Chicken and Mushrooms in a White Wine Cream Sauce

August. The salmon are running and Anchorage loses its collective mind. This is the time of year when normally rational Alaskans stand in glacial rivers in waders at 5 AM, casting for silver salmon with the intense focus of people who believe — correctly — that the fish won't wait. The grocery stores are full of wild-caught sockeye. The freezers are being loaded for winter. The whole state smells like fish and triumph.

I don't fish. Reynaldo used to — he'd go to Ship Creek, right downtown, and stand in line with fifty other people and cast his line and sometimes catch something and always come home happy, smelling like river water and bearing either fish or stories about fish, both equally valuable. After he died, nobody in the family picked up the rod. The fishing was Reynaldo's thing. Some things can't be inherited.

But the salmon comes to me anyway, through friends, through the community. One of my ER colleagues, Pete, dropped off a fillet of Copper River sockeye, still cold from the cooler, with a note that said "Eat something, Santos." Pete knows I cook. The whole ER knows I cook. I've been bringing food to shifts since I got back — adobo, lumpia, pancit in containers that come back empty with notes that say "MORE." The ER runs on caffeine and other people's cooking, and I am becoming other people's cooking.

I made the salmon the way Reynaldo would have wanted it: sinigang. His recipe. Salmon sinigang — the broth sour with tamarind, the fish breaking apart in pink flakes in the hot liquid, the vegetables soft and soaked through. I added kangkong and tomatoes and green chili peppers and I stood over the pot and stirred and the smell was my childhood in Mountain View, the smell of a man who loved two countries and cooked his homesickness into a soup that fed four children who never fully understood what he'd left behind.

I packed portions for the ER. Pete, Sarah, Dr. Martinez, the night shift crew who hold each other together with bad coffee and shared trauma. They ate the sinigang between patients, standing in the break room, and Sarah said, "Santos, this is the best thing I've ever eaten in this hospital," and I said, "That's the lowest bar in medicine," and we laughed, and the laughing felt normal in a way that nothing has felt normal in months. The ER is teaching me something new: you can feed people and be fed by their eating. The nourishment goes both directions.

The sinigang fed the first shift, but the ER runs around the clock—and once you start bringing food, you can’t stop, because you realize what it does to people, how it changes the quality of the silence in that break room. So I started keeping a second recipe in rotation, something I could make fast on a weeknight from what’s already in the fridge, something that travels well in a wide container and reheats without becoming sad. Reynaldo would have approved of this one too: it’s generous the way he was generous, rich and warm and meant to be eaten with people you trust.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 25 minutes | Total Time: 35 minutes | Servings: 4

Ingredients

1 1/2 lbs boneless, skinless chicken breasts or thighs, sliced into 1-inch strips
8 oz cremini or baby bella mushrooms, sliced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 small shallot, finely diced
1/2 cup dry white wine (such as Sauvignon Blanc or Pinot Grigio)
3/4 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup low-sodium chicken broth
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves (or 1/2 teaspoon dried)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Fresh parsley, chopped, for garnish

Instructions

Season the chicken. Pat chicken dry with paper towels and season generously on both sides with salt and black pepper.
Sear the chicken. Heat olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add chicken in a single layer and cook 4–5 minutes per side until golden and cooked through. Transfer to a plate and tent loosely with foil.
Cook the mushrooms. In the same skillet, melt butter over medium-high heat. Add mushrooms and cook, undisturbed, for 3 minutes until they begin to brown. Stir and cook another 2 minutes. Season with a pinch of salt.
Build the aromatics. Add shallot and garlic to the mushrooms and cook, stirring, for 1–2 minutes until softened and fragrant.
Deglaze with wine. Pour in the white wine, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Let it reduce by half, about 2 minutes.
Make the cream sauce. Add chicken broth and heavy cream. Stir in thyme. Bring to a gentle simmer and cook 4–5 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the sauce thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon.
Return the chicken. Nestle the seared chicken back into the skillet. Simmer on low for 2–3 minutes to heat through and let the chicken absorb the sauce. Taste and adjust seasoning.
Serve. Garnish with fresh parsley and serve over egg noodles, rice, or crusty bread to catch the sauce.

Nutrition (per serving)

Chicken and Mushrooms in a White Wine Cream Sauce — What I Bring When the Sinigang Is Gone