Sherry Chicken

A quick and easy meal can be hard to come up with on the spot.  Luckily, with more time spent in the kitchen it can become easier.  This recipe is something easy to do with only a few hands on moments.  It also has a lot of techniques you can use with other foods.  Rage on.
Ingredients

1. Chicken Breast, boneless and skinless (I used 3 but you can adjust this for however many you need to feed)
2. 1 C Cooking Sherry (you can use any red wine in place of sherry and it doesn’t have to be cooking sherry either)
3. 1 C Shredded Mozzarella Cheese
4. Cavender’s All Purpose Greek Seasoning
5. 2 T Butter
6. 1/2 lb. Baby Carrots
7. 1/3 package of Spaghetti Noodles
8. Olive Oil
9. Salt and Pepper

Quick Directions

1. Season the chicken breasts with the Greek seasoning and salt and pepper.  Make sure all sides are well covered.
2. In a stainless steel frying pan, pour in olive oil to coat the pan and turn on to medium high heat.
3. Sear both sides of chicken, to a nice golden brown.
4. Place pan in an oven heated to 350.  Cook for 10-15 mins or until chicken reaches an internal temperature of 165.
5. Cover chicken with mozzarella and place back in the oven until it is melted.
6. Remove chicken from pan, place back on medium high heat and add sherry to deglaze pan.
7. Let simmer till it is reduced by half, then add 1 T of butter and continue to cook until sauce thickens up.
8. While chicken is in oven, bring two pots filled with water to a boil.  Add noodles in one, and carrots in the other.  Cook noodles till al dente and carrots until they are fork tender.  Drain water and finish them with 1/2 T of butter each.  The butter is optional.
9. Plate the food and enjoy!

Detailed Directions

First step in any great dish is having all of the ingredients ready before you begin.  Now we are ready to begin!  Start by rubbing Cavender’s Greek Seasoning and salt and pepper on both sides of the chicken.  Cover it generously, don’t be shy.

Great!  Now add it to that pan that’s already heated up to medium high with olive oil coating it.  You don’t need a lot, just enough to cover the pan nicely.  And make sure your using a stainless steel pan, as those non-stick ones won’t work for this technique.

Sear the chicken.  We aren’t looking to cook the chicken through in this step, just looking for nice color.  This really helps with the final product and each side should only take a couple of minutes.  Once the  color has been achieved, place it in the oven.I use stainless frying pans that can be placed in the oven, if yours can’t handle the oven, you can place the chicken onto a baking pan instead.  This won’t really hurt anything, but will change the sauce that is created in the final steps.
Cook the chicken to an internal temperature of 165.  The chicken will cook for about 10-15 minutes.  You want to get as close to that number as possible, but going over a few degrees like I did won’t ruin the chicken at all.  Make sure to use a thermometer if your not comfortable with cooking raw chicken.  It is an important tool in the kitchen!

Alright, so our chicken is done.  Cover it with  the shredded Mozzarella and put it back in the oven for a few more minutes.  Don’t worry about some of the cheese falling onto the pan, it will be a great addition to our sauce.

Melted and a bit of browning is what we are looking for here.  And once its achieved, remove the pan from the oven and take those tasty chickens out of the pan.  Prepare for the fun!

And now the best part of the dish begins.  If your pan looks like mine, don’t be scared about all of the drippings and cheese stuck to the pan.  This process is called deglaze and there are a lot of different ways to approach it but they all follow some simple steps.  For tonight's recipe we aren’t going to get as fancy and cause any rage as some would ask you too.

Add that cup of sherry or your red wine of choice and let it simmer away on medium or medium high heat.  Use a spoon and scrape the bottom while this is going on.  The drippings should be unsticking themselves but a little help won’t be a hindrance and will get the sauce mixed together better.  Once about half of the liquid is gone, add in your 1 T of butter, I prefer to use cold butter here.

Once you have the consistency we are looking for(which is a nice thickness that will stick to the back of your spoon but still will drip slowly off) it’s ready!  Oh, and by now you might be asking why I haven’t talked about the carrots and the pasta.  Don’t worry, I’ll go over that at the end.  Plate the dish, eat, enjoy, rage!!!

Information worth knowing(and details about those carrots and pasta)

• The pasta was cooked to al dente(which is defined as cooked so as to not be too soft, firm to the bite) I then drained the water and put 1/2 T of butter in, let it melt and cover the pasta.  You can leave the butter out if you like, or you could take it up a notch with some salt and pepper, but remember the pepper will be noticeable and change the look.
• The carrots were cooked till fork tender.  In other words, until you could puncture them easily with a fork.  I also finished them with 1/2 T of butter.  But again, just like the pasta you can leave this out or step it up with some salt and pepper.
• Almost any vegetable can be cooked like the carrots.  Just simply get a pot of water boiling, add the vegetable and let it go till the vegetable is tender.  I also prefer to add a small amount of salt to  any water I’m going to boil for pasta or vegetables.  This is most key for pasta because when it is cooking is the only time you can actually get some seasoning such as salt into the pasta.
• The deglazing is another thing you can  use for multiple dishes.  Generally you want to use white wines with chicken and fish, and red wines with beef and other dark meats.  However, today I broke the rules.  You can do whatever the heck you want in the kitchen as long as you like the final product.  And those times when you tried something that failed?  Just blame it on some bad advice or recipe that you actually didn’t ever follow!  The deglaze can be accomplished many ways as I mentioned earlier.  One main thing usually used in the deglazing is to add some chicken or beef stock.  I simply didn’t have chicken stock on hand and decided it was not needed.  The sauce worked fine without it.  One final note about deglazing...you must use a stainless steel pan.  You want the drippings to stick to the pan.  It simply won't work with a non-stick pan.  Trying it would be a large amount of rage.