Two Weeknight Winners: Thursday



Good cooking (fun cooking) is like anything else – to do it you need a bit of gusto, some momentum, and it helps to get into a rhythm.  So you pick up the cookbook and pin back the ear of the next page of the cookbook and try that one the next night – head off to the store for the fresh ingredients and carve out the space late in the day to put it all together, eat, then repeat.  A night after Summer Squash and Apple Pork Loin, it was time to try Chicken and Creamy Mushrooms with Snap Peas, why not?

This was the first recipe I've ever made that included snap peas; for some reason this veggie has always reminded me too much of cheap filler at Chinese restaurants and I only think of them as too

crisp and all shell.  It turned out the snap peas were the treasure ingredient, reducing down in a cream and mushroom sauce very well and very quickly, leaving them soft on the outside yet the peas nestled within maintaining their crisp texture.  The recipe starts with chicken pieces (I use almost primarily chicken thighs anymore) dredged in flour, fried to brown, then roasted until tender and done, and finishes with a simple but wonderful sauce consisting of chicken broth, a few pinches of diced scallions, mushrooms and cream.  All done within 25 minutes, this is as close as you can get to quick gourmet, the kind of plate that kids might look at and wonder about temporarily until they take a little nibble at those sweet soft peas coated in cream.