Not sure if a moment of inspiration or desperation but I thought of a recipe to serve over rice and I look to y’all for possible pitfalls or ways to improve it. It is inspired by the sauce for steak diane.
Cube the chicken and brown. Set aside
In the same pan, cook down some shitake mushrooms. Set aside.
Throw in a minced shallot for 30 seconds. Just enough to start releasing the smell but still no color.
Deglaze with chicken stock and add Campbell’s Golden Mushroom soup. Make sure the proportions to broth are such so the sauce is loose but not thin.
Add Worchester sauce, dried thyme and cook for a couple minutes.
Add back chicken and mushrooms and simmer for 10 minutes.
Add chopped fresh parsley and serve over rice.
Side of green beans for a veg.
If you’re cooking good mushrooms I wouldn’t use canned mushroom soup. Use only enough stock to deglaze, add all the ingredients to the pan and coat everything with 1 or 2 Tbsps flour. Stir and cook in the pan for a few minutes then stir in remainder of stock until you have the right consistency, bring to a boil quickly then reduce heat and simmer partially covered for 10-15 minutes.
Coincidentally, I made something very similar for dinner last night. Looking forward to the leftovers for lunch today.
I browned some chicken breast pieces in a little butter with garlic cloves and fresh thyme, then removed the chicken and sauteed some diced onion and mushroom. Deglazed with a bit of white wine, then added bone broth, thickened with flour, and added the chicken back to finish. I served it with baked potato and asparagus (which I surprisingly found on sale at the grocery store, strange this time of year).
Your recipe sounds great. Not 100% sure of the Worcestershire sauce, seems like it might overwhelm the rest of the sauce, but it could work. My one recommendation to improve yours would be to skip the Campbell’s cream soup! Use a good quality chicken broth and thicken with flour-- either make a roux before adding the broth or add a flour slurry into the broth.
ETA: ninja’d, and good thing! Can’t be said enough. Listen to me and TriPolar and skip the cream of something soup, unless you’re making Hotdish!
Just to fulfill the rule of threes, skip the soup.
Other suggestions.
Make sure the bones are in the pan along with the cubed chicken.
No need to set aside the mushrooms. Put them in at the same time as the shallots and cook very low until the mushrooms have released their moisture.
Add a bit of butter and flour to the mushroom/onion mix. Turn up the heat a little and cook until you can’t smell raw flour anymore. Flour before liquid always.
Then deglaze, season, simmer, serve.
You can considerably alter the sauce’s profile depending on what liquid you use. Red or white wine, stock, cream, beer, any of them would work (just simmer long enough to cook out any alcohol).
I’m thinking just a couple of dashes to put a “Hmmmmm. There’s a subtle layer of flavor in this.”
The Campbell’s cream soup is the basis of this experiment so I am leaving that in, not that I disagree with everyone here but to see can it be done. The rest of the sauce is built around that.
That’s fine, but in that case you can safely ignore the other advice about building a pan sauce. The soup has enough sodium, stabilizers, and emulsifiers that there’s no real reason to use the normal methods if you include it.
I think I’d just deglaze it with chicken stock, add the Worcestershire sauce, thyme, shallots, and mushrooms, and reduce it until it’s pretty concentrated. Let it cool some, then whisk in some heavy cream, add the parsley, adjust the salt, and serve over the rice and chicken.
It might benefit from a squeeze of lemon juice or a bit of vinegar to adjust the brightness as well.
If you’re leaving the canned soup in, you’re doing basically what we used to do in Boy Scouts, although that was a bit simpler- it was an onion, no mushrooms, worcestershire, thyme, or parsley.
For what it’s worth @Saint_Cad I think what you posted in the O.P. is a solid start. Don’t go nutz with the Worcester, but for what you’re trying to do, I think the results will be decent.
A question for our OP @Saint_Cad: You’ve spoken about your main dish and your preferences to use the specific ingredients mentioned, but you haven’t mentioned what sort of rice you’re going to serve it over. Because, well, that makes quite a difference in tuning the dish to the starch.
Are we talking a rice pilaf? Brown rice? White rice? Forbidden rice? Wild rice? Short, medium or long grain? Sticky or loose?
Because with a lot of those options, you benefit from tailoring the flavors in the entree to how they’ll fit, both flavor wise and texture wise with the rice.
By no means a big deal, especially if your intent is just to have a starch to pour the sauce and entree over. But you can add a lot of additional flavors and textures along with the rice, so it may be worthwhile to plan it out.
As an example, you could have mushroom on mushroom with this option:
Or go for a nutty, slightly crunchy contrast with something like this:
I cooked 8 oz. of sliced fresh mushrooms in butter, with some smashed garlic, salt, pepper, and a good pinch of rosemary, till the liquid mostly evaporated. Then 1/4 or 1/2 cup of dry white wine, and let that boil down. That was very nice over floured sauteed in butter chicken breast. The same is very good made with dry red wine over steak or even hamburgers.
The results are: I thought it didn’t have as much flavor as a good pan sauce in the style of a bourbon, diane or stroganoff sauce but was good tasting. Mrs Cad loved it and ask for it to be put into our monthly rotation.
As long as you found it at least good, and the wife loved it, I think that counts as a win, especially for a first time cooking. I’d guess more, or fresher herbs, or better stock/soup would have helped, but like a lot of things, ready made gives a huge benefit in time and energy spent, even with a flavor tradeoff.