Comfort food: Chicken Alfredo

Alfredo sauce is incredibly easy to make--making it really well so that Italians approve might be a different issue, but anyone with a pan and a spoon can create some concoction that tastes alfredo sauce-y.  And it's quick, and when your friend is coming over for dinner and you have most of the ingredients already, it's a good option.

First, I fried up some chicken breast in olive oil with minced garlic, Italian seasoning, salt and pepper. I set the chicken aside and deglazed the pan with some white wine, and while ideally, I would have made the sauce in the same pan, it was too small, so I just had to transfer all the pan juices.  This deglazing concept is new to me, and I'm not sure if this is what I was supposed to do, but it all tasted OK, so I guess it worked?

In a bigger pan, I melted about 2 tbsp butter in with the pan juice and added salt, pepper, 3 or 4 minced garlic cloves, half a diced onion and a bunch of sliced mushrooms, then sauteed until the onion was translucent.  Slowly, I added in some flour to create a roux.  I let that cook for a short bit then slowly stirred in about 1 3/4 cups light cream.  As I tasted it, it was 1) too thick, so I thinned it out with some white wine and a little bit of soy milk (shhh...I don't drink real milk, so I didn't have any, and I was desperate).... and 2) not at all garlicky enough, so I  pressed 2 more cloves of garlic right into the sauce towards the end of cooking.  Correct technique?  Almost decidedly not, but it tasted better that way.  I then dumped in a bunch of Parmesan cheese.  The recipe that I was sort-of-kind-of-not-really following called for colby jack cheese, but that seemed like too much, so I skipped it.

Anyway, in the meantime, I boiled some linguine (fettuccine would have been better, but it wasn't on sale....), then tossed it and the chicken chunks with the sauce. 

Lessons learned....substitute some of the cream for (not soy) milk to thin things out, and potentially use less flour.  Add more garlic from the beginning. Fresh herbs would have been AWESOME in this (my guest suggested parsley....I would have added thyme or maybe a sprig of rosemary during cooking), so next time, I'll try that.