Recipe: Chicken Faux-ard and Basil Pearled Cous Cous

I've been getting our meat from Whole Foods. There's a long and rambling reason behind that, which I will be posting about, but that's another story.

I had ordered two chicken breasts, which were wrapped up and shoved in the freezer, and when I thawed them today, I saw that the two together weighed over one pound. That's a lot of chicken.

So I decided to make paillard.

Paillard simple means that you pound the living daylights out of your meat until it's nice and thin. Then you can grill or saute it, and you can even make a little sauce out of the pan drippings if you saute it. That was the plan. I figured I could split one breast in half (well, really 2/3 for MacGyver and 1/3 for me) and it would be perfect.

First I mixed some flour, pepper, garlic powder and dried basil (my basil plants did not survive the Great Floridian Freeze of 2010) for dredging.



Then I threw 3 cloves of chopped garlic into a pan with some butter and extra virgin olive oil.



This is one breast, people. It's HUGE. I split it in half, sandwiched each half in between saran wrap...



And then bludgeoned it with a hammer, alternating with a rolling pin. I don't have a meat mallet. I had to be creative.



And I got it as flat as possible.



Since the pieces were so large, I set up a dreging station with dinner plates instead of bowls: one scrambled egg and the flour mixture from earlier.



Then I dipped each piece of chicken in egg and dredged it in flour.



And then I tossed it into the pan of butter, oil and garlic.



In the meantime, I started my pearled basil cous cous. I cheated and used the Near East brand. It called for bringing 1 3/4 cups water, 1 tbsp olive oil and the cous cous to a boil, and then letting it boil on medium for 8 minutes.



Which gave me time to tend to the chicken, sizzling away.



At the end of the eight minutes, I added the "spice packet."



And mixed it in. For some reason, my water all boiled off, so I added a little more and let it continue cooking for another 6 minutes.



And that's when I tried deglazing the pan. It was a fail. Brutal. Awful. I'm pretty disappointed. And that's why I'm calling it Chicken Faux-ard... because it wasn't quite what I had set out to do.

But, there was wine, and that makes 95% of disappointing things better, so here's the final meal:



MacGyver declared it delicious. Definitely a great way to get more out of your chicken.