Chicken Picatta brings restaurant food home.

Byline: Home Cooking by Jim Boyd The Register-Guard

ARMAND LAKE, a mathematics teacher and former basketball and football coach in the Springfield School District, started cooking for his wife about six months after they got married and continued on through the years as the primary cook for a family that grew to include two sons.

Lake offers a recipe today for Chicken Picatta.

"The only two meals that my wife cooks are Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner, and usually the Christmas dinner is shared by everybody in the family," Lake said.

"My wife worked in banking and I usually got done and home before she did. I mean, there were nights that she didn't get home until probably 7-7:30. ... So I got tired of sitting around and waiting for her to come home and cook. She was tired. And I started fiddling around with recipes and cooking.

"I think that's part of the reason I got started," he said. "I think the other reason was probably back when I was in Scouts, that's the way you earned your merit badges. So my mom would let me destroy the kitchen."

Lake said he hates leftovers.

"So I'm usually doing something different each night," he said. "When I was coaching, I'd usually cook up lots of things on the weekend so that you could just throw it in the freezer and bring it out and put it in the oven or something so it's ready to go. Or one of the boys could come home and stuff it in the oven so it would be done. Because I was out to all hours at night. Especially during basketball season, it would be 10 o'clock, probably 11 o'clock, before I'd get home."

Specialty: Grilling.

"I'm a meat-and-potatoes type guy, so I marinate and barbecue steaks, ribs, you know, anything you can do with meat," he said.

"I'm not a real fish eater, but I will cook fish for people who want to eat it - salmon, halibut. And I can do a lot with shellfish - bouillabaisse and those kind of things. And then I do the standard chicken with different types of marinades."

For Christmas, he received a cast-iron beer-can holder to use in making beer-can chicken.

"You just put a can of beer in there and put the chicken over the top of it," he said.

"You season it any way you want. You put the lid down and cook it for about an hour, and the chicken just falls off the bones. Absolutely delicious!"

How he began cooking: "I would have to say that my mother had probably a large part of it. Obviously, I was living at home and watching her cook. I think she gave me the opportunity to mess up the kitchen once in a while.

"I can remember when I was a youngster, when they would sleep in and I'd get up early and try to make them breakfast. I was probably that young kid who took up burnt eggs and toast and they said it was wonderful.

"I think all kids, if they are involved in cooking at all, that's probably where they started," he said.

His biggest cooking success: "I think one of my best successes was cooking for a party of about 50-60 people - a wedding, a rehearsal party - and ended up cooking by flashlight out on the back porch," he said.

"Cooking tri-tip and chicken, and making sure the meat was rare and the chicken was done - with a flashlight. I think I pulled that one off pretty well."

Lake explained that he ended up cooking in the dark because things ran late and dinner had to be delayed.

"It was one of those things where when you're barbecuing, you can always hold off," he said.

"So the family kept just saying, 'Everybody's not here yet. Everybody's not here yet.' And I said, 'Not a problem, not a problem.' And before long I've got flashlights, you know, I've got my sons holding flashlights so I can see on the barbecue."

His biggest cooking failure: "Unsolicited, you could call either one of my two boys and ask them, 'Has there ever been a meal that your father has just completely destroyed?' Because I always make the comment, 'When have you ever had a bad meal at our house?'

"Well, it will pop out of their mouth, 'We had barbecued ribs one night and they were absolutely terrible.' I mean, it was charcoaled and jerkied.

"It was just a slip," Lake said. "I let them sit out there too long. We were entertaining some people. It was ugly. If I could have gone down to the grocery store and bought something to replace it - but everybody sat there and ate it and nobody said a word until the next day."

His favorite cookbooks: "A Taste of Oregon" by the Junior League of Eugene and an old "Betty Crocker Cookbook" that he got from his mother.

Why this recipe was chosen: This dish is tasty and easy to prepare, but it's the sort of dish you normally would order in a restaurant and not think to cook at home, he said.

Lake's version is made with chicken thighs, a dark meat that doesn't have to be timed as exactly as white breast meat. Breast meat has to be perfectly timed or it will be underdone or too dry, Lake said.

You can serve it with rice and a green salad, he said.

"It makes for a pretty nice meal and it's kind of on the fancy side," he said.

Chicken Picatta

1/2 cup flour

6 boneless chicken thighs

3 tablespoons olive oil 

2 tablespoons capers 

1 tablespoon lemon juice

2 cups chicken broth, divided

1 tablespoon corn starch

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Put flour in bag and lightly flour each chicken thigh by shaking. Shake off excess flour.

Heat olive oil at medium-high heat and fry thighs until brown, about 4 to 5 minutes on each side. Drain thighs on a paper towel. (Don't throw away leftover pan drippings.) Place thighs in a baking dish equipped with a lid.

Returning frying pan to the heat, saute 2 tablespoons capers (more if you like) and add lemon juice. Add all but 1/4 cup of chicken broth and heat.

Mix together corn starch and the 1/4 cup of unheated chicken broth. Add corn starch mixture slowly to the heated liquid in the saute pan to make a sauce.

Pour sauce over the chicken thighs in the baking dish. Bake, covered, for 30 minutes.

To nominate a cook for this feature, mail it to: Home Cooking, P.O. Box 10188, Eugene, OR 97440; fax it to 338-2813; contact Jim Boyd at 338-2363, or [phone]; or e-mail it to [e-mail]. Include the nominee's name and phone number, your name and phone number, and why you think he or she is an interesting cook.