It is fun how every now and then D goes grocery shopping and some random electron strikes true and reminds him of a dish prepared in a previous life. Like this one. Supposedly it's French, I'm sure with a fancy name I don't care about, and also a long and complicated recipe, that we, of course, ignored and simplified.
Need:
- tablespoon of cooking oil
- 300g of fatty bacon
- 2 large boneless chicken thighs with skin
- at least 500 g of chicken wings
- 2 young onions (or a pile of shallots)
- 2 large carrots
- (mushrooms)
- 6 cloves of garlic
- 1/2 litres of white cooking wine (or more, yes, it's a lot)
- water
- salt
- pepper
- 5 x 10cm sprigs of fresh rosemary
- 10 x 10cm sprigs of fresh thyme
- (garlic paste)
- (butter)
- (vegetable stock)
- (other provencal herbs)
- fresh cream
Chicken portion has to have both wings or drumsticks (for the cartilage bits to thicken the final sauce) and thighs (for the skin collagen and also to get some actual meat into the dish, since everyone knows there is basically none of that on the wings.) Breast-fillet meat can be added in small quantities.
Cover deep copper pan with a thin film of cooking oil to lessen sticking.
Cut up the bacon and fry it to render the fat, leave the bacon bits in pan (because too lazy to take them out).
Roughly chop the chicken, and fry the skin side in the bacon fat until browned, then remove meat from pan and set aside.
Clean and chop the onions, garlic, carrots (and mushrooms, but we didn't have any this time).
Caramelise the onions, add some butter if not enough fat left on the pan. Do not add minced garlic at the same time, it'll just burn.
When onions almost golden, add the garlic and brown it a bit. When anything sticks, lift if off using small quantities of white wine.
Meat back into the pan, also add the carrots, mushrooms and herbs (without taking them off the branch).
Pour in the rest of the white wine and top up with water until all the solids mostly covered.
Season with a generous amount of salt and pepper, cover with a lid and leave to simmer for up to an hour. Every 10-ish minutes mix to make sure none of the sticky-outy bits (thanks, S, we'll never be able to escape this expression now) are left uncooked.
Side note.
A month or so ago I spotted some herbivore damage on the jade plant (Crassula ovata) that is hiding from nightly frosts in our living room. Found out that the culprit was a cm long brown caterpillar. Took some research effort, but we were mostly certain that it was a safe local species (and not the spiky toxic asshole nor the fucker chinese moth due to whose damage I have to throw away basically half of our trees) so since the plant could take it, left it alone. Except that a few days later I found another one of these, this time hanging outdoors from our bike-cover roof when the temperature was about to fall below zero in the evening. And then there were two. But a few more days later I get back indoors from taking the bin out, glance right and there is another one calmly sitting on my shoulder. By this point, one of the first two had decided to take a tour of its lodgings, so we found it 3 meters away from the plant hanging at the top of the door, so I did initially suspect that the one now hitching a ride on me, might have been one of the earlier ones, but after a while of squirming on the floor trying to look for a little brown stick in a pile of foliage, managed to determine that we indeed now had three of these pets to stare at from the sofa instead of a TV. Normal. Occasionally they kept up their excursions, up a curtain or the mango tree, for example, sometimes disappearing for days whoknowswhere, but all in all, at least two are still there grown to 3 cm and a lot fatter, hiding under a cabbage leaf we hung into the Crassula to vary the sticks' diet. Oh yes, the stick part - when not eating or capering about, they do some sort of stiff-stick impression holding on the the plant with the hind legs and poking straight out in a (random?) direction.
Side note from the side note.
We've been calling them drongu(la)s(es) since the start, and I only found out a week or so ago why. Since everything and anything in this house tends to obtain a random non-word-name sooner or later, it did not even occur to me to wonder, but it turned out that drong (or sth similar at least) means a stick in Polish. So now you know.
In any case... The leaves from the thyme and rosemary will drop off during the cooking process, but the stems will probably get stuck under chicken pieces or sth, poke out of the sauce and wobble around like dronguses at a crazy rave party. I almost collapsed laughing.
After about 45 minutes of boiling check that the meat is supersoft and falling off the bones and taste the liquid. Season with additional herbs-salt-pepper-garlic paste if needed. (Oh yes, can also use stock (cubes), but we did not have any.)
Leave the lid off until the liquid reduces to about a half, then add fresh cream, let it warm up and serve with steamed potatoes.
(And in case of a perfect match, one person gets to eat all the skin bits and the other gets to eat all the cartilage bits, because the other way around these particular pieces are disgusting to the people involved. Wow, what a clear sentence this turned into...)
Cheers,
Hedi
