Tonight I started out with two mostly-thawed chicken breasts.
What I should have done, in retrospect, was cut them up, because semi-frozen chicken is the easiest to carve, and then done them in a pan on the stove with the mushrooms and the zucchini.
At some point during the day, however, I'd gotten it in my head that I wanted to bake the chicken. If I'd actually gotten to it when I wanted to, about an hour before my wife got home, this would have been reasonable. However, little Cilantro fell asleep on me and, well, I fell asleep too, and I didn't end up starting on it until my wife walked in the door.
I forged blindly ahead, cooking off the sides of the chicken in olive oil as instructed, taking the chicken out and cooking the mushrooms, then reassembling the whole thing with chicken stock and zucchini to cook thirty minutes or so.
While I waited, I washed dishes, I made pasta... and the chicken still wasn't done. After fussing over it, it finally came out cooked over an hour after I started. I had planned to turn the remaining stock into a gravy sauce but I decided it had already taken too long and served it as it was.
It turned out perfectly good, but not much of a looker, so there's no pictures tonight.
Afterward, I was back in the kitchen to clean and I figured I might as well make the gravy, I'd even gotten the flour out. Now, I'd never made gravy before, and I was expecting this would be as big a hassle as the rest of dinner had been.
Nope. I didn't even need a recipe, this was one of those things that worked based on Cooking Show Osmosis - whisk flour slowly into liquid, taste for flavor and texture, and poof, gravy. It turned out really tasty. I put a little on the leftover pasta for my wife to taste and she pronounced it excellent.
So the best part of dinner is actually going to be lunch tomorrow.
On the one hand, I did kind of wish I'd finished the gravy to go with the chicken. On the other, well, I'd been annoyed and distracted at that point, so it very well may not have turned out as good if I had gone at it then. It's hard to say.
The chicken-mushroom sauce is the first thing I've produced by accident that I liked enough to make notes on. If I'm able to replicate it, you'll be seeing that recipe here in the near future!