Friday, November 5, 2010

Early Morning Lunch cooking

I enjoy taking leftovers for lunch at work. Unfortunately, there are times that I do not have leftovers in the fridge. This morning was one of those days. I could have had egg salad sandwiches but I was hankering for chicken. I grabbed a chicken breast out of the fridge and saw mushrooms in there. I thought in my head that chicken with sautéed mushrooms in some kind of sauce. I did not have any cream so there would be no cream sauce, no stock of any kind was available but I did have some white cooking wine. Also in my fridge, I found some minced garlic and capers. I cut the chicken into bite sized pieces and sautéed in some olive oil. Once the chicken was cooked, I removed from it from the pan and cooked the mushrooms and garlic.

The mushrooms started to stick to my stainless steel skillet so I added some wine to deglaze the pan and continued to cook the mushrooms in the wine adding more wine each time the mushrooms start to stick. Once the mushrooms darkened and became tender, I decided to go back to the fridge to see what else I could put in there. Digging deep in the fridge I found some sliced scallions from a week before. The capers and scallions went in at the same time. I added the chicken back into the pan along with the chicken so that I could let the flavors come together. I added more wine and waited for the alcohol to boil off. I remember watching an Epicurious podcast where they added cold butter liquid to make some kind of sauce so I turned off the heat and added a chunk of butter and sprinkled with kosher salt and ground pepper. I did not end up with sauce but I did have lunch. The chicken was tender. The dish had the sourness of the capers but was not overpowering.

What I learned:
  • That I need to learn the name of the butter sauce and how to make it. (maybe called tempering, anyone know?)
  • 6 in the morning is a great time to cook creatively but a bad time to try to remember to take pictures or remembering measurments.
Question for you:

 What is the best meal that you have made Ad Hoc? Has the dish become part of your meal rotation?



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