Roast Chicken with Wild Mushroom Sauce

Last week was a bit of a wild one.  By Friday night I was so ready for a totally different kind of wild.  Realizing that spending the night at home with a bunch of cats wasn’t likely to get me the kind of wild I might have secretly fancied, deciding on a dinner recipe with “wild” in the title seemed like a great start; and given my penchant for anything that includes the letters m-u-s-h-r-o-o-m, I knew things were at least looking up, and Roast Chicken with Wild Mushroom Sauce made my Friday night seem a whole lot more exciting.

I have no recollection of why mushrooms have always been so delicious to me.  I do sometimes reminisce about the time I was on holiday in Weymouth with my parents and brother.  That holiday involved one particularly fine mushroom.  We were walking across a cow field, or up a cow hill, or something similar to one of those – I know the walk entailed lots of cow-dodging – and one of us found an enormous mushroom, growing merrily in among the cow pats and clumps of grass.  Mushrooms do like to grow in cow pats you know, so we really shouldn’t have been surprised.  Upon discovering this rather large, gilled fungi we determined that it would make an exceedingly delicious accompaniment to our Sunday fry-up the next morning.  We carefully carried our treasure back to the holiday home we were renting.  At the appointed hour early the next day, we excitedly sautéed the unwieldy white-cap and ceremoniously quartered it, and dished it up alongside bacon and eggs, and knowing my mother, grilled tomatoes.  I am a little sketchy on the tomato detail.  That mushroom tasted better just because we had plucked it out of the field ourselves.  Wild.

I also like to reminisce about my unscheduled mushroom adventure up in the Great White North.  A few years back – almost 4 to be exact – I was tripping around Canada, somewhere near Jasper.  One day I was walking through a forest to reach a viewpoint, and ended up taking gobs of pictures of the most fantastical mushrooms I’ve ever seen.  I didn’t harvest or eat any, but even so – mushroom heaven right there by the ice fields.  Wild.

Becky the Greek & Justin the Geek came over while I was rustling up our wild Friday Night Dinner of Roast Chicken with Wild Mushroom Sauce.  Becky mowed the dandelion field lawn while Justin geeked out all over my little blogette.  He likes to install gadgets.  I have absolutely no clue what any of them do, and when I get the urge to go tinker in his widgety gadgets I usually take one peek of the plug-ins page before running screaming from the building in search of chocolate.  I blame him entirely for the printable recipe card thingys that you all have at your disposal now.  Justin was highly motivated to tinker because he had heard a rumor that dinner would include chicken breasts – WITH THE SKIN ON.  In Justin’s world that ranks almost as highly as cooking in bacon grease.  Becky the Greek has denied Justin chicken skin for the last 8 years.  Except when eating at Ma’ono, of course.  Wild.

How To Win Friends And Influence People 101: give them permission to cook in bacon grease and eat chicken skin.  And make them Roast Chicken with Wild Mushroom Sauce.

This Roast Chicken with Wild Mushroom Sauce dish is spectacular.  The chicken is moist, juicy and bursting with flavor, and the wild mushroom sauce is – honestly I can think of no better word – wild.  Clearly Justin the Geek is heavily biased, but despite that, we were all agreed: do this recipe without the chicken skin and it just will not be the same.  Even Becky the Greek concurred that chicken skin is good.  It wouldn’t have looked as tasty, or tasted as divine without that crispy, golden wrapping.  I highly recommend getting yourself some {chicken} skin.  Especially if, like me, it’s the only kind of skin you’ll be getting the next time you’re feeling a little wild.

The most difficult thing about this recipe was finding chicken breasts with skin on.  I looked high, I looked low.  I eventually tracked some down, but had to buy chicken breast with rib meat, so some butchery was required on my part once I got them back to the kitchen.  There were several upsides to this:

1. Cheap, cheap, cheap.
2. HUGE chicken breasts.
3. Lots of scraps and cut-offs to cook up and use as a filling for a {LOW CARB} and wildly delicious chicken pie with something you never thought to put in one.

There is always an upside – you just have to look for it.

You may have yourself a friendly butcher at your meat counter who will do the butchering for you; or you may have a butcher willing to sell you some breasts before he skins them.  Whatever route you to take get chicken breasts with skin on, I contend it is well worth the extra effort required.

I rounded the Roast Chicken with Wild Mushroom Sauce out with Celery and Cucumber Salad with Herbs and Caramelized Brussel Sprouts with Lemon to make a totally balanced meal.  Not one of us missed having a starch.  And no one felt the need for dessert either.  We’re lovin’ this whole Friday Night Dinner thing.  Particularly when it means we can chow down on chicken skin without a care in the world, or worry that it’s going to make us fat.  It won’t.  You really can have it all.

Roast Chicken with Wild Mushroom Sauce. Mmmmmmmmmmmm!

Roast Chicken with Wild Mushroom Sauce

Author: Carrie Brown | Prep time: 15 mins | Cook time: 30 mins | Total time: 45 mins | Serves: 4

What You Need

• 4 boneless, skin-on chicken breast halves
• Coarse sea salt and freshly ground pepper
• 2 TBSP coconut oil
• 1 small onion, finely chopped
• 1 lb / 450g assorted wild mushrooms (I used shiitake and cremini), stemmed and quartered
• 3 TBSP red wine vinegar
• 1 tsp. konjac flour / glucomannan powder
• 1 ½ cups / ¾ pint chicken stock
• 2 TBSP fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped, plus sprigs to garnish
• 1 TBSP heavy (double) cream

What You Do

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
2. Season chicken with sea salt and ground black pepper.
3. Heat coconut oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat and add the chicken, skin side down; cook until golden brown, 4 to 5 minutes.
4. Flip the chicken breast over and place in a deep baking pan or dish.
5. Roast in the oven until the juices run clear when you insert the point of a sharp knife into the thickest breast – about 15 minutes.
6. Remove baking dish from the oven and cover with foil.
7. Reheat the skillet with the coconut oil and chicken juices in, and add the onion – cook for 1 minute until onions just start to brown.
8. Add the quartered mushrooms to the skillet.
9. Cover the skillet (use a baking tray if your skillet doesn’t have a lid) and cook, stirring occasionally, for 3 minutes.
10. Stir in the stock and the chopped parsley.
11. Rapidly whisk the konjac flour in a small dish with the red wine vinegar to make a smooth slurry.
12. Pour the slurry into the mushrooms and stock, stirring constantly until completely incorporated.
13. Simmer the sauce over low heat, stirring, until thickened – about 5 minutes.
14. Stir in the spoon of cream and season with salt and pepper.
15. Pour the mushroom sauce into a deep serving dish. Place the chicken breasts skin side up on top of the mushrooms.
16. Garnish with parsley sprigs.

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Great with: Celery and Cucumber Salad with Herbs and Caramelized Brussel Sprouts with Lemon.

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