Almost forgotten French classic: "Coq au vin"

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For some obscure reasons, it is now extremely difficult to find Coq au vin at the table of most restaurants with the exception of its various deconstructed versions (e.g. an onion on one side of a rectangular white plate, a delicately stewed piece of chicken in the middle with a wine reduction sauce drizzled around it and a few sautéed wild mushrooms at the other side of the plate).

As a matter of fact, most stews are now only made in some rare home kitchen as they all disappeared from restaurant menus and cookbooks in the 70s, especially here in North America. True: stews are hard to plate in a stylish way and new restaurant trends often focus on design more then on taste. Besides, a whole generation, fed on stew for the entire duration of their childhood have, understandably, came to expect something else from their gastronomic experience. This is not an irreversible tendency however so I encourage all of you to join the fight against the culinary extinction of stews in your own kitchen. This is not just a struggle for the survival of one or a few dishes; it is a struggle for culinary diversity; it is a struggle for kitchen liberation and free expression! Cooking men (and women, to be post-feminist) of all countries, unite!

Well, err… I mean… don’t you feel like winter is a perfect season for cooking stew?

Yesterday, I cooked one of the best chicken stew I know: coq au vin. It is a fairly simple French recipe ideally made with older chicken. I bought two small specimens of what the grocery label identified as ‘mature chicken’. They are, if I am right, hens raised for their eggs but whose old age made them less productive. As such, they were probably of the factory farmed type which I didn’t appreciate much in some recent dishes and that prompted me to research the topic and which was eventually discussed so eloquently by Kate at the Accidental Hedonist. It turns out that these ‘mature chicken’, although not always raised in the best conditions, have much more flavour then regular roasters but their meat can be extremely tough and needs long and patient cooking. When you don’t have the money to invest in free-range organic heritage birds, these are certainly a good cost effective solution for stews and broths. If you do have the money, you are still better with an older specimen; ask your chicken provider in advance.

Here’s my recipe:

First, split each of your chicken into 2 drumsticks, 2 thighs, 2 wings, and 2 breasts. Reserve the carcass to make broth. This is not as easy as it sounds since the older birds are much tougher then most commercially available chicken.

Second, brown the carcass in the oven for 45 minutes at 400º F or until they reach that perfect brown colour. Use it to make a broth adding a simple mirepoix (carrot, celery and onion), bay leaves, a few whole pepper corns and, one or a few sprig of thyme. Let simmer for at least 2 hours of even better as long as 8 to 10 hours skimming regularly. Strain and reserve the broth. (alternatively use store bought broth)

In the meantime:

• Peel some pearl onions. To do this, you can blanch them in boiling water for a few minutes. After this treatment, the skins should slide off the onion easily.
• Clean a good quantity of mushrooms.
• Brown the chicken in a medium sized pot with some chopped bacon and olive oil. Reserve. (note, you can did the chicken in flour before browning it, this will help thickening the sauce)
• Brown the mushroom in the fat remaining in the pot. Reserve.

At that point you are ready to really start working on the stew. In the pot where you browned the chicken and the mushrooms, add the chicken and the chicken stock and let reduce by at least half to concentrate the flavour. At that point, add as much red wine as you can afford; I personally used one whole bottle for two small birds (a good chicken stock to wine ratio: 1:1). Adjust seasoning and add one bay leaf and a sprig of thyme (by that time, the bay leaves and thyme from the broth have lost some of their punch). Let simmer for as long as it is needed to cook the chicken minus about 30 minutes (you'll have to use your own judgement as each chicken cooks differently; it took almost 3 hours in my case). Add the onions and mushrooms and finish cooking.

This recipe produces a fairly thin but extremely flavourful sauce. You can thicken it out by adding corn starch mixed in cold water or a commercial sauce thickener. It is absolutely not a necessary step but I personaly like the sauce to be thick enough to stick to my food, not more then necessary though. Finally, a light sprinkle of fresh parsley adds a delicate touch of freshness to this otherwise hearty dish.

I like to serve this delicious stew with noodles but I bet mashed potatoes or even rice would do a great job too but you certainly need to get some kind of starch to soak up the delightful sauce.

After "Clair de Lune" it is now the turn of "Cafe Henry Burger" to shut its doors

I just read this article about to closure of one of the best restaurant in Ottawa. This happens just weeks after another famed local restaurant, Clair de Lune, was also shut down after many years in the business. Both restaurants attracted the rich, famous and powerful as well as young lovers on first dates or local foodies in search of culinary excitements. In both cases, business was not what it used to be and the owner of Cafe Henry Burger even blames the recent "greater scrutiny of public servants' expense accounts". The food of these two restaurants was excellent but for what I have seen it was also a little bit on the traditional side; lets say that they were more into the French Laundry's classicality then El Bulli's experimentations.

But lets be frank here, Ottawa is not and I don't even believe that it once was a great city to dine out. When we move here from Toronto, one of the first things Fufu realized was that there were almost more outdoor sports shops then restaurants in the city. Well it is not totally true but the amounts of outdoor sports shops here is quite spectacular when compared with that of restaurants. Ottawa seem to be a place to play outside but not a place to socialize and eat. We are still slowly discovering the city but so far our list of interesting places (budget-wise or gastronomically-wise) is quite short. It seems there is neither offer nor demand for cheap AND good restaurants in the area... and now we just lost two of the good restaurants in this city.

Smoked mackerel with hoisin sauce on avocado salad

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I just discovered smoked mackerel and I love it! It's fairly cheap, relatively easy to find, at least around here, and can be integrated into a delicious appetizer in less time than it takes to spell the word 'delicious'.

A few months ago, I went to a nice local restaurant called Les Fougères for Fufu’s birthday and had smoked mackerel served on avocado salad with a touch of hoisin sauce. Both Fufu and I loved the dish and got me thinking a lot. The idea is so simple and the taste was simply fantastic. Aki and Alex of Ideas in Food seemed to agree by choosing a slightly different version of this dish for their maple syrup menu. Tonight I made my own version for the first time and served it as an appetizer. We didn’t have any hoisin sauce (I left my bottle at my mom’s place during the holidays) so I mixed together some oyster sauce, hot sauce and a touch of vinegar to make a different sauce which worked quite well. The avocados were diced with a bit of tomatoes (which is totally unnecessary but add a nice touch of red) and sprinkled with a bit of lemon juice.

The next time however, because there will be a next time, I will be more gentle with the sauce. Less sauce poured in finer droplets would improve presentation but also the overall mouth feel since this kind of sauce is quite powerful when taken alone or in too large quantity. I would also chop the avocado more finely for a nicer presentation. I am not sure whether or not I prefer the skin-on or skinless version of the dish; the mackerel skin is beautiful and definitively flavourful but is a bit too chewy to integrate well with the other ingredients. A slight sweet onion (or even chayote) crunch would also improve the avocado salad while a delicate sprinkle of chopped cilantro would add an attractive and fragrant finish to the whole dish.

Paper chef #14 - quinoa, yogurt, cashew nuts and 'babies'

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It is that time of the month again when bloggers from around the world put their intellect to work in order to create exiting dishes around four selected ingredients in an attempt to reach the everlasting glory of winning the paper chef challenge. The ingredients for this 14th edition of Paper Chef were:

Quinoa,
Yoghurt (with an ‘h’),
Cashew nuts and,
Babies (human babies being unaffordable these days and with all those scary prion diseases kicking around we were encouraged to chose other species, such as lamb or poussin, or something with the word baby in it, such as baby spinach or baby bok choy)

Since I love the list of ingredients that were given to us by Owen at Tomatilla and by Mrs D and Chopper at Belly Timber, I have decided to offer you a full day worth of kitchen experiments. That means breakfast, lunch and diner. It also means that I have a lot to write about so let’s get started.

Breakfast:

French Canadian quinoa crepe with cashew butter and maple syrup.

In my family, as well as in most French Canadian families, THE cooking reference is, and has been for decades, “L’Encyclopédie de la cuisine” by Jehane Benoit (better known locally as Madame Benoit). Her place in French Canadian cooking resemble the one of Julia Child in American cooking. As such, the crepe recipe that my family used, at least since I am born, comes from that book. I know, who needs a recipe for crepes? Well, I do... for some reason, crepe is one of those things that I cook only using a recipe and frankly I can't explain why. Therefore this next recipe is based on Madame Benoit’s recipe but, in order to keep with the themed ingredients, I replaced one cup of all purpose flour with one cup of quinoa flour and one cup of milk with one cup of yogurt. Yes, quinoa flour does exists! And, surprisingly, it smells a bit like spinach... I am learning new things everyday.

Quinoa crepe recipe

1 cup All purpose flour
1 cup Quinoa flour
One pinch of salt
2 T spoons of sugar
4 large eggs (baby chicken)
2 cups of milk
1 cup of yogurt
1 T spoon of vanilla extract
2 T spoons of melted butter

All you need to do is to mix all the ingredients together; let the whole mixture sit in the fridge for an hour or so and cook your crepe in a frying pan (ideally non-stick). The trick is to make them really thin but this batter, either because of the quinoa or the yogurt, makes crepes that are a bit more fragile (I am betting on quinoa) so be gentle.

I also made a sauce with maple syrup and cashew butter to put on top of our crepes this morning. Usually I don’t bother adding anything but maple syrup on my crepes but the addition of cashew butter was a nice one. The slight spinach smell that came from the quinoa flour was a bit weird at first but as we started eating, we could not care less. Fufu also made a nice fruit salad on the side that we devoured as fast as we engulfed the crepes.

Lunch:

Quinoa stuffed crepes with sprouts salad

Yes, you guessed it, we made too much crepe batter for only two persons and had to find a way to make something else out of it. The solution was simple: stuffed crepes. Well, ok, I'll be honest with you: I always make more crepe batter then I need because I love to snack on them and to stuff them. You now know the recipe for our quinoa crepes, so here is the recipe for our stuffing:

Quinoa crepe stuffing (just mix everything together)

1 package of frozen spinach (frozen spinach are always drier than fresh ones cooked at home, but for those who are crazy about the theme ingredients, you could use baby spinach and dry them in a towel)
1 large carrot, grated (ok, use baby carrots if you want)
2 cups of cooked quinoa
1 cup of grated cheese (we used a very local day-fresh 'cheddar' cheese… the stuff we put on poutine around here)
½ cup of grated parmesan
1 pinch of each: nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves and cumin (can't be more precise than that but trust your tastebuds to adjust seasoning to your own taste)
Cayenne pepper (to taste)
Salt and pepper

I also made a nice yogurt based sauce to go with these crepes.

Yogurt-curry sauce

1 cup of yogurt (we used sour cream because we already had many uses planed for the little yogurt we had at this point)
1 T spoon cashew butter
1 T spoon peanut oil (Does cashew oil exist?...)
1 t spoon of apple cider vinegar
½ t spoon to 1 t spoon of curry powder
1 t spoon of hot sauce (we used the Vietnamese version)
Salt
White wine to thin out the sauce to the desired consistency

As for the salad, it is made of various sprouts: (sprouts are babies!) broccoli sprouts, alfalfa sprouts and snow pea sprouts. It also contained red and yellow bell peppers, a bit of good olive oil, a squish of lemon juice, salt and pepper.

The result was greatly exceeding our expectations. I think it is the spices in the crepe stuffing that made the difference; we were lucky (or skilled enough?) to strike the right balance of flavour.

Diner

The lamb extravaganza

I bought two nice racks of lamb for diner. I don’t know what got into me; these delicious baby sheep ribs are too expensive for our weekly food budget. I felt I had to make something really good out of them in order to be forgiven for my extravagance. This is probably why I spent so much time in the kitchen.

In fact, I made a man of myself today and went to work early. And it didn’t take me long to produce. By mid-afternoon, my girlfriend, Fufu, already had a bun in the oven. And I am the one who made it! [insert emoticon: idiotic proud macho smile after bad sexist joke].

The bun in question was a multigrain cashew nut loaf and was more specifically made of:

Whole wheat all purpose flour
White bread flour
Quinoa flour
Oat flour
Oatmeal
Rye flour
Buckwheat flour
Ground flax seeds
Toasted Cashew nuts
Yogurt
Instant yeast
Maple syrup (to activate the yeast)
Salt
Water

Before baking it, I puffed quinoa seeds the way I puffed wild rice or plain regular rice a few months ago and make a nice crust on the loaf with it.

Since I always make bread by feel and taste (yes I do taste raw dough)I can't give you the specific amounts of each ingredients used but I am guessing half of the loaf was made of the two types of wheat flour. This is necessary to give the bread some fluffyness. Even then, this bread was still quite dense as any multigrain bread should be. Both Fufu and I especially liked the quinoa crust on it: it was crunchy and slightly salty while the interior of the bread was moist and truly tasted like the grains it was made off, not only wheat. The loaf is huge so I guess we'll have to make soup to finish eating it up.

At first I was affraid that the yogurt would mess up the dough but the bread turned out to be perfect... When adding it I was guessing it would do the same effect as milk does in some bread recipe and it did: it helped the loaf to stay moist and probably helped tastewise. It was a wild guess though since I am not usually a very good baker. Ah! the risks we all take to participate to this edition of Paper Chef!

Here is another picture of our newborn baby. We are very proud of this very healthy cutie.

We ate a few slices of this bread with a store bought baby pig (porcelet in French) and duck rillette.

The piece de resistance for our diner was, as you now know, the lamb. We marinated it 24 hours with:

Yogurt marinade

- Yogurt
- The zest and juice of one orange
- Chopped parsley
- Chopped lemon balm
- Cumin
- Coriander seeds
- Pepper flakes
- Worcestershire sauce
- One or two drops of liquid smoke (I know it sounds terrible but if you read the label, you’ll see there is nothing to be afraid of and if used sparingly it has the power to add wonderful flavours to a dish).

The cashew nut crust was made of:

- 1 cup of cashew nuts
- The zest of ½ a lemon
- ⅓ cup of parsley and lemon balm
- 1 T spoon of olive oil
- 2-3 T spoons of puffed quinoa
- 1 egg (baby chicken)
- Salt and pepper

We first put the roast under the broiler and then cooked the meat on a fairly low heat to preserve its tenderness. Just before taking it out of the oven, we finished the browning of the crust by using the broiler for a second time. We served it with baby carrots and a quinoa, wild rice and lima bean salad. Chopped parsley, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper were added to the salad.


The presentation on the plate was quite ordinary despites my efforts but almost everything else was perfect. If I had to make this dish a second time, I would prepare a finer crust and find a better way to make it stick to the lamb. The crust I made was peeling off the lamb at times when slicing the meat and I just hate having to replace bits of crust on the meat when plating. Also, since both Fufu and I like to eat our meat rare to medium rare, that we marinated the lamb in yogurt (which helps tenderizing it) and that we had been extra careful when cooking it (low temperature), I believe the extra fat left next to the bone is useless. In fact, it didn't even have the time to render and it is not very pleasant presentation-wise (as you can see in the pictures). As such, I would remove it next time. The lamb was already extremely tender and while it might help adding flavour I am guessing a much smaller amount would work as well if not better.

We also had a nice salad to accompany our meal. It was made of baby spinach, red and yellow bell pepper, shallot and puffed quinoa. We served it with a nice yogurt dressing.

Yogurt dressing

- ½ cup of yogurt
- 1 finely diced shallot
- Zest and juice of ½ lemon
- 1 t spoon of olive oil
- Salt and pepper
- White wine to thin it out

It was a very good salad but I would advise anyone who intend to reproduce it to reduce the amount of shallot that you see on the picture or to replace it with a sweeter type of onion. We first planned to make this salad with a sweet red onion but had none available to us tonight so we opted for shallots, which are generally stronger in flavour.

Finally, and I am still wondering why because we clearly overate during the whole day, I also made a nice comforting desert: quinoa pudding. This recipe is loosely based on a very traditional rice pudding and frankly tastes pretty much like one too.

Quinoa pudding


- 3 cups of milk
- ½ cup of quinoa
- 1 egg (baby chicken)
- 1 t spoon of vanilla
- ¼ t spoon of cinnamon
- ⅛ t spoon of nutmeg
- 1/3 cup of raisins
- 1/3 cup of brown sugar
- One pinch of salt

- 1 T spoon of starch diluted in cold water

- 1/3 cup of roasted cashew nuts to serve

Cook the quinoa with all the ingredients but the egg, the starch and cashew nuts. Take the mixture away from the fire for a good 20 minutes to reduce the temperature, temper the eggs and then mix everything vigorously. Put on simmer stirring constantly until the whole mixture thickens. At this point, you can thicken it even more using the starch (unlike rice, quinoa has very little starch in it). Serve warm or cold with roasted cashew nuts.

Now that all the cooking is done and that this post is almost finished, all I need to do is relax and digest this whole day of quinoa, cashew nuts, yogurt and ‘babies’. Both Fufu and I had a lot of fun playing with these ingredients but I’m glad it is over now… it is too much to write about in a single post… we just got carried away this time I guess.

UPDATE: go see the round up on Belly Timber

Paper Chef

The art of recycling - apple crust and granite

I made these two dishes long ago and never took the time to write about them. I like to talk about my big successes as well as my catastrophic failures in the kitchen; I also like to share my thoughts on improving dishes that were good but not perfect. The problem here is that my dishes were good, although far from being faultless, but I still have no idea on how to make them better. This probably explains why it took me so long to write about them. I could forget about these dishes and move to more interesting topics but I also love discussing strategies to avoid waste and this is exactly what this post is about.

Months ago, when snow didn’t cover the ground and even before the leaves turned yellow and red, I bought stupid amounts of apples. I can’t help it; the local apples are so good when in seasons. The problem is that after a few days (not even a week) their taste change, they loose their delicious sourness and I stop eating them. When they are fresh, I could eat 10 of them or more in a day but when they are not there is not much left to do but to cook them. This is why I bake so many apple crisps during the fall season. To make this easy desert, you don’t really need a recipe and it is both fast and simple. The problem is that if, like me, you peel your apples before cooking them, you end up with big bowls of unnecessary waste.

Traditionally my answer to this was to make apple jelly; apple peels are full of flavour and pectin and make great jellies. However, I don’t like jellies and jams that much. I find them overly sweet for my palate in the morning; they are fine in deserts but I am not much of a baker. This year, I decided to make granite with them instead. I made a light syrup by cooking the apple peels in water and sugar and then strained it and froze it after incorporating a bit of calvados. The result, I must admit, was good but not good enough to be worth of mention in any cookbook, including the bad ones. Unsurprisingly, it tasted like cooked apples; a taste which I didn’t find too pleasant in a frozen desert.

I will probably stick with the jelly next year if I can’t find a better idea until then.

Back from vacation

I surely neglected this blog over the last weeks. I was away celebrating the holidays with my family and did not take much time to cook and even less to blog about it. Most other food bloggers had a lot to say about their holiday feasts, but I decided to take some vacations from my blog instead. I had great food during these few weeks: delicious quails with cognac infused grapes, a fantastic although a bit weird Tunisian stew: mloukhia, Peking duck, great brunches, not to mention two different fondues and a Korean diner featuring the always tasty BBQ short ribs. In fact, I simply enjoyed all my meals without having these weird blogger's after thoughts about the best way to write about my experiences and discoveries or about the best light to take pictures.

But do not worry! I am now thinking about my next experimentations, about the best way to enlarge my repertoire and sharpen my cooking skills... And I still have to tell you about some of my pre-Christmas (mis)adventures in the kitchen including my glazed chestnuts experiments.

Happy New Year!