Recipe: Chicken with Goddess Dressing

I have been meaning to post a few recipes every now and then so I figured I should start with my all time favorite easy weeknight recipe. My definition of easy is sometimes a bit different than other people’s because I actually find enjoyment being in my kitchen, but this is definitely a very approachable recipe for anyone.

I’ll start off with the basic recipe which only requires 3 ingredients (plus salt, pepper, and olive oil) and then give a few the variations I have found that goes well with it.

Basic Recipe:

Ingredients:
2 chicken breasts
1 12-oz container of button mushrooms
One half-bottle of Goddess Dressing from Trader Joe’s.

Steps:
1) Cut the mushroom into quarters. I de-stem mine, but its a personal choice.
2) Saute in olive oil with some salt and pepper on medium until all the moisture has been given off. Stir occasionally so it doesn’t burn.
3) While that is cooking, fillet the chicken breast into two thin pieces. You could skip this, but I just find it easier to cook them through this way. Alternatively, you could pound it thin, but I haven’t tried this yet. It takes a bit of practice to fillet a chicken breast if you haven’t done it before, but it’s worth learning how to do because I have found it to be useful for other recipes as well.
4) Add a bit of salt & pepper to both sides of the fillets and cook on medium to medium high heat until it is just cooked through and hopefully browned on both sides. You could lightly flour the chicken before you pan fry it to help with the browning process, but its pretty optional.
5) By this time the mushrooms should be done, so toss in about a half bottle of the Goddess Dressing and turn the heat to your lowest setting.
6) While the mushrooms and sauce are hanging out, cut the chicken into rough strips or bite sized pieces. I try to cut against the grain when I do this to make it less noticeable if I overcooked the chicken.
7) Toss the chicken with the mushrooms and sauce for a bit (under a minute) to let them heat up together, then kill the heat and serve.

Pretty simple right?
I like to keep a few bottle of this on any given night as a fallback meal.

Variations:

The beauty of this is that since its so simple and already tastes so good its easy to make variations to it.

For example, if you wanted to go the umani route, you could add a bit of truffle oil, grated parmesan, and some toasted pine nuts right before serving. I imagine asparagus might also work itself into that nicely, but I haven’t tried it yet.

Another variation I just tried recently was adding some mustard (I used whole grain dijon-style because that’s what I had) and a bit of “browning” to the mushrooms right before adding the Goddess Sauce. Browning is a sauce used in Caribbean cooking and pretty much tastes like burnt sugar. Be gentle with it, otherwise you’ll turn your entree into dessert. If you can’t find it I am sure you could substitute a bit of brown sugar earlier in the cooking process and get the same burnt sugar flavor on your own. Once again, subtlety is extremely important here…

If you have a bit of extra wine lying around and wanted to use that you could deglaze the pan you browned the chicken in with the wine, reduce it, and add it to the mushrooms. A bit of tomato paste and/or some chicken broth seems like a good idea as well, but I haven’t tried it yet.

Also, if you get an unexpected dinner guests you can stretch the meal a bit by adding a bit more sauce and serving it on top of a starch of some sort. I used to use basmati rice and it worked pretty well. I would imagine pasta would also work pretty well. Someone once suggested mashed potatoes, which I will give a shot sometime soon.