Chicken with Lime Gravy

My roommate Darvin is leaving, so tonight's Saturday Supper is in some ways a farewell dinner to him. So, just for today, I've decided to stray from my philosophy of making only simple dishes and go for something more intricate, more gourmet, if you will. That's why today's dish looks much better than usual, even if it doesn't necessarily taste better. Well, that's why I have cumin.

Welcome to Saturday Supper, where your host, I, Yifan, will learn the alchemy of taking normal inert ingredients and making them potentially chemically reactive. Today's dish is seasoned breaded chicken with lime gravy.

Ladies and gentlemen, behold: probably the most advanced mess I'll ever attempt.

As a callback to my very first Saturday Supper dish, I used the same concept to make the chicken, except with more oil, less oven, and less mess on my hands. Remember what I said about that dish's difficulty level though? Well this dish is a good deal harder. I'd say we're past "sheltered college student" well into "college student who thinks he knows what he's doing with his food but doesn't" now.

First of all, pounding the chicken is kind of a must to make this work right. I mean, that's not to say that this worked right, but in any case you still need to pound it. The chicken is best thin, so you know, those of you who have always wanted to pretend you could be Rocky or maybe E. Honda from Street Fighter will be glad to know that punching the chicken repeatedly is basically the best solution here. Then instead of covering my hands with mayonnaise and breadcrumbs and slathering it on the chicken like a barbarian, I put it all in a ziploc bag and proceeded to continue scoring ultra combos on a piece of dead meat.

Frying the chicken with mushrooms, breadcrumbs, and cumin yields...that monstrosity.

After summoning the dark one (pictured above) with your infernal fire and canola oil, it's time to make the gravy. So having never made gravy before (perfectly reasonable, given that I've never made anything before), this was a daunting task. Turns out you can easily just use chicken broth, flour, and whatever's left of the demonspawn that you just took out of the pan. I guess the trick is to whisk the gravy well before you put it in the pan, otherwise it gets more and more impossible to make smooth without forming little flour clumps that make it look like your gravy's recently risen from the grave. Or developed leprosy.

I thought to give the chicken an extra kick with some lime juice. Funny thing about limes: one lime is plenty of juice to cover a cup of chicken broth. Two limes? Overkill. So the gravy ended up being less "chicken gravy with lime flavor" and more "lime gravy," but that ended up okay when eaten with the chicken, actually, so I'm just going to go ahead and claim I did that on purpose, as usual. The flavor is pleasantly piquant, like a velociraptor using its teeth to gently graze your tongue.

So that's that for this week. On a side note, I'm finding that that fried rice trick I did last week is incredibly handy since I only need one pan to make it, so actually the next few dishes probably won't involve rice after all as I just keep making fried rice on weekdays. Everyone wins!