Coq Au Vin

I've made this dish a couple times before, but never posted it. I wouldn't say it's my favorite dish, but it's pretty good, and it's a great way to use up a lot of wine that you wouldn't otherwise drink. Abby and I had a couple half empty bottles of wine sitting around from an earlier dinner party, and, while I would normally make something like braised shortribs with the extra wine, I've already had a blog entry with shortribs, so I figured I would give this dish another spin. It's a classic French bistro preparation, and, at least in the intermediate steps, it doesn't look pretty.
See? This is what chicken looks like when its been marinated in red wine for 24 hours. Not nice. Enough on that, though. Here's the recipe.

INGREDIENTS

• 1 chicken (you can leave it whole, or cut it up. I cut it up and reserve he wing tips and back bone for stock)
• 1 carrot, chopped
• 3 carrots, tourneed (cut into football shapes)
• 1 stalk celery, chopped
• 1 onion, chopped
• bouquet garnit (bay leaf, thyme, parsley, garlic clove, and black peppercorns)
• 2-3 cloves
• 12-16 pearl onions
• 1/8 to 1/4 lb slab bacon, cut into lardons
• 1/4 to 1/2 lb button mushrooms
• red wine, about a bottle.
• butter
• olive oil
• salt, pepper
• 1 Tbsp flour
• pinch of sugar

Start by marinating the chicken in red wine with the chopped carrot, onion, celery, and cloves for 24 hours. Remove the chicken - it will look all gross and mottled like the picture above, and strain out the vegetables, reserving the wine.
Pat the chicken dry with a paper towel and season with salt and pepper. Add a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of olive oil to a large dutch oven and brown the chicekn on both sides over medium high heat. Again, it doesn't look too pretty, but it's getting better.
Remove the chicken, add the vegetables from the marinade, and cook over medium heat. After about ten minutes, stir in 1 to 1.5 T flour. Cook this for another minute or two, then add the chicken and enough red wine to cover the chicken half way...it's a braise, not a stew. Cook over low heat for about an hour, turing occassionally.
As this is simmering, turn your attention to the other ingredients: the bacon, onions, carrots, and, if you like them, the mushrooms. Traditioally, this dish has mushrooms, and not carrots, but I'm not a huge mushroom fan and I had several extra carrots in the fridge.

Start by cutting the bacon into lardons and cook until crispy. I decided to use salt pork instead because, while I love bacon, I thought that the smokey flavor it imparts would be a bit too dominant. When you're done with the bacon, remove all but about 1 Tbsp of the fat and add 1 smashed clove of garlic to the pan, let this brown for a few seconds and add the mushrooms, stemmed and halved or quartered. Cook until done and set aside.
Next, peel the onions and tournee the carrots so they are about the same size as the onions (you can kind of see the carrots in the picture below). To glaze the onions ad carrots, put them in a pot just big enough to hold them all in one layer. Add a pinch of salt, a pinch of sugar, and 2 Tbsp butter. Add enough water to just cover everything and cover it with a sheet of parchment paper cut to the size of the pot. Bring this to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer. When the water has evaporated, remove the paper and continue cooking to slightly brown the vegetables.

Once done, remove the vegatables, add a splash of red wine and scrape up any of the fond that might have developed. By this time, the chicken should be done. Remove the chicken and strain the cooking liquid into a fat separator. Pour the separated braising liquid into the pot with the reduced red wine, turn the heat way up, and reduce the volume by half. If you want to reduce this really quickly, pour everything into a really wide pan. More surface area=more efficient evaporation=faster reduction. Return the chicken to the pan to coat in the braising liquid, then plate with the bacon, onions, carrots, and mushrooms. I think its good to serve this with polenta since (A) polenta is super easy to make, and (B) polenta is perfect for soaking up tasty braising liquid.

Hamersley's Bistro

Abby and I are putting together a list of restaurants that we need to go to before we move to Chicago (if you know of any can't miss places in Boston, please let us know and leave a comment), and last night we got to check out Hamersely's Bistro, a place that I had been wanting to check out for quite some time. This restaurants has a reputation that spreads beyond Boston, and I guess it's supposed to be a shining example of French bistro cooking. It wasn't disappointing. The meal was thoroughly satisfying and the service was good. If you're in the mood for unfussy French food, I would highly recommend this place.

Since there were four of us - we went with our friends Kyle and Susan - we were able to try out several different appetizers, including a roasted beet salad (comes with the vegetarian prix fixe), country style pork pate and chicken liver pate with toast points (below)...
warm oysters with periwinkles...
and a grilled mushroom and garlic sandwich on country bread.
All of the appetizers were great. The pate was good, but it was pretty much like any other I've had...not that I was expecting anything new. The warm oysters were a bit different than any I've ever had before. Usually I have oyster raw or battered and fried. I don't think that these oysters were cooked through, because the texture was closer to that of a raw oyster. Warming them up really brought out the briny flavors in the oyster, though. That's a good thing. The fact that they were topped with tiny little snails was also sort of novel.

Of all the appetizers, the mushroom sandwich was the standout. I usually hate mushrooms, but I actually liked this, which is saying something. In this dish, they don't hold back on the garlic or butter, so I think that helped a lot. (Abby's note: Sam is understating how deliciously awesome the mushroom sandwich was, although I have no idea why bread was involved - the mushrooms were tasty little explosions of warm, earthy goodness, and anything else just seemed extraneous. The bright, tangy notes of the side salad did provide a good counterpoint between bites, however.)

For the main course, Abby ordered the roast chicken and I went with the cassoulet. Both of these are classic bisto dishes, so, when in Rome....or when in a classic bistro, these seemed like the appropriate things to order. I've always maintained that you can judge a restaurant by it's chicken dishes - these are often the most boring dishes, so it takes some skill to make it shine - and by that standard, Hamersley's comes through in a major way. The skin was perfectly crispy, and the lemon and garlic flavors in the chicken were bold, without getting in the way.
The cassoulet is a different type of dish. It's the type of soul satisfying one pot meal that is just perfect when the weather takes a turn for the worst. I lacked the piquant, lemony notes and the variety of texture in the chicken, but it had the depth of flavor that one looks for in a dish like this. I liked it, but if I had to choose between the two, I would go with the chicken.
We finished off with a cheese plate (forgettable), chocolate cake (a bit dry) with coconut sorbet, and bananas foster bread pudding (awesome, a must order).

Pork braised in milk with roasted red pepper potato puree

Here are the ingredients you'll need for this dish. It's really pretty simple.

• 1 carrot, diced
• 1 leek (white, light green parts only), finely chopped
• 1 onion, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• bouquet garni
• 2-2.4 c whole milk
• 2-3 lb pork center cut roast

Start by seasoning the pork with salt and pepper and browning on all sides in a Dutch oven until it looks like this:
Remove and cook the onions, carrots, garlic, and leeks. After about 10 minutes, add 1/2 to 1 T flour. Stir and cook an additional minute or two. Add milk and bouquet garni. Bring to boil, stirring constantly.
Add the pork, reduce heat to low, and cover for one hour. Turn the pork occasionally and stir the content of the Dutch oven to avoid any scorching. After an hour, remove the pork and let it stand. Meanwhile, strain the solids out of the braising liquid and bring to a simmer in a separate pot. Season with salt and serve over thinly sliced pieces of pork. Here, the pork is served with blanched and sauteed green beans and potato puree with roasted red bell peppers.

Rillettes

I've been wanting to make these for a long time. It's one of the dishes that I always linger over when I flip through the Les Halles cookbook. A couple weeks ago, I was at the Garden with Elana and saw that it was special, so I had to try it. It did not disappoint. For those who aren't familiar, rillettes are a sort of pork condiment that you spread over toast and eat with mustard and cornichons.

As an aside, I'm just noticing that a lot of these posts feature pork dishes. This reminds me of a conversation I've had a couple of times. It's one of those "desert island" sort of questions. Assuming you are a full fledged omnivore (this question is pointless for veg and/or pescatarians), and you could only eat one type of animal for the rest of your life, what would it be? I go with pigs. No other animal can so efficiently produce the same range of different foods.

Anyway, back to the rillettes. You start with a few really cheap cuts. Pork shoulder (I substituted pork butt, since that's what was available), pork belly, and pork fat.
Cut up the shoulder and belly and throw it in a pot with a few cups of water and a bouquet garni. Cook the hell out of it. In the mean time, cut the fat into little cubes and stick it in a warm oven (~200-250) to render the fat.
Six hours later, take the pork out and use a couple of forks to shred it up.
The next step is to pack the pork into small jars and seal it with the rendered fat. The final step is to wait for at least three days to let all the flavors mix.

Demi glace

Last year I made demi glace for the first time. It just ran out a little while ago, so its time to reload. Making a batch of demi takes all day, but it's really worth it. I freeze the demi in ice cube trays, so I have nice little portions that I can throw into sauce. For those who aren't familiar with it, demi glace is a super concentrated concoction of veal stock and red wine. I start out with the a mirepoix (carrots, celery, and onion) and bouquet garni (thyme, parsley, bay leaf, garlic, and peppercorns wrapped in a cheesecloth). To develop the flavor in these vegetables, I roast them for a little while with tomato paste. While the vegetables are roasting, I fill a pot (or two) with veal bones that have also been roasted.
I let the veal bones simmer for a while and then add the roasted vegetables.
After several hours of simmering, strain the liquid several times (I probably passed the stock through a strainer lined with cheesecloth about 20 times). Now, you have the veal stock, which, along with some shallots and a lot of red wine, will turn into demiglace. Mix together all of these ingredients and portion them out in as many pots as possible. Spreading the liquid out in as many wide pots as possible maximizes surface area, greatly speeding up the time it takes to reduce the stock and wine mixture. Reduce, reduce, and reduce some more. In this batch, I reduced a couple of gallon to about 2 liters. This batch should last me through the year and will be a great way to add a backbone to numerous sauces, braises, and stews.