My Dear Madeira...

I had it in my head recently that I was in the mood for chicken marsala, which we hadn't had in quite some time, plus I had some mushrooms in the fridge needing to get used up. When I got home from work and started figuring out if I had the stuff, I found what I thought was a major problem. No marsala.

WTH!?

I could've sworn I stocked up on these cooking alcohols late last year. But nope, there with all the other bottles of opened bottles of stuff were ZERO bottles of marsala.

Dammit.

Ok, found an unopened bottle of madeira - I must've considered experimenting, and so looked online to see what I could find... Sure enough, seems like you can treat it pretty similar to marsala, including using it in a dinner that would include chicken and mushrooms. Sweet!

First I sauteed up some lightly seasoned chicken breasts, and in the background you'll see a small skillet of asparagus waiting for me to turn on the heat. I figured they were a last minute thing. While the chicken did it's thing I also had the rice cooker going on the counter, and some broccoli nukin' (because you know Brett won't eat asparagus).



Once the pounded and seasoned chicken was mostly cooked, nicely browned on the outside, and just a HINT of pink still remaining inside, I removed it from the pan to a plate, tossed in some butter, and threw in the mushrooms. (Yes Peter, mushrooms! YUM!)


Once the mushrooms had browned a brief bit, first some flour, and then the wine and chicken broth went in. Things are still looking a little too moist at this point...


About twenty minutes later and the sauce is looking more saucey! Time to get the asparagus going, and then toss the chicken in to finish off any cooking it might need and to warm it up in the sauce. (Most likely the chicken had finished cooking with carryover heat anyhow)


Let's plate up! How good does that look!? We did find the sauce was a LITTLE sweeter than we remembered marsala to be, but not so much that this would be a dessert. After the initial "oh, that's kinda sweeter than I expected!" bite or two, we both agreed we looooved this dinner!


Please stop drooling on my dinner!