I just realized that you can freeze chopped scallions. This is big.
Omelets. Ramen. Chili. Dumpling dipping sauce. CHICKEN PICCATA. This is HUGE.
What I'm hearing is that you clean them, slice them, and then freeze—ideally laid out on a tray or something so they freeze quicker and without sticking together—then transfer to a ziploc when frozen. No cooking needed. I'm going to do this today and report back.
Chicken piccata is very easy and very tasty, BTW—a great hard-to-screw-up bit of deliciousness. Here's how I make it:
Ingredients: Cooking oil and/or butter, scallions, capers, lemons, white wine or stock, pasta. Plus fried skinless boneless chicken breasts: Chicken, flour, salt, pepper.
Fry up some chicken breasts, sliced about 3/4 thick (or just buy cutlets), after dredging in flour with a bit of salt and pepper mixed in. This is a super easy component to a zillion recipes, so if you don't know how to do it and want to, ask, and I'll give you tips.
When the chicken is cooked, add some more cooking oil, olive oil, or butter to the pan (a couple glugs of oil or a cube-shaped hunk of a stick of butter. When that's hot, splash in some white wine or chicken stock. (I prefer wine here, as it gives a sharper, brighter flavor.)
(You'll have set aside the chicken, by the way—you're cooking the sauce in the pan the chicken cooked in, but the chicken is on a plate somewhere, waiting.)
When you add the wine to the pan, it's going to sizzle and bubble in a very satisfying way. While it's doing that, scrape the bottom of the pan to dislodge all the bits and crumbs of flour and chicken. This is called deglazing, and it turns the wine into a sauce.
Let the wine boil down for a bit to release some of its alcohol and thicken—if you have bread, dipping it into the sauce here to taste it is the best way to see if you've got it how you like it. Then dump in a whole bunch of chopped scallions—four or five-ish scallions.
The scallions, like the wine, will sizzle excitingly. Stir them as they cook, and watch them turn a bright green and soften a bit. When that happens, toss in a jar of capers, drained. Three or four ounces, something like that. Let the capers cook over low heat.
The capers don't need to be in for long—you're just merging flavors at this point, and how much they mesh is up to your preference. After a bit, put the chicken back in, so it can warm up and deepen the flavor some more.
Right before serving, squeeze the juice of a lemon or two over the whole thing and stir—I used to do the lemon earlier, but waiting until the end makes the whole thing really pop with acid and brightness. Strain the juice if you can, or pick out the seeds—the pulp is fine to use.
You can serve it just as a meat dish if you like, but I serve it over pasta—I love it with campanelle, since the capers get lodged in the pasta. As described, with a pound box of pasta, it'll likely serve four with some leftovers, depending on how much chicken you use.
Super easy, and almost impossible to screw up once you get the hang of cooking the chicken. And if you've got frozen scallions, lemons are the only fresh ingredient you need—and lemons will last for a while in the fridge. So it's perfect for making while hunkered down.
With very few exceptions I didn't start cooking regularly until I was well into my thirties, and this is one of the first things I learned. It's a great starter dish because it looks and tastes extremely fancy with very little effort and basically zero technique.
Ooh! Here's a list of the ways you can screw this dish up, so you don't. (1) Butter is finicky about high heat. Mix it with oil. (2) The scallions can burn, so watch em until you put in the wine, then turn down the flame. (3) Don't forget to put in the lemon juice.
That's it. That's a complete list of all the ways I've ever screwed this recipe up.
