Suzanne Beecher

Dear Reader,

Use a baseball bat, either end of a shovel, your spouse's shoe (I'm lucky enough to have a husband who wears size 13), a rolling pin, the wooden end of a broom, or you can use a meat mallet--it's the boring route to go, but it's been the tried-and-true tool, for cooks for generations.

Pounded Italian Chicken Cutlets

Ingredients:
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts--halved
1/4 cup flour
1 egg, beaten
1 T water
3/4 cup dried bread crumbs (any flavor you have will work)
1 tsp dried oregano leaves
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup oil

Sauce:
1 8-oz can tomato sauce (but I always use a little more)
1/4 tsp dried basil leaves
1 tsp Italian seasoning
1/4 tsp garlic powder

Optional:
4 slices mozzarella cheese
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Place each chicken breast between 2 pieces of waxed paper. Grab your baseball bat, broom handle, your husband's shoe, rolling pin or meat mallet, and pound those halved chicken breasts. When you've pounded the meat down to about 1/4 inch thick, retire your meat pounder, you're ready for the next step.

You'll need 3 shallow dishes. Put flour in one. Combine beaten egg and water in the second dish. Combine bread crumbs, oregano, and salt in the third dish. Cover each piece of chicken with flour, dip
each piece in the egg mixture, then dip in the bread crumb mixture.

Heat oil in large skillet over med-high heat. Add pieces of chicken, cook until crisp and golden brown on one side, 6 to 8 minutes. Turn, cook the other side about 2 minutes or until chicken is no longer pink.

In a small saucepan, combine tomato sauce, basil, Italian seasoning, and garlic powder. Cook over low heat until thoroughly heated, stirring occasionally.

Top chicken with sauce. If you're using cheese, add it now and cover the pan, so the cheese melts.

Not only is this recipe fun to make, the chicken is the most tender I've ever tasted.

Why do you pound chicken? The meat is even and thinner for cooking. Pounding meat tenderizes and makes the chicken very moist.

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@firstlookbookclub.com

P. S. This week we're giving away 10 copies of the book The Antidote: A Novel by Karen Russell. Click here to enter for your chance to win. 

PROLOGUE

Deposit 69818060-1-77

Harp Oletsky's First Memory

It is nowhere you chose to be, and yet here you are. Papa steers your shoulders into the heart of the jack drive. Hundreds of rabbits stare at you through the wire around the fence posts. It feels like looking into the mirror. They do not want to be in this story either. Men have been working since dawn to herd the wild jacks into this pen. The town has gathered to solve the problem of the rabbits, who chew through rangeland and cropland, who eat the golden wheat your papa turns into money. Worse than the locusts, says Papa. Every hide brings a penny bounty. So many turnipy sweating bodies and a festive feeling in the air like a penny rubbed between two fingers, like blood shocked into a socket. A smell that reminds you of the room where babies are born. When you try to turn and run away, Papa grabs you. There's Mr. O'Malley, Mr. Waldowko, Mr. Zalewski, Mrs. Haage. You can't remember any more names. A hundred jointed arms come swinging into the pen that is alive with jackrabbits, the place of no escape. Now there is only madness.

Terror of cudgels, terror of ax handles and hammers, terror of being trampled. "Papa! Help! Stop!" Rabbits run over your feet. "Settle down, Harp—" Papa is angry. He pours your name over your head like scalding water. The rabbits are angry. The rabbits are crying and dying, the clubs coming down, down, down. "If you ain't gonna help, stay clear of us, boy—" You are six today. Your family will have a party after supper. The cake was cooling when you left for town. You feel sick thinking about it. Cherries come slopping out of the rabbits. Gray skins are splitting, the antidote slipping under bootheels and wooden bats. Papa shows you what to target: the skulls and the spines of the screaming jacks. It's the fastest way to stop their screaming. There is another way, a voice cries out inside you. Smash it flat. You watch Papa click into his rhythm and begin to kill alongside the rest of the men.

You meet your baby sister's gaze through the fan of her clean fingers. Lada is sitting on your mother's lap. Three girls you know are watching from outside the fence. The girls are allowed to squeal and shield their faces. You wish you were a girl with them. Down, down, down come the clubs and the planks. Your stomach bulges and flattens. You are screaming with the rabbits. Your birthday wish is to get to the end of this sound. Quiet comes at last. The men's arms rest against their sides like tools in a shed. Women are hanging the dead jacks to dry by their long ears. Every twitching rabbit's foot has stilled. Inside of you, the screaming continues. It goes on and on and on. Papa finds you where you have hidden your eyes behind your hands, your tears inside your palms. "We can't let the jacks overrun the whole prairie. No one likes it, Son." This is a lie. Many had liked it. You shut your eyes along with the dead rabbits, because you did not want to see whose faces were smiling. "Here," says Papa. "One is still living. You cannot be softhearted, Harp."

Your father puts the club in your hands. And after that, you are always afraid.

Section I

Collapse

The Prairie Witch

A person can lose everything in an instant. A fortune, a family, the sun. I've had to learn this lesson twice in my life. The first time it happened, I was a fifteen-year-old fugitive from the Home for Unwed Mothers. The second time, I was a prairie witch chained to my cot in a cinder-block jailhouse. "Your second home," the Sheriff liked to say. Officially, I do not exist in his West; nevertheless, it is a crime to pay me a visit.

On Black Sunday, before anybody knew to call it Black Sunday, I woke up in the jailhouse to a sound like a freight train tunneling through me. An earsplitting howl that seemed to shake the stone walls. My body trembled like a husk on the cot. My fingers clawed into the mattress. For those early moments in the dark I was nothing but the fear of floating off. What had happened to me while I slept? It felt as if a knife had scraped the marrow from my bones. Something vital inside me had liquefied and drained away, and in its place was this new weightlessness. Lightness and wrongness, a blanketing whiteness that ran up my spine and seeped out of my mouth. Bankrupt was the word that rose in my mind. At first, I did not recognize the voice crying out for help as my own. I clamped down on the sound, panicked—I could not afford to lose any more ballast. My numb limbs began to prickle with feeling, pins and needles stitching them back to my brain. It was not a happy reunion. Ten white toes sprouted like mushrooms on the edge of a filthy green blanket, waving to me from the outermost limit of what I could make out. A kerosene lantern in the hallway gave off a feeble emerald glow, beyond which the cell plunged into shadow. Not even the pain was mine. It came and went like the wind. Then it drilled through my skin and swallowed the world.

Or perhaps the black blizzard was already well under way when I woke up. Choking heat filled the jailhouse, along with lashing tails of dust. It occurred to me that I might be buried here before I could recollect who I was. Minutes and hours lost all meaning for me; I balled up on the cot and prepared to be pulled apart by a cyclone. Eventually the winds began to weaken. Light cut a pathway across the turbulent sky—I watched a pale line brightening and widening through the small cell window. A greenish disc hung above the cloud wall, and it took me ages to recognize the sun. It was not midnight after all, but well past noon.

I began to remember more about the land beyond this cell, the edgeless prairie. The name of the town where I worked returned to me: Uz, Nebraska, southeast of the Sandhills and west of the Platte River. We were four years into the worst drought that any newcomer to the Great Plains had ever experienced. Other beings kept older diaries. Cored cottonwood trees told a millennial story written in wavy circles that no politician had cared to read. Congressmen train themselves to think in election cycles, not planetary ones. They see spiking market highs and lows, and forget how to read in circles. Uz had been having brownouts for months. Plagues of jaws and mandibles. Grasshoppers rattled down on the tractor cabs from hissing clouds. Thousands of jackrabbits fanned over the Plains, chewing through anything green. Winged indigo beetles blew in from God alone knew where, husks shaped like hourglasses that nobody on the High Plains had ever seen before 1931. Red sand from Oklahoma and black dirt from Kansas and dove gray earth from the eastern plains of Colorado formed a rolling ceiling of dust above Uz that flashed with heat lightning.

The Sheriff and his family lived in a two-story brick frame house facing the jail, parts and blueprint purchased from the Sears, Roebuck catalog. It sat on the free side of the property, five hundred yards beyond the bars of my two-foot-by-two-foot window. As the dust blew into my cell, outside things became less and less real. The Sheriff's house slimmed to a charcoal sketch. Erased, redrawn, and finally lost to sight. The sky was well and truly falling.

(continued on Tuesday)

Love this book? Share your review with the Publisher