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I made this last night. It was very tasty, but the recipe, as printed, has a couple of flaws that I want to point out.
First of all, it only calls for two TEASPOONS of Dijon mustard. In Step 2, it tells you to add two teaspoons of mustard to the pan, along with the cream, wine, tarragon, salt & pepper, after the chicken has browned. Then, in Step 3, it says, “spread 1 teaspoon remaining mustard over each breast.” What remaining mustard?
The conclusion I came to was that this is a typo on the recipe card. Being that you need to spread 1 teaspoon of mustard over each of four chicken breasts, and you need two teaspoons for the sauce, that means you need SIX teaspoons of mustard IN ALL. And being that there are 3 teaspoons to a tablespoon, the recipe should have read “2 TABLESPOONS Dijon mustard.”
I also didn’t like the use of shredded cheese here. I did buy shredded Swiss, though, because I almost always want to make a new recipe as instructed the first time. But the shredded cheese kind of went all over the place, it didn’t stick on very well. Sliced cheese would have been better, and I will use that next time. The Ritz cracker crumbs didn’t adhere very well, either. It would have been more manageable, once again, with a slice of cheese instead of a mound of the shredded variety. In the oven, it did all melt okay, though. But I would have preferred more of the crumbs to have stuck to the top, rather than fall off into the sauce.
My friend Kat has a much easier version of chicken cordon bleu. There is a video on that blog post, as well, that shows you how to do it. She does it as a roll-up, with the chicken pounded thin first. The slices of ham and cheese go on the chicken, and it gets rolled up, then it gets rolled in bread crumbs. Since the chicken meat is kind of moist, the crumbs will stick better. Then she cooks them on a George Foreman grill. Due to the fact that the chicken breast were pounded thin, this takes very little time to cook.
Kat’s recipe does not call for mustard, but I see no reason why you can’t spread some on the chicken, before you put the slices of ham and cheese on, if you wanted to. And you could also use the Ritz cracker crumbs instead of bread crumbs if you felt like it. You could use any kind of cracker or bread crumbs you have on hand. I didn’t feel lik dirtying up my food processor, so I just put the crackers into a small ziploc bag and crushed them, in the bag, in my hands.
And before any of you “green” people go nuts on me, I do wash and save plastic bags that I use for this purpose, and reuse them until they break. The only time I would NOT recycle a plastic bag is if it was used to store raw meats, fish, or poultry. So, needless to say, you would NOT recycle the plastic wrap used when pounding the chicken. But in addition to this being mess-free, it’s also a food safety issue. The more you expose raw poultry to surfaces in your kitchen, such as counters and cutting boards, the more chance you have of cross-contamination, which can make you and your family sick. And being sick can cost you a lot of “green”, if you get my drift. Never take chances.
So, next time I want to make chicken cordon bleu, I will take the best of both of these recipes and do it that way. Enjoy! 
