Chicken with White Cream Sauce

Tonight I made Chicken with White Cream Sauce from the Julia Child cookbook because we were having our friend Anthony over for dinner. I've made it once before and I think it came out better last time. This time we had a few things that didn't work out quite like I wanted.

1) I didn't realize that the bottle white wine I had in the fridge didn't have very much in it, so I ended up using less wine and more vermouth.

2) I didn't check how much Arborio rice we had left and had to send Chris and our friend Anthony to the store to get more when I had already put the chicken in the oven and started the onions for the risotto. The chicken was out of the oven for more than 20 minutes before we ate.

3) My camera battery died in the middle of me cooking so there are not a lot of 'in progress' pictures. This is a picture of the chicken breasts once I cleaned them, rubbed them with lemon juice and salt and peppered them.

This is the cream sauce bubbling after I added the heavy cream

The final product on a bed of risotto (also from the Julia Child cookbook).

The chicken came out a little drier this time (probably from being kept in the pan for too long while they ran to the store) but it was still really yummy. The risotto was perfect, in spite of me having to throw out the first batch of onions and start over once the new container of rice arrived. All served with a side of steamed broccoli.

For dessert I made Chocolate Guinness Cake with Bailey's Buttercream and Chocolate Ganache. Yuuuummmy. It was so good. Check out my baking blog for details on that.

Edit on 8.28.08 to answer Danny's questions:

For the chicken I used white wine (chardonnay) and vermouth because that is what I had in the kitchen. Also, I used chicken stock since I was making chicken (didn't make sense to me to use beef stock). I'm trying to remember but I'm pretty sure I read the recipe wrong. I thought it said a 1/4 c of vermouth and a 1/4 c of white wine, but looking at it now it seems to only say 1/4 of vermouth. Oh well, it was still yummy.

Next time I make this I am going to follow the variation recipe on page 269 for Chicken Breasts with Mushrooms and Cream, because that just sounds delicious.

For the risotto, I again used chicken stock because I was serving it with chicken. I don't know that I would change that if I were cooking beef only because beef stock can have an overbearing flavor and this risotto has such a delicate flavor.