PS oops. I meant to post this on Saturday. You kids will just have to wait extra long for the next piece of awesome.
My mum makes a dish called “coq au vin” (which is to say, “chicken in wine” – you can imagine how the French came up with THAT one). I really like it. So a few things happened lately:
1. When I cleaned out my email inbox, I found a list of my mum’s recipes.
2. As I shopped for groceries, I saw one of those “Feed your family for $10” things – for coq au vin.
My mum’s recipe had things like:
“Ingredients. . .
Enough bacon
enough mushrooms
some onion
red wine”
which was helpful – up to a point. For one thing, I’ve never cooked with red wine, and I have noooo idea how much to put in (a bottle? a cask? a teaspoon?) For another thing, “enough bacon” is an oxymoron.
So, with the less delicious but more informative recipe from the supermarket, and the bacon and mushroom recipe from mum, I made a wonderful wonderful thing.
Here’s roughly how it went (and yes, as you can tell, I’m my mother’s daughter):
Cook one chopped onion, a dessertspoonful of minced garlic, a few rashers of bacon (chopped), and three chicken pieces in a wide frypan until the chicken is brown on both sides.
While that happens, stick 400mL red wine in a microwave safe jug with about half a cup of flour (to my surprise, cornflour worked fine – it just took a lot of stirring), stirring every minute until it suddenly goes thick. Add some thyme and bay leaves and two cubes of chicken stock along the way.
Stick the chicken mixture in a casserole dish, and pour the wine mix over it (it doesn’t matter if it’s gone cold). Cook it with the lid on at 150 degrees celsius for anywhere between 30 minutes and an hour and a half, depending on when CJ gets home. Cook rice.
When you have about fifteen minutes to go, mix a handful of fresh chopped mushrooms into the casserole and take the lid off (NB: take lid off first).
If you feel like it, fry some sliced zucchini in the pan and add some chopped fetta just before serving.
Voila! Je suis riche!
I was psyching CJ up for this all week (the word “bacon” was all he actually needed), but both of us were surprised and delighted when we first tasted it.
Nostalgia = win.
Tomorrow’s entry includes a photo CJ described as “horrific”. If you don’t like seeing a lot of blood in the movies, tomorrow’s entry is not for you.
And from flickr.com:
