Recipes #4, #5: Blue Cheese Brussels Sprouts & Chicken Piccata

So the other night, Carlee and I decided to make dinner for my mom and sister. My mom LOVES brussels sprouts, as well as blue cheese (and so do I). I was super excited to learn how to make these wonderful vegetables! I have another brussels sprout recipe, which I'm sure I will be sharing soon enough....


Before I go into the brussels sprouts, I'll start with the chicken piccata. The recipe is from, surprise surprise, Giada de Laurentiis. It's very simple to make! I bought the Foster Farms skinless, boneless chicken breasts (comes with 4 in a pack), and de-fatted them. I'm not sure what the technical word for that is....but essentially, I told the knife, and cut off any white areas or red bloody areas. Luckily, these breasts didn't have much. Then, I pounded them out, and cut them all in half. I took a picture of the ready-to-be-coated cutlets, but it looked too gross, so I've decided to keep it to myself!


Next, put salt and pepper on them, and lightly coat them with flour. In a pan, put 2 Tbsp butter and 2 Tbsp olive oil. Once it starts to get hot, place the chicken in the pan, and cook for about 3 or 4 minutes on each side. The thinner you pound them, the quicker they cook!

Once they're done, put them on a plate, but don't dump out the extra butter and oil. In the pan, put about 1/3-1/2 cup of lemon juice (for me it was the juice from 2 lemons), 1/2-3/4 cup chicken broth, and 1/4 cup of capers (but I put in the entire jar). Let that come to a boil, and throw the chicken back in, and let it simmer for about 5 minutes. YUM.

There they are, ready to be served! If you make pasta, the extra sauce can be used for that =)

For the Blue Cheese Brussels Sprouts*, all you need is:

4-5 shallots
2 cloves of garlic
red pepper flakes
1 Tbsp olive oil
brussels sprouts (we used maybe 1 pound?)
salt and pepper to taste
blue cheese
*recipe is stolen from Carlee...thanks!

Start off by cutting the brussels sprouts in half, and place them in a pot of boiling water for a few minutes. Once they've had a chance to cook, drain them, and put them in an "ice bath" or you can just place them in the freezer (to stop them from cooking anymore!). In the meantime, heat up 1 Tbsp of olive oil, and place the sliced shallots in the pan. We cooked these for a long time...until they were nice 'n brown!! Oh, and don't forget to add in the red pepper flakes! yummm

Look at those yummy sprouts!

The shallots stayed in the pan for probably 15-20 minutes.
They got super tender and were sooo good!

After the shallots have been browned to perfection, toss in the brussels sprouts and the garlic. We cooked these for another 15 minutes, at least. Make sure the brussels sprouts get tender, but not too mushy! They should have a nice golden brown color to them when they are finished.

Here's a picture before they were completely done, but you get the idea!

Unfortunately I failed to get a picture of the final product. I think I was just too excited to dig in! The brussels sprouts were amazing, and I will definitely be making these again. Oh, so at the very end, we ended up serving ourselves a portion of the sprouts, and then added as much blue cheese as we wanted. It melted and was wonderful with the brussels sprouts!