Veloute

When I first started a food blog, the hardest part for me was actually paying attention to/documenting the amount of ingredients I used (well, and taking pictures that didn’t make my food look repulsive, haha). I am definitely not much of a recipe kind of girl and one of my favorite parts about cooking (as opposed to baking) is that most of the time you can continue to season things as they are cooking to your desired taste. Tonight’s meal pretty much exemplifies the problem I have with recipe documentation because it’s just one of those intuitive types of meals, and the amounts of things will vary on your diet, the size of your chicken, etc.

Veloute is pretty much just a fancy way of saying thickened stock. All it is, really, is starting with a roux of flour and butter, adding stock and then thickening and seasoning simply with salt and pepper. Because it’s so simple, it really is great if you can use a homemade stock. I don’t really know if what I made tonight can be considered a veloute since it had mushrooms, garlic and shallots in it, but it sounds a little fancier than “chicken and broth” or “chicken and shrooms.” 😉 So like I said, what is below may not be particularly accurate, but this is a really simple weeknight dish that can be modified a million different ways.

Chicken kinda sorta Veloute

Butter, olive oil cooking spray or a combination (whatever you want to use to pan fry chicken)
2 chicken breast halves
1-2 Tbsp butter
1 small shallot, minced
4 oz. baby bellas, sliced
1 clove garlic, minced
1 Tbsp. flour
1/2 cup chicken stock
salt and pepper

Sprinkle chicken breasts with salt and pepper. Pan fry until cooked through. Set aside and keep warm.

In the same skillet, add a little butter and cook the mushrooms and shallot until tender. Stir the garlic in until fragrant.

If you need more butter to make a roux, add it now. Then, add the flour. Stir, cooking off the raw flour taste.

Slowly add the chicken stock. Heat and stir until thickened. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Spoon sauce over chicken.

We had this with some fontina mashed potatoes. Basically I made my regular old mashed potatoes. I should probably not mention the fact that I used *gasp* skim milk AND (here’s the part where foodies cry in agony) Smart Balance. Still there? OK, phew. I stirred in 6 Tbsp of fontina (for the two of us), split the mashed potatoes in 2 mini crocks and topped them each with 1 Tbsp shredded fontina and placed in the oven (400) for about 10 minutes.  A nice change from plan mashed or parmesan (which is originally what I was planning on doing until I remembered we had fontina).