This week’s splurge was Chicken Tetrazzini from the Cotton Country Collection (brought to us by the ladies of the Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana — for those of you in the know: these are the women who also gave us Chicken Spectacular, so you know that they’re not messing around).
The recipe itself was quite good. The execution of the recipe left a fair amount to be desired. For starters: despite having had a day long break from our little man (courtesy of Grammie and Pop), Matt and I were both completely exhausted when we began the dinner preparations. It’s never a good sign when I find myself standing over the cookbook reading and re-reading and not absorbing any information.
The major snafu involved the fact that all the vegetables (celery, mushrooms, bell pepper, and some green onions and parsley thrown in for good measure) were supposed to be minced. I began preparing the veggies by stating that I didn’t pretend to know how to mince a mushroom, so I was just going to finely chop everything and be done with it. At some point Matt says something to the effect of “isn’t that what the Cuisinart is for?” My response was, yes. Yes it is. Unfortunately by the time Matt mentioned the use of a helpful appliance I had already spent at least 20 minutes finely chopping things that were supposed to be minced. No worries, I thought. Just throw everything into the processor and mince it and move on. This is when I realized (far too late) that too many ingredients at one time in the Cuisinart means that you have to turn the thing on for a really long time which means that you end up with a puree instead of minced anything. So we ended up with a green paste that we were supposed to cook until “tender.” As I was beginning to pour the paste into a pan containing butter and garlic (pre-minced, thank goodness) I was thinking to myself “I really shouldn’t be doing anything in a skillet without my apron” and at that exact moment the vegetable paste hit the pan and sent butter splattering all over one of the few tops that I own that Liam hasn’t smeared with food or dirt (or both).
We finally got everything into the skillet and cooked as well as it could be cooked and into the casserole dish. Next up was a (seemingly) simple task: toast some bread to have with our meal. Matt put two pieces into the toaster oven only to find that what I suspected was happening earlier in the week was still happening (the toaster oven doesn’t necessarily toast when you turn it on — sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don’t) and it took three attempts and three times the amount of time to toast two pieces of bread.
In the end, the tetrazzini was fantastic (it’s hard to go wrong with both butter and heavy cream) and the bread was pretty tasty (although not entirely toasty), too. By the time we finished our meals and our wine all was again right with the world.
