Celebrate Spring With an Upscale Smothered-Chicken Dinner.

[elleng]

'Chefs are not generally the best source for recipes. They don’t use them the way we do at home. Often they don’t use recipes at all. Many of them cook instinctively, the way artists work. They do not measure ingredients before cooking. They navigate by taste and smell. They respond to the sound of fat sizzling against a piece of fish, or the sight of a shallot turning golden in the heat. When they’re happy with the food, they jot down a few notes, then cook the dish again and again until it can be made by rote. The people who work for them watch and listen and smell and taste until they can do the same — professional cooking is about apprenticeship and technique. Most line cooks don’t receive formal recipes from which to cook. They get battlefield instruction for soldiers new to the front, sauce-stained cards scribbled with notes: sweat in rondeau, drop; roast, save fond; arroser fish; crash jus with stock. Civilians don’t cook that way.

So when I got it into my head to cook a version of the pan-roasted chicken with morels and a Madeira-laced cream sauce that the chef Angie Mar has on her spring menu at the Beatrice Inn in Manhattan — it’s an upscale smothered-chicken dinner, basically — I didn’t ask for the recipe. I asked if I could watch her cook.

Mar was game. “I never really write recipes anyway,” she said. “It’s hard.”'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/magazine/spring-smothered-chicken-dinner.html?

Pan-Roasted Chicken in Cream Sauce

'This recipe is an adaptation of a dish the chef Angie Mar serves at the Beatrice Inn in Manhattan, the chicken crisped in a pan, then napped in a Madeira-laced cream sauce dotted with morels. Which sounds fancy and hard to make but isn't, really. Brown the chicken, and set it aside to rest. Cook the morels in the remaining fat — you could swap them out for another wild mushroom or even button mushrooms in a pinch — and then flash them with Cognac, which you'll find will come in handy again and again once you start cooking with it. (Try it on steak au poivre!) Then build up a sauce with cream and a little butter and crème fraîche for gloss, get the chicken into it and add some fresh savory and tarragon at the end — or just one of those, or neither. Make the dish as you prefer or as you can. It's luxurious, every time.'

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1019296-pan-roasted-chicken-in-cream-sauce

[Cracklin Charlie]

1. It is hard to write a recipe.

My brother always wants a recipe.

Me to him: write this down...

[longship]

2. Step one: smother one medium chicken.

[irisblue]

3. Okay, you made me snort

[longship]

4. Sorry. I just could not resist it.

I hope your keyboard and display are okay.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

5. Oh, I know.

I'm an adequate cook, and while I find recipes to be very helpful, I don't often measure anything exactly. So if you ask me to share a recipe with you, I can only hope you're an experienced enough cook that I can give you ingredients and general directions.

Oh, and Rachael Ray was a huge influence on me some years back. I'd started watching "30 Minute Meals" and was fascinated. So I tried fixing one of her recipes, Chicken Tajine, and had assumed that despite the show's name, there were of course cuts and editing. To my astonishment, about 25 minutes into cooking that dish, it was ready. I was in a bit of shock when I called my husband and sons to the dinner table, as I hadn't thought we'd be eating for another half hour or so.

What I most learned from her was technique. There are wonderful ways to shortcut some of the cooking process, and I instinctively do those things these days.

[dixiegrrrrl]

6. I used to think my grandmother invented smothered chicken.

With or without the cognac. One of easiest, fastest ways to do bone-in chicken thighs, and the sauce makes it's own gravy,
so I do mashed potatoes with it.
endless variations on flavor, mushrooms are always good.
Excellent over brown rice, too.

[elleng]

7. I've gotta try it some day!