When I first moved away from home to go to college, I promptly collected all of the recipes that I loved from my family. I didn't want to have to eat only canned food and Lipton Chicken-flavored rice for the rest of my life. So, I got Grandpa's Chili, Dad's Spaghetti Sauce, Grandma's Chicken and Dumplings as well as her Biscuits and Gravy AND Cabbage Rolls, Dee's Potato Salad and, of course, Steak and Tomatoes, and finally Mom's Twice-Baked Potatoes and her Fettucine Alfredo. Oh, and her Caesar Salad. Off to college.
Well, those recipes kept me entertained for a short while and soon I was seeking new challenges. I picked up 365 Ways to Cook Chicken and there I found one of my (and definitely Kara's...) favorite recipes: Chicken with Champagne Sauce. It's a fairly simple dish. Cook a couple of chicken breasts in butter, flambee with Cognac, then cover in Champagne and chicken stock with a little tomato paste for color. Oh - and a buttload of heavy cream! I usually serve it over Linguine. Rich, flavorful, delicious and fairly easy. Plus impressive with the big fire show!
The natural law of food pairing says that if you use a particular wine in the cooking of a dish, said wine should really pair well with the dish as well. Exceptions apply, of course. To cook (and pair) with this dish on tonight's experiment, we used Francois Diligent's Brut Champagne NV. This is a K & L Wine import (if I remember correctly) and only sold by them. Affordably priced and highly touted on the website, it was about $25. Unfortunately, I found it tasted only slightly better than a very good domestic sparkler. So, into the sauce!!!
We drank the other half of the bottle with the meal and, while I wasn't highly impressed with it in the first place, things got decidedly worse with the food. The heft of the dish was not cleansed by the acidity and bubble, but rather made the Champagne taste one step above soda water. All that cream really wanted something a bit heftier on the palate to match. Lesson learned...
Thankfully, the dish came out remarkably well this time and we were so giddy as we haven't pulled this out of the archives in awhile. Some freshly home made French Bread sealed the deal as we sopped up the sauce. I highly recommend this recipe (and the book if you're not a home chef yet) for a decadent and not-too-taxing meal. But maybe this is one of those occasions where you could break out the buttery Chardonnay or Meursault and be a little happier.
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