Chicken Milanese: A Literal Shitshow

I really thought this was going to be an easy one.

It was the first workday of the year and my bosses were still on vacation, so I ducked out of the office early to partake in the yearly event we all know and look forward to with bated breath. Say it with me: ENDIVE SEASON. The kids all clamor for endives! “Mommy, have the endives come into season yet?” “Not yet, my sweet, but the winter’s bitter greens will be on shelves shortly if you wish your very hardest!” An all-too familiar scene played out in homes across the country this time of year. (The internet tells me endives are actually available year-round due to the magic of capitalism, but true endive-heads know endive season can only be found within your heart.)

Years ago, I made Gwyneth’s Chicken Milanese, but only made one of the four “special” recipes she includes as toppings (back then, we ran out of paper towels and I ended up patting my chicken breasts dry with toilet paper, which I now see was FORESHADOWING). Since one of the recipes features endives, and the other three incorporate relatively easy-to-find ingredients year round (a Gwyneth rarity!), I figured I’d hop on the endive season madness sweeping the nation and would finally knock out all five(!) recipes that make up Chicken Milanese: Four Very Special Ways. And, for good measure, I’d tackle her Endive Salad as well. AND, because I’m psychotic, I’d throw in a simple pasta recipe from Melissa Clark’s “Dinner,” quickly becoming my favorite cookbook of all time. (We’ll talk more about this later, but you should know that Melissa Clark is perfect.)

In Gwyneth tradition, it took two different grocery stores to get all the necessary ingredients. Gorgonzola, for some reason, was $8. I don’t like gorgonzola, so I’m unfamiliar with the going rate, but this seems high for a wedge of rotten cheese!

I returned home before the sun went down, an unheard-of feat on a January workday. I slipped the key into the door, thinking fondly of myself. How smart I was, to leave work early, to plan a three-course meal with multiple varieties, all made from recipes that take no longer than 30 minutes! Justin would get home from work and discover a triumphant surprise on the table.

And then I opened the door and saw this:

That’s my mom’s unwanted Roomba she unloaded on us at Christmas, jammed under the fridge door amidst an ocean of piss and a pile of shit, presumably scared out of my elderly dog by the malfunctioning robot that suddenly invaded his sleeping space.

(Yes, we have a stack of air conditioners in our tiny kitchen. Our super climbed up our fire escape one day while we were out of town and shoved them inside onto the floor. It’s a long story and reason #525 why we have to leave this apartment before we kill ourselves/each other.)

So, instead of spending the next 30 minutes whipping together a multicourse feast, I mopped the apartment, using up the last of our paper towels in the process. I don’t know why it’s become a recurring theme in my life that I attempt to make Gwyneth Paltrow’s Chicken Milanese without paper towels on hand, but one can’t anticipate where destiny will lead. (I also forgot about the pat-dry step in this attempt, so no toilet paper chicken for us this go-round. In retrospect, the toilet paper would have genuinely helped.)

Once it was time to actually get started, I began roasting cherry tomatoes in the oven, and then prepared the four Milanese toppings. The first, Slow Roasted Cherry Tomatoes and Arugula, was the one I had already cooked years ago, and all it required was tossing arugula in oil and vinegar and dumping (or “folding,” I guess, if you’re being fancy) the roasted tomatoes in when they came out of the oven.

The second, Tomato & Avocado Salad, is exactly as it sounds. The third, Many Herb Salad & Dried Cranberries, is also exactly as it sounds (the “many herbs” are chives, cilantro, parsley, and mint). Everything was going so smoothly! The final topping, Endive & Gorgonzola, is the one that scared me. As I already said, I don’t like gorgonzola, and pairing it with bitter endives seemed like a nightmare. But the endives are supposed to be sautéed, which Gwyneth reassures me “gives way to its hidden sweetness.” I decided to hold off until the very last minutes to cook the endives, because I dreaded having to eat a lukewarm, congealed mass of gorgonzola and leaves.

Taking a break from Gwyneth, I started the wonderfully simple process of making Melissa Clark’s Fusilli With Burst Cherry Tomatoes, Mint, and Burrata. You just sauté cherry tomatoes with garlic, salt, and red pepper flakes for a while, toss in some almost-but-not-quite-al-dente fusilli (or rotini if your grocery store didn’t have fusilli) to finish cooking in the tomato juices, and then add a lot of butter and parmesan to melt into the pasta, before you top it with creamy burrata and little pieces of mint and scallions. It’s literally a 15-minute meal, as advertised, and, uhhhhhhhh I LOVE IT SO MUCH. Wowoowowowowoowow. (Here is a slightly different recipe with pancetta added, which sounds truly iconic.) Spoiler alert: it was better than everything Gwyneth had me make, and it wasn’t even close.

Anyway, back to this fucking mess. I had carefully thought out a plan that required using all four burners at once, in order to get every course of this dinner on the table at the same time, with everything that needed to be hot still hot, and with every salad well-dressed but not wilting. I was shooting for the goddamned moon.

So, while the pasta boiled (we’re skipping around in time here, please try to follow along), I took my two MONSTROUS chicken breasts — horrendous, oversized, deformed hell-breasts from what were surely disgustingly mutated hens; sorry, it’s all the grocery store had! America is dying! — and pounded them as thin as I could between parchment paper. I remember this process being fun the last time I did it. This time I found it difficult and disgusting. Chunks of raw chicken splattered on the newly-mopped floor. The mallet tore through the parchment paper. The breasts were oddly reluctant to being pounded (lol), but would suddenly change their minds and flatten out like a horrific cartoon suicide. I pounded away at the chicken, Justin filmed on his phone, and we both squealed in horror because we’re very masc.

You’re supposed to get the chicken thin enough to “almost read through,” but that was never going to happen with these Satanic breasts. I’m sure Gwyneth uses free-range, organic, delicately raised chicken, which I would have loved to also use, but sometimes you have to make do. I maybe could have read something through the chicken if it were, like, one of those banners they drag behind a plane. Whatever, the pasta was almost done and time was running out.

I dredged the raw chicken in milk, which is suuuch a gross process, and then slapped it into a pile of panko bread crumbs. “AH! I forgot salt and pepper!” I shouted, and immediately panicked about becoming the lady who served Oprah unseasoned chicken. So I just scattered a random amount of spices on top of the bread crumbs/chicken pile. The wheels were truly starting to fall off the bus.

I fired up some oil in a non-stick skillet and plopped the first breaded chicken disaster into the oil. I then prepared the other chicken breast, while also firing up another skillet and frying chopped endives for the fourth and final topping. After a few minutes, I went to flip the chicken breast over and… it looked awful. Half the breading stuck to the non-stick pan, and the breading that was still on the chicken was on the express train to burnt city.

“Okay, so, this is going to be a really bad dinner,” I warned Justin, who was already eating candy and roasted chestnuts on the couch, in anticipation of an unsatisfying meal.

And then I remembered I still had to make the fucking endive salad!!!! Earlier, I had whipped together Gwyneth’s grainy mustard dressing — another recipe I’ve already completed in the past, as if I need to be repeating recipes in this never-ending project — but the “recipe” (consisting of about 25 words) tells you to stack the endive leaves “log cabin style,” which, what? How do you stack leaves like a log cabin? This was the last shit I needed to do right now. I tried my best, threw together a terrible-looking pile of bullshit leaves, and put it on the table alongside my bowl of dressing. The second I turned my back, Bark Antony started licking the endive leaves in the stack that were closest to him, ruining my log cabin. Everything was going great!!!

Back to the kitchen, where I removed the first chicken from the oil, threw the second breast in to get frying, and mixed gorgonzola in with the sautéed endives to complete the fourth topping. As expected, it looked like a goopy, nasty mess. Great! Love when your hard work pays off.

I told Justin to start eating before me, because I still had to fry my chicken breast and his was getting cold. It was a romantic dinner for two: one eating by himself, the other going full Tasmanian Devil in the kitchen, 4 hours into a “30-minute” recipe. Maybe I was too ambitious, who can ever say!! Anyway, my chicken breast came out even worse than the first one. I feel like the breading would have stayed on if I had patted the chicken dry with paper towels or toilet paper or whatever, but we’ll never know because I’m never doing this recipe again.

When I finally sat down to eat, I tried each of the toppings with the chicken, and they were fine! The flavor of the chicken was nothing special (it’s literally bread crumbs with salt and pepper), so it was nice to have anything on hand to zest it up a bit. The avocado and tomato mixture was probably my favorite thanks to the lime juice I squeezed over it, but the herb mixture with cranberries was surprisingly not that bad. I did NOT enjoy the gorgonzola glob, but to be fair, it was one of Justin’s two favorites, and the endives were surprisingly sweet after being cooked. I’m never going to love gorgonzola and I just have to live my truth. For that matter, the endive salad was better than expected, shitty log cabin and all. Endives are crazy bitter, but the mustard dressing really complements the flavor well, and I could have eaten a lot more of it had I not made a ridiculous amount of food.

But the star of the meal, I’m sorry to report to all you goop-heads, was Melissa Clark’s pasta. I’ll stop raving about it because this isn’t the Danny/Melissa Project, but you should do yourself a favor and get her “Dinner” cookbook. It’s just jam-packed with solid, easy, ridiculously good recipes for dinner. I haven’t found a single recipe that’s been difficult or anything less than delicious, and they’re also simple enough recipes that I know I can use them to create my own adaptations in the future.

Anyway, Gwyneth’s stuff was fine, too, I guess. But if this first cook was any indication, 2019 is going to be full of CHAOS. But while we’re here, my new year’s resolution for the blog is to be better at tracking just how much money I spend on each of these recipes. So here are some stats (I’m Nate Silver now):

• Chicken Milanese + Four Toppings total cost:
  • $51.43 ($12.86 per serving @ 4 servings)
• Endive Salad total cost:
  • $11.28 ($2.82 per serving @ 4 servings)
• Stores visited:
  • 2
• Hours spent, including shopping and dishes:
  • 5

Long live Melissa Clark!