Seared Chicken Breast with Candied Carrots

Jillian Coalson: Welcome to Food Done Right, the cooking show that teaches you how to make elaborate food quick and easy. He is Barry and I am Jillian. Barry Coalson: And, we are going to be cooking a great meal for you today. Today, we have seared chicken breast with sweet potato mash, Candied Carrots and a pan sauce. First, we are going to start with our sweet potatoes because they'll take the longest to cook. We are going to go ahead and get these peeled. Now we are going to start cutting our sweet potato. We are using sweet potatoes because they are a little bit sweeter, than regular potatoes but they are very similar. We just want to cut them, all the same size, so that they cook evenly. We are getting to let these cook until they are soft and ready to mash. Now, we are going to go on to our carrots. Jillian has peeled all the carrots for us. We are going to cut these into an oblique cut. You start cutting it, on a bias, then you roll your carrot half a turn and cut again on a bias. Keep doing that, all the way around the carrot. Try to keep your carrots, the same size. Keeping the same size for a couple of reasons. One reason is because it looks nice. They are all the same, another reason to cut them the same size is that they cook evenly. Now, with all of our carrots cut, we are going to come over here, put some butter in the pan. Add our carrots. Now, we are going to add sugar to the carrots. It makes them a little sweet, toss them around a bit. Once the butter is melted, we are going to cover the carrots with chicken stock and we'll bring it up to simmer mode, and let that cook. It takes about 10 to 15 minutes, depending on how big your carrots are. Okay now, we are going to see if our carrots are done. A really good way to tell if your carrots are done is to get a fork, stab your carrot and if it falls of the fork easily, that means it's done. It's called the fork-tender. It fell off pretty easily, these are just about done. Jillian Coalson: So unlike a lot of people who go ahead and they drain their potatoes and they work their butter and cream in cold, a nice trick to make a nice moist mash potato, is to warm your butter and your cream. So, we are going to go ahead and let this warm. This is going to make a nice fluffy mash potato versus a glue like mash potato. Barry Coalson: Now we are just draining our potatoes. Sweet potatoes are a much moister. They have much more water than regular potato. So it's very important to dry them out. The way we do this, is put them back in the same pot that we just had. Alright, I am mixing them around a little bit. I am going to put this back on the heat, to suck out some of the moisture. So, it's not so wet. Jillian Coalson: Now it's about time for our main part of our dish. Our chicken breast already to be salt, peppered and cooked. Now they are very thin pieces, so we want to make sure that we don't overcook them. Barry Coalson: We have dried out our potatoes enough. So now I am going to take the butter and the cream mixture, that we made, previously and we are going to pour that into our sweet potatoes. You don't want to put all in at once because you don't make them too runny. Mix them up, really nice. Then, you are going to season them with salt and pepper. I like to use black pepper, if you don't want the black specks in your mash potatoes, you can use white pepper but I think black pepper tastes better. So I am going to use black pepper. Jillian Coalson: I think our oil is about ready now to add our chicken. I am going to go ahead and put them down like I said, presentation side down. We want this to have high heat because we want to sear the bottoms and cook it quickly without overcooking it. So it's just going to be two minutes on each side and our chicken is going to be done. Barry Coalson: Now with the same pan, we are going to make our pan sauce. It has all that good juice from that chicken left over. We are going to use that flavor and make a sauce with it which can be really nice. Turn on medium heat, add a little bit of butter, and deglaze it, with some white wine. Cook that down a little bit. So, once we cooked in wine now, we are going to add a little bit of chicken stock and our sauce will be ready. Jillian Coalson: In our dish today, just took the sweet potatoes and brush them across the plate to give the plate a more refined look. Let's go ahead and slide, put chicken breast right on top, and Barry is going to finish with the pan sauce. Barry Coalson: Thank you for watching. For full details and recipe, you can go to our website, www.fooddoneright.com. Thanks for watching! Jillian Coalson: Bye! Barry Coalson: Bye!