New year's persillade

I spent a bit of time on New Year's Eve doing some menu planning for my next cooking stream. I don't want to spoil anything, but I will say that it involves 6 dishes, none of which I've made before, and is an undertaking that will change the culinary landscape forever. That's totally not a baseless exaggeration or clickbait of any kind, but if you watch that next stream, you'll learn the 3 Key Secrects Why Chefs Hate Me And You Won't Believe Number Seven!

Anyway, after looking at photos, making some drawings, and having a think, I decided that I also needed to eat that night. Since I'd already spent what little brainpower I had on a menu, I wanted to keep it simple for dinner, so I used an old fallback I learned from a Jacques Pepin video a few years ago: persillade. I started off by slicing up a chicken breast into little thin cutlets which I seasoned with salt and paprika.

I pan fried the chicken in butter and olive oil, as one does.

The persillade part comes just as the chicken is finishing cooking. I had minced up a bit of garlic and parsley and kept that shit in a bowl off to the side. When I had about 15-20 seconds left on the chicken, I dumped all of that in and tossed it all around to give a little bit of a coating to the chicken, then pulled all the meat out to rest.

Rather than making an official "side dish" with this, I just made a quick saucy vegetable mix to top the chicken. I dumped some diced red onion into the pan after the chicken came out, let that sweat a little bit, then added some diced yellow bell pepper and thinly sliced baby bella mushrooms with another little bit of butter. I sprinkled a little salt to draw out the moisture, then let all of that simmer for a minute or two before I dumped in some thinly sliced radish, as well. I didn't want the radish to get too soft, so, while it still had a little bit of crunch, I pulled the veggies off the heat and got ready to eat.

The beauty of simplicity is that it's simple. I stacked some of the chicken in the middle of my plate, then scooped some of the veggies on top. Easy peasy. The green from the parsley and red from the radish gave a nice little bit of color to a somewhat otherwise monochromatic dish.

Flavorwise, persillade is always a homerun. It's tough to go wrong with parsley, garlic, and butter. The extra butter that I added in with the mushrooms really went a long way towards giving the veggie "sauce" a nice, creamy texture, and the veggie blend with the butter came with just the faintest touch of sweetness that really brought it all home.

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