A busy weekend and a delicious, if reheated, recipe: Crispy Chicken Schnitzel

A house favorite from the archives: Panko breadcrumbs give chicken breast schnitzels an assertively crispy outside. Recipe, eventually, below.

There really should be a new recipe here. We have a few ideas we’re working on and a new cooking memoir awaiting our review. Didn’t get to any of it. This post isn’t an excuse for that—it’s a recounting of things we found more interesting than cooking this weekend. But if you make it to the end, you’ll find a simple dish we like to cook fairly often.

On Saturday, we joined more than a quarter million of our closest friends at the Women’s March 2018 in Chicago. After feeling so powerless on a daily basis for more than a year now, being there felt wonderfully empowering. Energy, anger and hope flowed through the crowds clogging the streets. Signs and banners ranged from poignant to belligerent to brilliantly funny.

As we neared the march’s end, we realized we were dangerously near the Chicago Art Institute. With recently renewed membership cards burning holes in our pockets, we went in. Most often, you’ll find us in the Modern Wing. Anything from the Abstract Expressionists of the ’50s moving forward is our sweet spot. But this visit, we gravitated to older works.

An artist who surprises me every time I see one of his works in person is Joseph Mallord William Turner. Working in the time of stiff Neo-Classic art and lumped together with other Romantic painters, the other major European movement of the time, Turner’s paintings feel absolutely modern to me. The way he captures light presages the Impressionists who would follow decades later, but if you move in close on a canvas, you can isolate sections that could stand alone as the abstract work that followed more than a century later. The painting above, Fishing Boats with Hucksters Bargaining for Fish, is dated 1837/38. It feels fresh and alive, nearly 200 years later.

By Sunday morning, the beautiful, unseasonably warm weather that had blessed the marchers was gone, replaced by cold winds and thick fog. We had heard that a Snowy Owl had been spotted at the 31st Street Beach and Harbor on Lake Michigan. We knew we probably weren’t going to catch a glimpse of the owl in the fog, but we went anyway.

Being anywhere on the lakefront, whatever the season, whatever the weather, reminds us why we chose Chicago and why we stay. It is at once calming and exhilarating, and always different. On this morning, we were treated to the silent beauty of the empty boat slips, their summer inhabitants safely dry docked somewhere inland, and the thick ice, cracked into slabs by the relentless movement of the giant lake. Even the occasional gull cries were muffled by the fog.

We did cook this weekend, but we had neither the energy nor the interest to experiment with something new, something postable. Instead we relied on comfortable, easy favorites. Like this dish.

Crispy Chicken Schnitzel. You’ll find the recipe for this mostly traditional schnitzel here. Panko replaces the usual bread crumbs and amps up the crunchiness.