Chicken A La King - ☺♥

This dish is a relatively common one but one worthy of making. I think of it as warm comfort food, ideal to serve during cold weather months, but tasty at any time of year. It qualifies as a one dish meal, though you might choose to serve small tossed salads (with non-creamy dressings) on the side. Chilled Pinot Grigio wine is a fine beverage to serve for this meal.

I cherry picked three Internet recipes for ingredients and procedural steps and decided what and how much to use/do for this recipe. After making this dish I found it to be bland so I added garlic to the recipe to amp up the taste. You may like the dish without any additional seasonings or other flavoring ingredients, or you might try the additions listed next.

You might decide to use garlic or any fresh vegetable like a cleaned and sliced jalapeno pepper, or fresh or dried herbs, like thyme or basil, or any dry or liquid seasoning, like curry powder or Thai chili pepper sauce, that appeals to you that will intensify the flavor, but don't use anything sweet.

Remember to use fairly small quantities of any added seasoning ingredients until you know by experience the preferred amounts. You can experiment easily by putting very tiny amounts of your chosen seasoning(s) or flavor additives into very small portions of the cooked dish and sampling the effect before committing the whole dish to a given seasoning or other additive.

I tried both toast points and white rice as a base for making individual servings of the Chicken A La King and I prefer the rice. You do whatever appeals to you.

Ingredients: (makes six servings)

1/2 cup of heavy cream

1 tsp. of salt

1/2 tsp. of pepper

2 lb. of boneless skinless chicken breasts, poached, rinsed/wiped of albumin, and diced into 1/2" cubes

3 tbsp. of olive oil

1 cup of milk

1/4 cup of butter

2 tbsp. of Better than Bullion® Chicken flavor

1 small onion finely chopped

4 ounces of drained sliced canned mushrooms

1 carrot peeled and finely chopped

1 celery rib finely chopped

2 sprigs of fresh rosemary

1/4 cup of all-purpose flour

2 large cloves of fresh garlic, minced

1/2 cup of Pinot Grigio wine

1 1/2 cups of chicken broth

1 cleaned and diced red bell pepper

1 cleaned and diced green bell pepper

6 sprigs of fresh parsley

Toast points or white rice, for serving

Directions:

Prewarm the individual serving dishes you plan to use for your guests in a 180 degrees F warming oven.

Cook the chicken breasts (poach them in boiling water for about 20 or a few additional minutes to make certain they are cooked through).

Rinse and wipe the poached chicken breasts in cold water to remove any albumin. Then dice the chicken breasts and set the pieces aside.

Make the toast points or white rice you intend to use at serving time and set those items aside, covered if you made rice.

Clean and dice or chop the various vegetables.

Heat the oil and the butter in a 2 gallon heavy bottom stainless steel pot until the butter stops foaming.

Add the salt, pepper, mushrooms, onion, carrot, celery, garlic, rosemary sprigs and diced bell peppers, then stir well to coat the vegetables with the oil/butter mixture, and cook on medium heat with occasional stirring until the vegetables are softened, about 5 minutes.

Stir in the flour and cook for 1 minute.

Add the wine, the Better than Bullion®, the milk, the chicken broth and the cream and cook on medium heat to a low boil, with stirring, until somewhat thickened, about 5 minutes.

Stir in the diced chicken breasts. Reduce the heat to maintain a simmer and cook for five minutes with gentle stirring.

Remove and discard the rosemary sprigs.

Remove the Chicken A La King from the heat, then season it to taste with additional salt and/or pepper or other seasoning.

Serve it on the toast points or on the white rice in the individual serving dishes you warmed earlier.

Garnish each serving with a parsley sprig.

Enjoy!