Do not go reaching for your beat-up “Intro to French” Collins French-English paperback dictionary: This is nothing more than my version of herbed chicken in a cousin of a hollandaise sauce. The original recipe is a little more complicated (I’ll spare you details of how I simplified it) but this is a great alternative for The Modern Home Chef. This serves 4.

4 tbsp. (1/2 stick) of butter. Room temp and cube it if you want to make this stage go along a little more quickly.

A little olive oil, say 2 tbsp.

6 boneless chicken thighs

4 pinches of Herbes de Provence. I cannot tell you how much the discovery of commercially blended Herbes de Provence has changed my life. I have large hands, so this is almost but less than a tbsp., if that helps.

4 cloves of garlic

1 standard wine glass of dry white wine. Online sources tell me this is 5 oz. Not the wine glass I drink from it isn’t When I make this I just pour in the wine by eye. A bottle of wine is 750 ml = 25 oz., so 1/5 of a bottle.

2 egg yolks

The juice of 1 medium lemon

Some chopped basil if you want to make this more Mediterranean, but this is for garnishing

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In a large skillet (the skillet needs to have a cover, by the way, but I’ll get to that) heat the olive oil and the butter until it starts to foam a little. Add the chicken thighs so that they don’t overlap and brown them on both sides. This should take about 5 minutes. Salt and pepper the thighs, sprinkle in the Herbes de Provence, and add the garlic cloves. 

Cover the skillet and cook the chicken for 10 minutes at least. Spoon the juices over the thighs every so often. If your skillet doesn’t have a cover, you can create your own by covering with tin foil but this isn’t a best practice, especially if you have a gas stove. Plus, you’re basting the chicken, so it’s a PITA to keep removing and restoring the tin foil. The chicken is done when you stick a fork in it and everything’s all clear and you don’t get any, um, “redness.”

Remove the chicken to a large plate and keep the thighs warm by covering them and/or stashing them in the oven.

Back to the skillet, mash the garlic cloves with a sturdy spatula or the back of a spoon, like the one you basted the chicken with. Add most of the white wine but save a little. Cook until it reduces by half and make sure to scrape in the clingy bits.

Next up, in a small saucepan over medium heat whisk the 2 egg yolks until they thicken (but do not scramble; if they do you’ll have to start again) and then very carefully whisk in the rest of the wine (there should only a little left) and the lemon juice. Whisk and whisk. Add the liquid from your skillet a little at a time, spoonful by spoonful, still whisking, and then switch over to a wooden spoon and continue stirring over medium heat until all of this becomes a rich, thick sauce. 

Did I ever tell you that I have no biceps to speak of but could probably prevail in an arm wrestling competition based on my forearms?

How you present this to yourself and the three other dining companions is up to you. What I do is I retrieve the 6 chicken thighs, slice them in half, and each of us gets 3 halves and I spoon the sauce on top. Then, if have remembered to collect basil from the Handy Rooftop Herb Planter, I sprinkle that on too. I’ve only made this twice, once with lightly fried potato disks and once with (horrors) heated-up store-bought frozen French fries, and there was enough souped-up sauce that it also sauced the potatoes. If the sauce doesn’t suffice, make or buy some aioli. You can never have enough sauce(s). This way you can eat your potato favorite à la français.