Creamy Mushroom Chicken

Work has been frantic the last two days. It’s the pre-Christmas frenzy – businesses’ busiest time of year. I was certainly in no mood, nor did I have the energy, to cook. Our domestic helper prepared dinner tonight – a very quick, 15-minute chicken dish using Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup. Yes, we cheated. But it doesn’t taste anything like how it might be sounding. It’s actually quite, quite delicious. I learnt the dish from my mum, and it was a god-send during college. In just minutes, there could be a delicious, piping hot dinner on the table.

I would have preferred to use bone-in whole chicken drumsticks and thighs – chicken just looks better, and more like chicken that way . But I don’t like to freeze bone-in chicken. Inevitably, there’ll be some blackening around the bone when thawed chicken is cooked. And I find that rather unsightly. So I only cook with bone-in chicken when it’s fresh from the market. The rest of the time, it’s chicken fillets or de-boned chicken thighs.

The chicken is diced and seasoned with some light soy sauce, sugar, sesame oil and a bit of cornstarch. A diced large onion is sautéed in hot oil, before the chicken is added. Once the chicken is browned and semi-cooked, slices of fresh white button (or brown or field) mushrooms are added, followed by a can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup. A touch of hot water is added to adjust the consistency of the gravy. Finally, salt (or light soy sauce) and pepper are added to taste. Our helper added some dark soy sauce today, and so the chicken came out darker than I usually prefer it. I like the natural creamy color better.

Served the chicken with garlic stir-fried xiao bai cai (baby bak choy). I really like these curly leafed variety, which are only available during the winter months (winter in China that is, from where these are imported). They are so much sweeter and crunchier.

We also had soup today. Normally, there would be a soup at dinner everyday but we haven’t cooked any for over a week now. And today we had a nice chunky soup of lotus root, lotus seeds, white wood-ear fungus and boxthorn seeds (which give the soup a nice natural sweetness).

I’ve never bothered to photograph nor post any of the soups we normally cook. I don’t know why. But here’s my first…

In recent days, quite a few people have cooked and posted about soups (Alberto, Deb and Blue). I just love this synchronicity! Soups are so soul-satisfying and heart-warming – that must be the energy that is going around. Nice!

Copyright © 2003 Renee Kho. All rights reserved.
Please contact me for permission to copy, distribute or display any of the images and text contained in this article.