Dinner two nights ago was a major bomb.  Long day at work, and I was very crabby.  I should have known better than to try anything new.  And I should have taken it as an omen that the grocery store was out of rotisserie chickens.  I was just not in the mood to make anything too  lengthy or complicated, so I was planning on shredding a rotisserie chicken for a tropical chicken salad.  I had to cook up the chicken as part of the seemingly never-ending prep work to mix this up.  I completely underestimated the time it would take to make this, and really overestimated the end product.  It was what SQ would call ‘meh’.  There was potential, but the time involvement was SOOOO not worth it.  However, dinner last night was almost nonexistent – I barely made it home from work in time to grab some sandwiches and get Syd over to the high school for ‘Course Selection Night’.  It still hasn’t really hit me that my daughter is going to be in HIGH SCHOOL in the fall.  I think I’ve been too busy trying to help her figure out her life after high school.  It was a long night, and we were both exhausted before we ever got there.

So, tonight I made chicken with a white wine/cream sauce.  I also fried up some potato wedges.  My French summer-mother from high school would have been proud.  In her quest to continually cook what she considered to be ‘American’ dishes, she was constantly making homemade french fries.  I guess she didn’t realize that most Americans buy them frozen at the grocery, or get them in the drive-through from McDonald’s.  I didn’t have fries that good again until I went to St. Martin with my husband 20 years later.  I pan-seared the cut-up chicken pieces, then cooked them with some stock, Chardonnay, and vegetables for about 20 minutes.  I pulled out the chicken, strained out the vegetables, and reduced the sauce down pretty heavily.  Whisk in some butter and creme fraiche, salt and pepper…and you have a pretty amazing sauce for chicken.  I minced up about 4 cloves of garlic to toss with the potatoes, and grated up some Parmesan cheese over the top.  SQ pulled out a bottle of Vouvray for drinking – good, but too sweet for this dish.  The wine would have been better with a cheese plate.  Which is probably what I need to have for dinner tomorrow.  I’m still in an indulgence funk from the holidays that I can’t seem to break.  I also knicked my hand up a bit with my new knife tonight.  I really think I could take a finger off with this knife and not even know it for several minutes.  I burn myself constantly in the kitchen, but I never cut myself with knives.  Except two years ago at Christmas when I was using my mom’s Cutco chef’s knife, which is also a beast.  I sliced my hand twice and never felt a thing.  A 10″ knife takes some getting used to, and I’m still not sure how to hone a Japanese ‘hybrid’ knife, but I love the way it cuts and slices.

Overall, happy with the dinner end-product tonight.  The music selections didn’t hurt either – thank you Radiohead for making my night less crabby.  Yeah, thank you SQ for being my nightly food DJ…your lineup was a winner tonight.