Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Running around like a chicken and other tales...

ok ladies and gents,

I am a low-carber who has had a glass of wine, so my typing is sure to suffer for it.

But regardless, I'd like to share something with you that I've been TRYING to find the time to cook for at least 1 week. Sheesh. Who thought finding time to make food would be so hard when I don't even have a family to trail after?

Apparently my time-management skills are lacking. (Either that, or I like watching two and a half men more than cooking... but I'm working to change that. :)


This week's recipe is a bit of a downer for me, because I didn't particularly cherish the results...and I have the leftovers in my fridge to prove it. HOWEVER, I am going to show you what I did, where I went wrong and what (I think) you can do to fix it and make this recipe fabulous!!

Here we go...


Chicken with Basil Cream Sauce


(Recipe courtesy of www.low-carb-diet-recipes.com)

Calories: 157, 2 carbs, 15g fat, 4g protein.

Ingredients:


  • 1/2 cup of chicken broth
  • 1/2 tsp garlic powder
  • 1/2 tsp italian seasoning
  • pinch of salt, pinch of pepper
  • 1/2 cup heavy cream
  • 4 tbsp prepared pesto sauce (look with the spaghetti sauce at the grocery store)
  • 2 tsp grated parmesan
  • 4 chicken breasts
  • I added spinach...which was not in the original recipe
Directions:

  1. Sauté the breasts in frying pan, then lower the heat and cook covered for another 10 minutes until no longer pink inside. (i.e. cook the chicken. lol).
  2. In a large skillet, bring chicken broth, garlic powder, italian seasoning, salt and pepper to a boil. Let it keep boiling until it reduces to about 1/2 volume.


  3. Stir in the cream, and again let it boil until it reduces to about 1/2 volume. (At this step, I added spinach so I got some extra veggies also..)

  4. Whisk in prepared pesto and parmesan. Serve sauce over chicken.


Here's what I did differently:

  1. I misread direction 2, and added the pesto right away. I really don't think this made any difference.
  2. I did not have italian seasoning (honestly I don't even know what it is..) so I used some mrs. dash garlic and herb. That sounds italian-y doesn't it?
  3. Because I have a hard time adding enough veggies to my day, I decided to throw spinach into this recipe as well. I think in cream sauces, spinach is divine. It gets all wilty and wonderful! How often can you say that wilted veggies are wonderful?


The result:

Ok. It was just....ok. VERY SALTY. I am not a huge fan...I think it LOOKS wonderful (despite my bad photography...) and it smells pretty wonderful. But, for a person who doesn't really dig salt...you're going to find this dish very salty. I attribute this to the canned chicken broth I used, as well as the mrs. dash, and the pinch of salt, obviously. I also think that the chicken I used was not of the highest quality (I got it in the freezer section of walmart. It was a week for penny-pinching). and possibly there was sodium added to it as well.


What I would do differently:

I definitely think that this recipe can be fixed. What I would do is substitute your favourite white wine for the chicken stock, FORGET adding the salt all together, and use a good quality, fresh chicken breast.


I would also not break my favourite pot lid by dropping it ontop of a can opener...


Sigh :)

Anyways..I'd love to know if someone else has better luck with this recipe than I have had...let me know!!

Enjoy...;)

1 comment:

  1. Oh, that's too bad! I hate when recipes don't turn out as good as you hoped.

    The picture looks awesome though!

    ReplyDelete