little more leftover sauce for the pasta. I ended up cooking the chicken for longer than I had thought it would take so some of the parsley was burnt, but I still think it tasted great (and so did Matt, who loved the parsley). Next time I'll go for smaller pieces of chicken and pound them down a little bit more so they're thinner and cook faster.

I also had a decent amount of pasta leftover (I cooked a whole pound) - not really a big deal, since I'm a pro at eating leftovers, but I could probably only cook half a pound next time and be fine with that amount of pasta. I microwaved some frozen vegetables so I could have a little color, and because no matter what recipe I'm making, I still feel a need to balance my starches with meat and vegetables. All in all, first dinner for multiple people = great success!