Anyway. It would taste better in France, too, I'm betting, because I kind of completely screwed up. The recipe (Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child, Vol. I) says that you should end up with a kind of sauce like hollandaise, but that's definitely not what I had. It tasted fine...but Mom said it would benefit from a sauce, and since she very rarely offers something so near to a criticism, I'm thinking it would most definitely absolutely benefit from a sauce.
Here's what we ended up with.
But as you can see, it's hardly a sauce. More like...salad dressing. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but IT WOULD BENEFIT FROM A SAUCE.
Okay. I'm definitely obsessing about this.
Let me acquaint you with the difficulties I met during cooking. First, Julia Child calls for white whine. We do not happen to have any white wine in the house. So I used sherry. Not cooking sherry, sherry sherry, the kind you drink. (I cannot fathom why; it is absolutely repulsive.) You pour this sherry into a saucepan and let half of it boil off.
What it doesn't say in the recipe is that you have to remove the juices from sauteeing the chicken. So I didn't. I dumped the sherry into the pan and let it boil away, breathing in these disgusting sickly sherry fumes the whole time - I swear I started to feel light-headed. And it was a pretty hot day, in the upper 80s, and even in a cool house when you're slaving over a sherry-scented fumes (have I mentioned how absolutely revolting sherry is?) it starts to feel the tiniest bit uncomfortable. Read: hellish.
Okay, so the sherry boiled off (along with half the sauteeing juices) and I added whatever it said to and dumped in the chicken and kind of swilled it around to coat it in the dressing. It definitely wasn't sauce.
See, what you're actually supposed to do is take the saute juices out, and then you boil the sherry (gagging the whole time) and then you remove the pan from heat and wait till it's way cooler. And then you add lemon juice and egg yolks. And then you add the saute juices by tablespoons, until it is sauce. Like hollandaise.
Remember that if you're going to make this. Because it was okay without a sauce, but it would benefit from one.
The Verdict: Decent enough. Would benefit from a sauce.
Today, or maybe tomorrow (depends if I can tear myself away from my novel), I'll be making a Dark Chocolate Tart. And sometime this summer, if I can get my nerve up, I'm going to make Le Glorieux, a devishly difficult chocolate cake from Vol. II of Julia Child. Wish me luck. Though that won't be anytime soon. End of July, earliest.
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