Chicken with Mushroom Cream Sauce

I mentioned yesterday that I would be trying this out for dinner. Wow, it is so good.
I'm reposting this from Simply Recipes with additional notes of how I did it. Italics are mine.

Ingredients

1 5-pound roasting chicken, cut into serving pieces (I used 5 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves)
Flour, salt and pepper
1 cup grapeseed oil, or canola oil (I used canola, and only about 1/2 cup since I didn't have as much chicken)
Butter
1/4 cup rich chicken broth
1 small onion, chopped
1/2 pound fresh mushrooms, sliced (I used baby portabellas, NOM!)
1 clove of garlic, crushed
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 cup heavy cream
Salt and pepper

Method

1 Put a cup of flour, a teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper in a brown paper bag. Piece by piece, put a piece of chicken in the bag and shake to coat the chicken with flour mixture.

2 Preheat the oven to 350°F. On the stovetop, in a large frying pan, heat oil to medium high heat. Place the chicken pieces in the pan. Watch the oil carefully, you don't want the oil to be so hot as to burn the chicken, you just want to lightly brown it. Brown the chicken pieces on all sides, turning when necessary.

3 Butter a roasting pan generously. Arrange the chicken pieces in it, pour broth over it, and bake at 350°F until the chicken is tender and cooked, about 40-50 minutes for pieces from a 5-pound chicken. You know that the chicken is done by poking a thigh with a meat fork (the thigh meat is dark meat and takes longer to cook than white breast meat). If pink or red juice runs out of the hole made by the fork, the chicken is not done. If only clear juice runs out, the chicken is done. (Since I used the boneless, skinless chicken, it only took about 20 minutes, the time it took me to make the rest of it, to cook through)

4 About 20 minutes before the chicken is expected to be done, start cooking the onions and mushrooms. In the same frying pan as was used to cook the chicken, empty the pan of all but 2 Tbsp of oil. Add the onions to the pan and sauté on medium heat until softened. Add the crushed garlic clove and the mushrooms and cook until mushrooms are no longer crisp. Remove and discard the garlic, and add the sour cream and the heavy cream to the onions and mushrooms. Lower the heat. Keep warm, but do not boil. Salt and pepper to taste. (I lost the garlic clove in there, so it stayed in)

5 When the chicken is done, remove from oven. Serve on a platter with the mushroom sauce spooned over it, or served on the side.

Serves 6 to 8.

Serve with noodles, rice, or Spanish Rice. (I lightly sauteed several large handfuls of baby spinach in just a little olive oil and served the chicken and sauce over that, with a large slice of sourdough bread on the side)

This was a very quick and yummy recipe and I will definitely make it again. We also have plenty of leftovers for tomorrow's lunch.

Tired

Today has been a very nice, but long day.

I didn't get to sleep until about 4:30 last night, but managed to get up around 10 and make it out to the farmer's market around 11.

Today's find were:
hydroponic tomatoes - $5
a huge English cucumber - $4
some goat cheese with chimchurri mixed in - $4
a dozen eggs - $3.50
So, that was what? $16.50, not too bad, considering I paid $4 for one cucumber, but it was delicious, and the fluff-rat agrees. Really, the eggs are the main thing I really want to be able to purchase every week there. There is a lot of produce there, but it's mainly onions (holy cow there are a lot of people selling onions), still a lot of "winter" type greens, and now our strawberry season is over :( It hasn't even started for most of the country, and ours is over and gone for another year.

Then we went to Costco. Wow. I love that place. I'm working towards more local food, etc, but I would have a hard time giving up my Costco membership.
This is what we got today:
12 lbs of baking soda (for making cleaning supplies)
2 gallons of white vinegar (for making cleaning supplies)
2 lbs of shelled pecan halves
1qt 1/2 & 1/2
1qt heavy cream
3 half gallons organic soymilk
1lb baby portabellas
1lb organic baby spinach
1lb organic spring greens
6lb organic tofu
6lb pears
10 lbs onions
2.2lbs Ruta Maya Organic coffee beans
2 loaves sourdough (they were still warm and wonderful with the goat cheese)
2lb strawberries
4.5lbs organic raisin bran cereal
1 pair jeans for Chris
30oz Kalamata Olive dip
12 pack 100% recycled papertowels
2lb cashew granola-ish type of stuff (best snack food ever)

And you know what the total was? With tax it was $131.24.
You just can't beat that.

Love me some Costco, really I do.
I read a lot of blogs from serious couponers and CVSers and comparatively this may seem like a lot, but overall this works much better for us because this is what we eat. I rarely ever see anything with a coupon and on sale that I would use.

I have made it through my first week of meal planning and I think it went very well. I need to work on this coming week's meal plan. I have tomorrow night worked out, since we ended up putting off making dinner after we both filled up on green smoothies I made.
Then we went out for tea with friends, and later when we got hungry split a wonderful masala dosai from a veggie Indian place. When we came home I just cut up the humongous cucumber and several tomatoes for us and we each had large plates of that for "dinner".

So, tomorrow night, I will be making chicken with mushroom cream sauce, using the baby portabellas. I found the recipe at Simply Recipes and I am always pleased with her recipes. They always come out great when I try them. I plan to serve the chicken and sauce on a bed of wilted spinach with sourdough on the side instead of noodles or rice. I'm also using boneless skinless chicken breast, too. I am not sure how that will work. I will be able to cut the cooking time down to about 20 minutes, but it won't have the same ability to brown. Meh, I am sure it will still be very good.

If I am making anything involves meat, 9 times out of 10 it will be using boneless skinless chicken breast. My husband has a serious aversion to meat with bones in it :) He's not picky about much of anything, and that's one of his few weird issues with food. His mother and step father would take him to dinner and my husband would sit alone at his own table in the Thai restaurants as a child with his plain rice and soy sauce, covering his eyes so as not to see them picking the meat off of their whole fried fish and such. Heh. Of course, my husband being born in Singapore and living in the Phillipines as a very young child loved curry and other regional foods from the area. Really, he's not a picky eater.

I do cook whole chicken or cut up chicken on occasion, I just debone it for him. I don't mind at all, I find it endearing.

I have had a long day, and am looking forward into crawling into bed soon. I think I will end up eating a small bowl of cereal before bed, though. The baby sure does like cereal before bed!

Long Day, Busy Week

This past week went by really quickly! I'm not even sure where it all went. It felt busy, though.

So, this week I made a few recipes from different blogs and they were wonderful!

First I made made this Smoky Refried Bean Soup and it was wonderful. The only things I did differently was I left out the green pepper, I didn't have any and I am not thrilled about them cooked. I love them raw, though. And then I substituted a chipotle in adobo for the chili powder, hot sauce and paprika. For the tomatoes called for in the recipe I used the Muir Glen Organic's Fire Roasted Tomatoes. Between those and the chipotle and adobo sauce, it had a great smoky flavor. It also had the perfect amount of spice to it. It was super simple to make, too.

Another thing I made were these Banana Cookies. OH, they were good! They were like banana nut bread in a cookie. YUM! I didn't add the clove to the recipe, and I'm not sure I will in the future.

In my veggie box this week I got 4 heads of wonderful red and green leaf lettuce, a huge bunch of cilantro, 4 smallish onions with green parts, one bunch of bright lights swiss chard, and one bunch of beets with greens. I think that was it. It was all gorgeous and the other night I made an awesome salad that went a little like this:

Wash and dry green and red lettuce, tear into pieces.
Dry roast half a cup of pecan halves until fragrant, toss them onto the lettuce.
Cut 1 1/2 navel oranges into segments and add to the salad.
Squeeze the 2nd half of the left over orange over the salad.
Add a large handful of cilantro very finely chopped to salad over oranges.
Add as much fresh goat cheese, crumbled (the best you can with goat cheese), onto the salad as you like.
Squeeze a lime over, add fresh black pepper.

That was a mighty fine salad. The only thing I lamented not having on hand was a red onion. I would have taken a quarter of it or so, finely chopped it and added that as well.

Today was a TaeKwonDo class and clinic for the oldest. The clinic was board breaking. He broke his first 3 boards ever, and was THRILLED with this, as you can imagine an 8 year old to be! I was so proud of him, he loves this sport and is so into it.
He used hands and elbows to break the first 2, then the 3rd, he decided to do a kick. The board broke into 3 and the 3rd piece flew way over the instructor's head. No one else's board did that, so of course that was a big deal, too.

Unfortunately, due to an accident on the interstate on our way to get there, we didn't have time stop and pick up a new digital camera before this. ARGH. That was very disappointing. We did get a new one afterwards, though, so I'll have new pictures to be posting again soon.

We ended up getting another Canon Powershot, which is what our last one was, and it was a great camera. It suffered an unfortunate fall several months ago, but in the 2 years we'd had it, we never had an issue with it, other than it's lack of indestructibility. ;)
The new one is a much improved 8MP, with a 4x zoom, and it was a very reasonable price. It's amazing how much things change in just two years' time regarding technology.

I have so many things I would like to post about, but I have been so tired by the time I get to sit in front of my computer in the evenings that I only manage to make it maybe halfway through my blog feeds before I just crash. I haven't had much energy for posting!

And now, the RIAA is stealing my sleep (heh), and I have to do that whole coffee demo thing in the morning at what will actually be 9 to my poor brain instead of 10 like it should be!

Also, it's still cold. WTF? It's over a week into March! I'm in Texas! It's supposed to be pushing 80 on a regular basis at this point. I am not ok with this weather thing, and I would like to call for a moratorium on all of this unseasonably cold weather.

I think I may need some sleep!

Damn, I make yummy food

So, I made the "winter pesto" I posted the recipe to previously. YUM! It alone is excellent.

But it doesn't stop there! What I did for dinner tonight was take leftover pork loin from last night and cut into 3/4" slices, put it in the skillet to warm it through and brown the slices a little, then put a dollop of the pesto onto each piece. Then I flipped the pesto side down onto the hot skillet for just maybe 15 seconds and then removed the slices and pesto onto my cutting board. I sliced the pork up into bite sized pieces, tossed it into two bowls of spring greens and baby spinach, added some sliced roma tomatoes, some black pepper and a just a little splash of rice wine vinegar (I thought balsamic or red sounded too heavy for this) and tossed.

Ohhhhh. That was so yummy, the husband loved it and now he said he loves me more than he did before ;)

It was wonderful, and I highly recommend that pesto. It is not overwhelmingly cilantro flavored, and the pecans are very nice.

Tomorrow night I plan to take the goat cheese I have and make it into croquette shapes, and press into the pesto, with maybe some additional pecans, then I will grill that on each side in the skillet and serve on a bed of greens and tomatoes, probably with some red onion (if I remember to pick one up) and possibly even a citrus fruit of some type or mango.
There is an amazing ceviche salad that Chris and I love at this restaurant we go to with his father. It has a disc of goat cheese covered in pine nuts seared on top of the ceviche and greens, with a mango salsa. That's where I got my idea for the goat cheese and pesto thing. I think it will be nummy.