Chicken Au Vin

Coq au Vin is the French solution to a renegade rooster. Throw him in the pot, cook him all day in wine and herbs until his tough flesh falls off the bone, then flambe him with cognac just before serving. A classic of French cuisine.

Chicken au Vin is my adaptation of this dish. I prepared it for our OTBN celebration. Starting with a fryer, a staple of 5-Minute cuisine, this recipe takes more than 5 minutes to prepare but is simple enough not to tire out the cook. This is an essential reason to master 5-Minute cuisine.
Always conserve cooking energy for fun at the party.

You could put this dish together a day ahead and bake it the next.

Chicken au Vin
1 3 - 4 pound frying chicken cut into 8 pieces.
1/2 cup flour
1 tsp salt
2 TBLS olive oil
2 cups red wine
1 tsp thme
1 bay leaf
10 pearl onions
20 small carrots
Salt and pepper to taste

Heat oven to 350.
Put flour and salt in a plastic or paper bag. Add the chicken pieces and shake so they are coated with flour.
Heat olive oil in a heavy dutch oven. Fry chicken pieces in two batches so they are not crowded about 5 minutes on each side until golden brown.
Put the browned chicken skin side up into a 9 x 12 glass baking dish.
Brown the onions and carrots in the pan with the leftover chicken bits. It's worth the effort to find pearl onions - mine were hanging in a mesh bag in the supermarket produce section. They turn into sweet, tasty morsels. Add the browned pearl onions and carrots to the chicken in the baking pan.
Pour 2 cups of wine into the pot. Bring to a boil. Stir it around to get all the chicken bits into the mixture. Boil for 2 or 3 minutes. Turn off the heat. Add thyme and bay leaf. Pour the liquid over the chicken. Season with salt and pepper.

Bake the chicken until done, about 45 minutes to an hour. Turn the chicken to brown on both sides. End the baking time with the skin side up. The chicken will turn a glossy reddish-brown and the sauce will thicken.

Serve over rice or pasta.

OTBN

Open That Bottle Night is a holiday invented by Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher, a married couple formerly news editors for the Wall St. Journal. Their wine column in Friday's WSJ is worth subscribing to the paper. They debunk wine snobbery and promote a philosophy that encourages everyone to drink the wines they enjoy and ignore all the fuss.

Celebrate OTBN by opening the precious bottle of wine that you have been saving for a special occasion. That special occasion is now! Prepare a meal, invite some friends, drink the wine, and share the memories of how that bottle arrived. The wine may have turned to vinegar (they recommend having a back up bottle just in case), it may be mediocre, or delicious but the stories will be grand.

Our bottle was the last of a case of Chateauneuf du Pape that we bought in 1996 for $144, at $12/bottle unbelievably cheap for this elegant wine. For us it was a shocking amount and much more than we ever imagined spending on wine. A new acquaintance, a wine connoisseur, bought the case for us in response to my campaign to learn more about wine. Alas, our relationship was brief, telegraphed by his comment, "This wine is much too good for you," meaning that were were too unsophisticated to know the difference. We drank the wine on special occasions and at my graduation party in 1998 saving that one last bottle for another very special occasion.

It moved with us from Tennessee to California. It languished in the cupboard. Every once in a while we would come across and think "some day." It became the centerpiece of our OTBN on February 23.

We put the bottle in the middle of the table, admired the label and the pope's hat sculpted into the glass at base of the neck. We opened the wine, let it breathe, poured it into long stemmed wine glasses, sniffed, and had our first sip. I made chicken au vin, basmati rice, green leaf salad, an apple tart for dessert and set the table with cloth napkins, napkin rings and candles.

The wine was smooth, complex, not faint-away fabulous but very good with that recognizable French finish. We drank it slowly. We laughed as we remembered someone telling us that we couldn't appreciate good wine. Of course we can. And so can you. Clink glasses in a toast, look, sniff, swirl, slow down, sip, enjoy. The fragile grape becomes an enduring elixir. In the poetry of the mystics wine is the metaphor for love.

Look in the cupboards. If you missed this year's OTBN, it's never too late.

Tofu On My Mind

I visited my sister a few weeks ago and discovered her secrets to home cooked meals at the end of a long work day. Every Sunday she cooks a batch of sesame chicken, sesame tofu, brown rice, quinoa, baked squash and steamed vegetables. When she comes home, she makes up a plate and puts it in the microwave. She even has (well had - it fell on the stove and melted but she will replace it) a special lid for re-heating food on a plate.

She picked me up at the airport, we stepped into the kitchen, and in minutes dinner was ready. My favorite was the sesame tofu. She sent me home with a bag of sesame seeds. My first attempt came out crumbly instead of chunky but tasted just as good as I remembered.

My Sister's Sesame Tofu
1 pound firm tofu drained
1 TBLS vegetable oil
1/2 tsp salt
2 TBLS sesame seeds
1 tsp sesame oil

Heat the vegetable oil and salt and sesame seeds in a frying pan. Add the tofu. Mash it down with a spatula a let it brown on the bottom. My sister says, "This takes longer than you think. If you don't let it brown on the bottom, it will turn into crumbles." Turn. The tofu should end up in large brown chunks. Remove from heat and sprinkle with sesame oil. Crumbles were good too.

I've been hungry for this tofu dish ever since she made it for me. It's a good thing because the whole issue of whether or not to eat meat has just returned to my radar. Here are three articles about meat, the first 2 sent by a friend, the 3rd I read in the news AND on my daughter's blog.

Just for balance I checked out the menu from La Tour D"Argent in Paris to see what they were serving, imagining that delicious would be the guiding principle of their food choices. It didn't help with the beef issue. Their speciality is duck, raised on their own farms.

I'm still thinking. John Muir's famous quote offers the most guidance for now: "Everything in the universe is hitched up to everything else."

The Articles
1. Livestock's Long Shadow Summary of a recent report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization www.fao.org/ag/magazine/0612sp1.htm
The U.N. report says that 18 per cent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming come from livestock, including chickens, pigs, cattle, and others -- that's more emissions than from cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together. The researchers found that, when it's all added up, the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by going vegetarian than by switching to a Prius.

2. Rethinking the Meat Guzzler http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/012808EB.shtml
In The New York Times, Mark Bittman says, "A sea change in the consumption of a resource that Americans take for granted may be in store - something cheap, plentiful, widely enjoyed and a part of daily life. And it isn't oil. It's meat. If price spikes don't change eating habits, perhaps the combination of deforestation, pollution, climate change, starvation, heart disease and animal cruelty will gradually encourage the simple daily act of eating more plants and fewer animals."

3. Government orders biggest-ever U.S. beef recall
USDA says sick cows weren't inspected - video purportedly shows workers abusing them
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/18/MNBLV4EPE.DTL&hw=meat&sn=002&sc=547

Gourmet Feast for Two
5 Minutes to Prepare, 20 Minutes to Cook







Salmon
1 large piece of salmon (about 12 oz)
1 TBLS mustard
1/2 onion sliced
olive oil
sea salt and pepper

Asparagus
1 bunch asparagus
olive oil
sea salt and pepper
lemon

Potatoes
6 - 8 small potatoes - fingerling or red
sea salt
olive oil
fresh rosemary or dried

Pre-heat oven to 400

Wash potatoes. Poke with a fork. Put on a plate and cover with a microwave lid or plastic wrap. Microwave on high for 3 - 4 minutes until tender but still firm.

Wash asparagus and drain.

Put salmon skin side down on a flat pan covered with aluminum foil for easy clean-up.
Coat the top of the salmon with mustard.
Arrange onion slices on top.
Drizzle with olive oil, sea salt and pepper.

Arrange asparagus in one layer on a baking pan. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with sea salt.

Put the microwaved potatoes in a pie tin. Sprinkle with olive oil, sea salt and rosemary.

Put everything in the 400 degree oven at the same time. It should all be ready in about 20 - 25 minutes. Squeeze lemon juice on the asparagus and garnish with lemon slices before serving.

A Spot of Beauty

Last year I changed one habit. I got tired of the pile of random papers on top of the chest of drawers. I removed the pile and vowed to keep just that one spot a place of beauty. I filled the spot with a vase of fresh flowers.

I've kept up the practice. I haven't expanded to other piles in my house, but for now, this is enough.

Sometimes I buy the flowers. Star lilies are $3 a bunch at the farmer's market or $4 at the supermarket. They fill the house with fragrance and last about 2 weeks. Sometimes I bring in flowers and branches from outside like this one from the camelia bush that is blooming in our back yard.

Recipe for a spot of beauty

Pick a spot that you want to transform into a spot of beauty

Place a vase or large water glass there.

Fill it with flowers, branches, or other growing things.

It will be there waiting for you. Enjoy