Cooking with Julia...

This week has been all about Julia Child in the food world.  We have enjoyed a few simple recipes from her Mastering the Art of French Cooking and thought I would share a few photos. 

 One of those valuable things I learned in culinary school was to get everything ready before you start.  

This is called Mise en Place (everything in it's place)

 This particular recipe was a very simple chicken breast in a cream sauce.

 The chicken breasts were VERY tender!  I do have to admit I had to go longer than the recipe called for in the oven by quite a bit.  I went about 30 minutes when it was suppose to go about a third of that.  I blame my oven for this but I also think that chicken breasts were smaller when she made them, though.  We are dealing with oversized food these days so I suggest you make adjustments based on such factors when using these older cookbooks.

For the sauce I substituted chicken stock for the beef stock and a simple white wine for the port.  I just used what I had on hand...

 I just poured the sauce down over the top of the chicken to serve and reserved extra sauce to spoon onto our rice.  I could have eaten just a bowl of rice with that sauce on it.  As a matter of fact... I reserved a bit of sauce and rice to have for lunch the next day.  LOL  OH MY GOODNESS!!!

Here is a PDF of the recipe which was copied from the original book.

Next time I make this I will make the variation with mushrooms added... 

which is the next recipe after this one in the book.

Amazing Chicken Recipe...

In May I received a box with some sun dried tomato products, a folder of history of the company known as Mooney Farms and a few of their award winner's recipes.  On Friday night I made the following recipe...

 You can find a printable copy of this recipe at their website.

 Here is the mixture that goes on top of the chicken before baking.

 The chicken is ready to go into the oven and I bring the internal temperature to 160 and then let it rest a few minutes once it come out.  The internal temp will rise to about 165 during resting and it is perfectly moist and delicious.

And here is the finished chicken with rice and broccoli.  It was FABULOUS... I totally know why it won the grand prize award for 2011.

There is still time to enter the 2012 contest... by July 1, 2012.  

Check out the website for details.

The Pistachio...

Dan and I recently made a trip up to Alamogordo, New Mexico to a little B&B for our 20th wedding anniversary. The place is called the Tavares Inn and it was lovely. While we were on our way home we stopped by a few pistachio places. There are several rather large pistachio orchards there.

* The Heart of the Desert
* McGinn's Pistachio Tree Ranch

We stopped for a picture and 10 pounds of raw pistachios... Above is me with the world's largest Pistachio.

I am on a mission to make lots of recipes using this delicious and nutritious little treat. I started my mission with a little pistachio crusted chicken breast... FABULICIOUS!!!!!

Want more recipes? Heart of the Desert has a good selection on their website here.

There will be more recipes coming from me, too! :)

Oh and we also picked up some pistachio brittle and a spicy mix called The Works at the McGinn's Tree Ranch