The Pragmatic Chef



Not all of us cook for a living. Some of us have a day job.

So when you read a recipe with 20 ingredients , one of which is "truffle butter (optional)," the immediate response is "no 'effin way."

So you look a little further for your Chicken Tetarazzini recipe. You find one that doesn't have a scary ingredient list:

a 4-pound chicken, cut into 8 pieces
1/2 pound mushrooms, sliced thin
5 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/2 pound spaghetti
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 cup heavy cream
3 tablespoons medium-dry Sherry
freshly grated nutmeg to taste
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan


OK, I can manage for all of these things to be in my kitchen at the same time. Now, let's start scanning the recipe for times.

Noooo! Almost 4 hours of cooking chicken and making chicken stock. There is no way to do this and attend my children at the same time, wrangling hunger, homework, behaviors, soccer practice, piano lessons, ballroom dancing class, lawyer-infested meetings about my son's Special Education, speech pathology appointments, .....

...but I digress.

The first 3 paragraphs about cooking chicken and making broth are reduced to:


Find the left-over grilled chicken breast from when we made the Caesar salads the other day

Open a can of chicken broth

That cuts 4 hours down to 40 seconds. So far, so good. That gives us time to dive into a couple of other cook books for ideas on the fly, some of which are incorporated until hitting the instructions:

"... make a well in center of spaghetti. Stir chicken into remaining sauce and spoon into well."

This sets up for an ugly scenario. No inequitable distribution of sauce here.

These sensibilities lead to a recipe which looks like this: Chicken Tetrazzini

Posted: Wed - September 21, 2005 at 12:20 PM        

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