Sauteed Chicken with Tarragon Cream Sauce and Carrots

This was my first attempt at a recipe from The Book. The Sauteed Chicken with Tarragon Cream Sauce and Carrots.

This one sounded easy enough, most of the ingredients on the list were already at home so it was just a couple of bits from the market.

Fresh Produce from the South Melbourne Market

I begun by getting the basic prep out of the way, the carrots were chopped, shallots finely diced and I removed the skin from the chicken. The tarragon was washed and chopped. Finally everything was mise en place and I fired up the stove-top.

Side note here: while preparing this super cute guy came out of my farmers market groceries, so I took him to my little garden :)

Now, you know that's fresh!

One thing I'm really bad at is multi-tasking. My next worst thing is time management. I decided that the chicken would take longer to cook than the carrots, because its thicker, right?

Chicken is in the frypan, browning the sides - I added the shallots and went back to the cook book to read. Oh my google - how did I burn the shallots, and I had cooked all of them so I didn't even have a backup! Lesson learnt. I quickly throw the wine in and get it simmering, putting the timer on, of course!

Scraping the carrots into the pot and quickly adding the butter and water and get it fired up. The carrots were bubbling away happily and I popped the lid on, timer for 10 minutes, just like the book said... and FOR CRYING OUT LOUD how did I burn them already? The carrots must have been up too high, and they've burnt to the bottom of the pan. I taste them, the burntest (that's not even a word) carrot I can find and it still tastes delicious, so I'm using them or I'll starve tonight.

The final step is putting it all together and this is what I was left with...

Should have wiped up the dish...

   

Our first French meal, done!