Picatta sauce is easy

May I improve your life? I can do it in a couple of steps:

1. Buy a jar of capers.

2. Learn to make picatta sauce.

I assumed that Chicken Picatta was a difficult dish requiring massive culinary chops. Also, it didn't occur to me that you could omit the chicken. My dad showed me the way out of this dead end.

If you omit the chicken, then you've got a dish you can whip up faster than you can boil the noodles. And if you use Angel Hair for your noodles, then the whole dish can be cooked in thirty minutes or less.

The only ingredient for picatta sauce that we don't routinely stock is capers. Everything else we keep handy...chicken stock, butter, flour, garlic.

I made some yesterday using this recipe. I need to repeat this a couple more times before it'll be second nature. I initially added too much chicken stock and it was too salty.

Guess what? I just kept adding water until it tasted right. Although this cooks up like a gravy, I didn't have problems with it congealing like a gravy, so I was able to start the pasta water, make the sauce (holding off on adding the lemon juice), then add the lemon juice and stir when the noodles were ready.

Also, this packed well the next day for a lunch at work. Good things all around.

I suppose you can probably find prepared picatta somewhere. I think I may have found a crack in my reality here. I think I'm going to leave picatta labeled as a swanky luxury food in my head, and just feel like a king every time I prepare it.

Here's another picatta recipe I bumped into that looked interesting: Chicken Piccata with Lemon, Capers and Artichoke Hearts.