Creamy Chicken and Pumpkin

Name: Creamy Chicken and Pumpkin
Prep time: 30 min
Cook time: 40 min
Total time: 1 h 10 min
Yield: 4 serving(s)
Ingredients: 1 ounce dried porcini mushrooms; 1 (3 1/2 lb) free-range chicken, jointed into 8 pieces (you can ask your butcher to do this for you); 1 lemon, halved; 2 tablespoons olive oil; 2 tablespoons unsalted butter; 1 small onion, finely chopped; 1 teaspoon salt; 10 ounces pumpkin, peeled, seeded and cut into 1-inch cubes; 8 ounces fresh mushrooms, roughly chopped (I like crimini); 1 1/4 cups half-and-half; salt & freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Submitted by Julesong

"Adapted from a recipe in BBC’s Good Food magazine, October 2004."

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Ready In:: 1hr 10mins
Ingredients:: 11
Serves:: 4

ingredients

1 ounce dried porcini mushrooms
1 (3 1/2 lb) free-range chicken, jointed into 8 pieces (you can ask your butcher to do this for you)
1 lemon, halved
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 teaspoon salt
10 ounces pumpkin, peeled, seeded and cut into 1-inch cubes
8 ounces fresh mushrooms, roughly chopped (I like crimini)
1 ¹⁄₄ cups half-and-half
salt & freshly ground black pepper, to taste

directions

Soak dried porcini in 1 cup hot water for 30 minutes.
Roll the lemon on a hard, flat surface, pressing with your palm, to help release the juices inside. Cut the lemon in half.
Remove the skin from the chicken pieces and rub the cut side of the lemon, squeezing gently, over the meat (use both halves to use all the lemon juice).
Heat oil in a pan large enough to hold the chicken pieces in one layer. Add the prepared chicken and brown on both sides. Transfer to a casserole dish.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
In a pan over medium heat, melt the butter. When it stops foaming, add chopped onion and salt, then sauté until pale gold.
Meanwhile, remove the porcini from the water and rinse well. Pat the porcini dry and chop into small pieces. Strain the water through a sieve, stopping before the last spoonful so that you don’t get the residue from the bottom.
Add porcini and pumpkin pieces to onion and sauté for 5 minutes. Add fresh mushrooms and cook for 5 minutes more, stirring frequently.
Stir in the half and half, 4 to 5 Tbsp of the strained porcini water and season to taste with salt and freshly ground pepper. Simmer uncovered for 10 to 12 minutes until reduced slightly, then pour over the chicken in the casserole dish.
Cover and cook in a 350 degree F oven for 30 to 40 minutes, turning the chicken once or twice and adding a few spoonfuls of water or unsalted chicken broth if the sauce becomes a little dry.

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RECIPE SUBMITTED BY

Julesong

Tukwila, 87

It's simply this: I love to cook! :) I've been hanging out on the internet since the early days and have collected loads of recipes. I've tried to keep the best of them (and often the more unusual) and look forward to sharing them with you, here. I am proud to say that I have several family members who are also on RecipeZaar! My husband, here as <a href=http://www.recipezaar.com/member/39857>Steingrim</a>, is an excellent cook. He rarely uses recipes, though, so often after he's made dinner I sit down at the computer and talk him through how he made the dishes so that I can get it down on paper. Some of these recipes are in his account, some of them in mine - he rarely uses his account, though, so we'll probably usually post them to mine in the future. My sister <a href=http://www.recipezaar.com/member/65957>Cathy is here as cxstitcher</a> and <a href=http://www.recipezaar.com/member/62727>my mom is Juliesmom</a> - say hi to them, eh? Our <a href=http://www.recipezaar.com/member/379862>friend Darrell is here as Uncle Dobo</a>, too! I've been typing in his recipes for him and entering them on R'Zaar. We're hoping that his sisters will soon show up with their own accounts, as well. :) I collect cookbooks (to slow myself down I've limited myself to purchasing them at thrift stores, although I occasionally buy an especially good one at full price), and - yes, I admit it - I love FoodTV. My favorite chefs on the Food Network are Alton Brown, Rachel Ray, Mario Batali, and Giada De Laurentiis. I'm not fond over fakey, over-enthusiastic performance chefs... Emeril drives me up the wall. I appreciate honesty. Of non-celebrity chefs, I've gotta say that that the greatest influences on my cooking have been my mother, Julia Child, and my cooking instructor Chef Gabriel Claycamp at Seattle's Culinary Communion. In the last couple of years I've been typing up all the recipes my grandparents and my mother collected over the years, and am posting them here. Some of them are quite nostalgic and are higher in fat and processed ingredients than recipes I normally collect, but it's really neat to see the different kinds of foods they were interested in... to see them either typewritten oh-so-carefully by my grandfather, in my grandmother's spidery handwriting, or - in some cases - written by my mother years ago in fountain pen ink. It's like time travel. Cooking peeve: food/cooking snobbery. Regarding my black and white icon (which may or may not be the one I'm currently using): it the sea-dragon tattoo that is on the inside of my right ankle. It's also my personal logo.

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