Week 44 - Apples

The Week 44 theme, apples, came at just the right time in the fall season, but I wasn't sure what to make. I didn't really want to make dessert, but I'm also not a huge sweet-savory dinner person, plus uncooked apples aren't great for little kids (choking hazard), so what to do? I've been doing a lot of cooking events on Yelp, so the answer came to me instead. I signed up for a cooking class where they made a creamy chicken and mushroom dish using hard cider, so adapting that became our apples challenge!

I'm not going to put up a fully-written recipe, since it's not mine to share and I don't know a source to link to for the original recipe, but I'll briefly mention the ingredients and what was made. The ingredients I used (which were heavily adapted from the original, since not only did I not have hard cider, but I didn't have any apple cider, so I used apple juice) were:

- 2 boneless skinless chicken breasts ($7.18)

- salt and pepper for the chicken ($0.03)

- olive oil for the pan ($0.10)

- butter ($0.27)

- cremini mushrooms ($5.58)

- 1 red onion ($0.60)

- 2 large spoonfuls of minced garlic ($0.15)

- 8 oz package of apple juice ($0.30)

- chopped parsley for garnish ($0.40)

- heavy cream: substituted milk and butter ($0.54)

- 1 box chickpea rotini ($2.12)

Note that the cost for the milk/butter heavy cream substitute is much higher than it should have been, but that's because we had to do it the equivalent of 3 times. More on that later. The approximate cost of dinner was $17.27, which feels a little high for this dish, especially with apple juice instead of hard cider, but the cremini mushrooms and chicken from Amazon Fresh cost more than they would have if we had been able to get them from Costco or Trader Joe's.

To make the dish, you basically cook the chicken, browning it in the pan on both sides, then remove it, cook the mushrooms in butter, remove them to the same plate as the chicken, then add the onion and garlic to the pan with more butter, cook them down, add apple juice (hard cider, really, but apple juice for us) to reduce to start the sauce, then add the heavy cream, make the cream sauce, add the chicken and mushrooms back in, season with some freshly ground black pepper if needed, spoon over some cooked pasta, and then top with parsley to garnish.

Sounds straightforward, but we didn't buy heavy cream (not a fan of cooking with it in an attempt to keep a healthier kitchen), so I was going to substitute milk and butter. I tried mixing milk with melted butter like a recipe I found said to do, but it came out hard and clumpy with a consistency more like a grated radish. Into the trash it went. Then I remembered that I had previously added milk straight into some dishes without issue, so I did that, but then it curdled and we were left with clumpy bits of milk separated out from the liquid. Apparently that's edible, but it looked really unappetizing. I got a bit frustrated, thinking I had ruined our entire dinner, so A took over, heating up some milk in a separate pan on the stove and then adding it in to the sauce, fixing our sauce enough that you would never even know a mishap occurred. Grateful he was able to step in to fix my mini-disaster.

After the entire milk debacle and all of our substitutions, how was it? It was fine, but it won't make our favorite home cooking list anytime soon. I'm sure it wasn't nearly as good as it would have been using hard cider or shallots, some of the original ingredients, or actual heavy cream for a cream sauce. You could definitely taste that sweet apple juice that we added, which didn't really get balanced out by anything else, but at least the apples challenge dish tasted like apples!