Hi! I’m Amy Riolo, today I’m working in the kitchen at Sirlatab in Arlington, Virginia, and we’ll going to be making citrus chicken breast with fennel, pine nuts and capers. Let’s get started by heating a large wide skillet over medium heat and then we’ll going to take 2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil and coat the bottom of our pan with it. since the pan is already heated that’s really going to coat up quite quickly and nicely. Once it coats the bottom of the pan, we can start adding our chicken, now these are chicken breasts which I got it here at Chiedar, you can use two regular size chicken breast and slice them in half but what I did for this recipe is I went ahead and got the thinly sliced chicken breast that Harry Chiedar sells. It just saves an extra step, you don’t have to slice them in half yourself and they’re nice and thin. Working with these thin portions of chicken is very nice because you get exactly the portion that you want, and each person gets their own chicken breast that is nice and thinly sliced. Now, while these are sautéing, they’ll going to start table at two to four minutes on each side, I want to talk a little bit about another ingredient which is our fennel. This is a fresh fennel stalk, sometimes, they’re marketed at the store as anis, what’s important is that we’re familiar with working with this vegetable. Now this is the bulb of the fennel, and this is what we used to cook with, these are the stalks and these are the frawns, we don’t need the stalks to cook with, you can save those, you can put them in soups or in stocks and then discard them later, but they’re very tough and fibrous. And we really don’t want to add them to our, our meal. So let me show you how to cut a fennel. In this recipe, we need about two fennel bulbs, so I’m just going to take the fennel and cut down here, right at the bottom of the stalk and just make sure that I’m getting all of these stalks off. and we are left with a bulb , that’s all we need, now, from that very first slice, I can already smell a little bit of a licorice smell because fennels smells like anis and like licorice. And then we can take it, and we can just quarter it. like this. The reason why we’re quartering it, is because we’re eliminating the core which is in the middle, this piece. So this is something else that we don’t need, we could just set that aside. So if you would like to, you could take your fennel and then slice it or you can keep it quartered, either way, it’s perfectly fine, it’s going to cook down and gets soft and add a really nice caramelly licorice flavor to our meal. And in the mean time we’re just gonna turn our chicken breast over, now a good gage to tell if your chicken breast are ready to turn are to see how easy do they turn. This one turns right over, so I know that it is done, this is not a dish that you want to go back and forth with, you wanted to just turn it once each time. So, whenever it starts to pull, you know it’s ready. If you really have to fight with it, then it’s not ready to turn over and you have to let it keep cooking. So now that we have our chicken breast turned over, what we can do is add some of our seasoning. What we’re going to season this dish with is the juice of the lemon, this is about half of a cup of lemon juice. We’re also going to use the zest of the lemon, a lot of people don’t realize but all of the flavor and all of the essential oil in the lemons are in the zest not in the juice itself. So if you’re ever making a recipe and you want to give it a lot of that nice lemon flavor, you keep adding more and more juice and you seem you’re not getting anywhere, it’s because you should be adding the lemon zest instead and that will give you a lot of flavor very quickly. So here I have some koshered salt that I’m adding and some freshly ground pepper. And now that our chicken are finish sautéing on either side I’m going to transfer them to a clear plate and I’m going to add the fennel right back to the same pan. The reason I’m adding the fennel is because we’ve already got a little bit of the chicken juices release, we’ve got the lemon flavor and we just want to caramelize the fennel before we cook them. Fennel is very high in potassium, and vitamin c, it also has a lot of alkaline minerals in it, like magnesium and so it’s a very, very healthy vegetable force to become familiar with. You need to turn my heat up to high, just so that this can get caramelize for a few minutes. and this is something that is used all over the Mediterranean, the fennel dates back about 3000 years. And it’s used not only as something to eat but it’s also used as a traditional medicine. Fennel is known to treat things like rheumatoid problems, they also helps people with bronchitis and it helps people with problems with their nervous system, so it’s been used that way for many, many years, in addition to its great taste, so start working with it, discover different ways to use it, it’s got a lot of fibers, so they call it a dieters friend and you’ll discover that there are a lot of delicious things that you can do with the fennel. If you can’t find fennel or you don’t like fennel, you can substitute zucchini in this recipe, either the green or the yellow, it would taste absolutely delicious, what we’re doing now is just browning our fennel. And once that starts to get a little bit of color on either side, we can add our chicken right back into the dish. And we’re just building flavors here, so now, we’re putting our chicken back in and the chicken’s going to get more of that fennel flavor, more of the lemon flavor which we already had from the beginning and in case that wasn’t enough we’re going to add few teaspoons of caper berries right into the top, this has been prinned and rinsed, these are going to give us a nice briny flavor which really enhances the citrus of the lemon, and they also look nice, they give us a little bit of the green color in there. and then we’ll going to add along with the capers, some raisins and some pine nuts. And this combination of caper berries and raisins and pine nuts is very classic in southern Italian cooking but specially the raisins and the pine nuts are very popular in middle eastern cooking. So we’re taking that same technique as it was introduce to southern Italy and just, doing the same thing with it. now, I’m adding a quarter cup of pine nuts, again this is a very rustic recipe, you could add more or less if you like. Almonds will also work here, if you don’t want the pine nuts, and we’ll just stir everything around, because I can smell the caramel smell from the fennel. As you can see it’s gotten kind of golden brown here, and this is what we’re looking for this extra golden brown flavor on our fennel is really going to ensure that the dish has another added dimension. So we’ll scrape a little bit off the bottom, we’ll make sure that everything is turned around and coated really nice and I’m going to go ahead and add a little bit of more of our crushed black pepper. The reason I’m doing this twice is because I didn’t add the pepper with the fennel. So I wanna add a little bit more and make sure that the fennel has its own pepper. Fennel can be eaten raw by the way, you can just slice it and eat it in a salad or munch on it instead of a celery stick, it’s delicious. Now I have two cups perry’s teeter reduce sodium chicken stock, we have the chicken and its already release a little bit of its juices and then we’re cooking it in more of its own stock. So it’s going to get much more flavorful and much more juicy. If you didn’t want to use stock, you could use water, you could also use your own homemade chicken stock which is optimal because you’ll have the least amount of sodium. But reduced sodium chicken stock has half the amount of sodium as regular. So if you wanna make some quick changes, that can overall impact your health, reduce sodium chicken stock is a good one. We’re gonna add it right in and it will steam up. now you can see as we’ve added that stock in all of that brown caramel flavor from the chicken and the fennel over here on the side has just really deepen, its given a lot of nice color to our dish, and it’s gonna make sure that when this cooks down, it’s much more than just a simple chicken breast recipe, it’s gonna be a wonderful meal in a pan. So what I’m going to do now is just spoon some of the sauce over, and then I’m going to cover the pan and reduce the heat to medium low and let it simmer for about 20 minutes and when we come back, I’m going to show you how to plate our chicken breast with fennel, capers and pine nuts