Basic Flavors for Quick Dinners

There are a few items nearly always present in my pantry or refrigerator that really help to get a quick dinner on the table, such as onions, mushrooms, chicken broth, dry sherry or white wine, and a fresh herb of some sort. Tonight I also had some heavy cream and leftover polenta (mamaliga in my husband's native language, a star of Romanian dinners), so this one-pot skillet dish is what showed up on the table.

May I digress a moment? After I discovered the rounds of polenta they sell in the grocery store, and then affirmed how well it goes with nearly anything when I tasted my mother-in-law's mamaliga, I decide to learn how to make it and use it quite a bit in place of pasta or rice.

Back to the dinner recipe:

Chicken with Mushroom Sherry Cream Sauce
1 Tbsp butter or olive oil
Half an onion, chopped
10 baby portobello or crimini mushrooms, chopped
1 cube frozen garlic from Trader Joe's or 1 clove of garlic, minced
precooked chicken (I used the frozen grilled strips from Costco), about 2 chicken breasts
1 Tbsp dry sherry
1 cup chicken broth
1 Tbsp Dijon mustard
3 sprigs fresh thyme (strip the sprigs as you add them to the skillet)
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/2 cup heavy cream

Melt butter in a skillet on medium heat. Add the onion and mushroom pieces and saute for about 10 minutes. Add the garlic and chicken and continue to saute for about 2 minutes. Splash in the dry sherry and let the mixture boil for a minute, then add the chicken broth. Turn the heat down to low and add the remaining ingredients. Simmer for about 5 minutes.

Serve over polenta and top with your favorite cheese (Beecher's Flagship, Parmesan, Feta, or whatever suits your fancy). I served this with green beans tonight. The above recipe is a guess at how much of each ingredient I used and makes about 3-4 servings.

The Best Cooking App

If you have an iPhone, what's your favorite cooking app? The one I've discovered that ties them all together is Pepperplate, which is available on iPhone, iPad, and on your PC or MAC. (I'm not sure about other smartphones, like Android.)

Pepperplate

Here is a snapshot of my Pepperplate on a PC. See the famous pancakes from an earlier post?

Recipes from many different websites can be imported just by copying and pasting the URL, and you can even manually add recipes. I recently went through some of the printouts and handwritten recipes I had from the past and imported them all into Pepperplate. Epicurious, Real Simple, Cooking Light via myrecipes.com, Simply Recipes, and others all allow direct import. They add more supported websites frequently. Even though I have the All Recipes and Epicurious apps on my phone, I usually go online and copy recipes into Pepperplate if I want them for future use.

Sometimes I actually look through Pepperplate in advance and add recipes to the planner for the week. The shopping list is also great, too, if you're planning ahead. Once you create a login you can use it on any device, and anything you've added on one device automatially syncs to the other next time you open the app.

So now I take my husband's iPad into the kitchen, stand it up with the nifty little cover he has for it, click on Pepperplate and cook away!

P.S. There is a lot of discussion out there right now about whether cookbooks are obsolete. Even with apps like Pepperplate and Google searches to help me use ingredients in my refrigerator, I still occasionally meander downstairs and look through my cookbooks for inspiration. Also, I'm right there anticipating Pioneer Woman's new cookbook with everyone else!