Anniversary notes from the road

The first anniversary of Blue Kitchen finds us on the road. If you’re even a semi-regular reader, you know we’re big fans of road trips.

Well, this one’s a doozy. As a belated celebration of another anniversary, a big-numbered wedding anniversary for us, Marion and I are driving California’s Pacific Coast Highway, from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Big city fun with friends at each end and hundreds of miles of ocean vistas, redwood forests and mountains in between—along what has been called one of the most beautiful, scenic coastlines in the world. With stops in Monterey, Big Sur and Pismo Beach [fans of Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny will understand why we’re delighted to be staying here]. If you’re reading this the day it was posted, we’re probably about halfway to LA right now.

In honor of this pair of anniversaries, I’m reposting the first dish I ever posted on Blue Kitchen, Chicken and Wine. It’s especially appropriate because it’s also the first dish I ever cooked for Marion. And like our life together, it just keeps evolving and getting better.

Chicken and Wine: An evolutionary tale

No, the title doesn’t refer to the theory—still hotly debated, apparently—that birds evolved from dinosaurs [although the thought of dining on a dinosaur’s distant relative is pretty cool, you have to admit]. It has to do with how cooking and recipes naturally evolve over time.

This recipe is one I’ve made pretty much since I began cooking. And just as my cooking has, it’s evolved and become a little more refined, a little more complex over time. So it’s fitting it should be the very first recipe on Blue Kitchen.

Over the years, I’ve experimented with cooking times, tweaked the herbs and messed with the sauce in various efforts to freshen up a meal that family and friends already loved. There’ve been a couple notable failures: Adding chicken stock to the sauce for more flavor—the flavor it added was chicken soup. And adding a little dried thyme—everyone agreed the “thymeless classic” was better.

There has also been a notable success in the last couple of years: Adding Herbes de Provence, a wonderfully aromatic blend of [typically dried] herbs and lavender flowers used in the cuisine of the Provence region of the south of France. The mix of herbs varies—the blend I use contains rosemary, French thyme, tarragon, basil, savory, cracked fennel, lavender and marjoram. This simple addition gives the dish a complexity the bay leaves alone couldn’t deliver.

Chicken and Wine, as I prepare it, is quite distinct from the classic French coq au vin. It uses white wine instead of red, for one thing, and the cooking time is much shorter; coq au vin pretty much demands to be cooked a day ahead and allowed to swap flavors in the fridge overnight. This dish is best when served immediately after cooking.

There’s a comfort food aspect to this dish that makes it a great family meal. But it also has a kind of rustic elegance that makes it good company food too. So here’s the recipe—at least how I’m making it right now.

Chicken and Wine
Serves 4

4 chicken leg quarters, trimmed and cut into drumsticks and thighs
1-1/2 teaspoons Herbes de Provence, divided
Salt, pepper to taste
Flour
2 Tablespoons canola oil
3 medium carrots, peeled and sliced diagonally into 3/4″ pieces
1 medium yellow onion, chopped
2 medium garlic cloves, minced
2 cups dry white wine
2 Turkish bay leaves
Cornstarch (optional)
Cooked white rice

Season both sides of the chicken with salt, pepper and half the Herbes de Provence. Dredge chicken in flour and shake off excess. I generally put a couple of heaping soupspoonsful of flour in a plastic bag, add the chicken, twist the top shut and shake it. Nice and easy.

Heat a large, deep skillet over medium high heat. Add oil and arrange chicken in a single layer, skin side down. Cook until skin is golden brown, 4 to 6 minutes, then turn and brown the other side, 3 to 5 minutes. Transfer chicken to plate and reduce heat to medium. Pour off all but 2 tablespoons of fat.

Add carrots to skillet and cook for 2 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add onion and cook until it softens and becomes translucent, 3 to 5 minutes. Stir in remaining Herbes de Provence [and bask in the amazing aroma it releases when it hits the pan]. Stir in garlic and cook for about 30 seconds [ditto with the aroma].

Add wine, stirring and scraping up any browned bits from the skillet. Add bay leaves. Return chicken to the pan along with any juices, nestling the pieces among the carrot chunks [see Kitchen Notes below]. The chicken should not be covered by the wine, but just sit in it. This keeps the skin a nice golden color, instead of turning it all pale and stewlike. Reduce the flame to low, cover the pan and let it simmer, checking occasionally to make sure nothing is sticking or burning. If the liquid is cooking down too much, add a little water, but do so sparingly. After for 20 to 25 minutes, pierce a piece of chicken at its thickest part; if the juices run clear, it’s done.

And now for the sauce. I used to thicken it at the end; now I tend to use it as it is from the pan. If you wish to thicken it—or to make more sauce if it’s reduced down too much—here’s how. Remove the chicken to a plate and tent with foil to keep it warm. In a small bowl dissolve 1 tablespoon of cornstarch in 2 tablespoons of cold water, stirring carefully and working out lumps against the side of the bowl—any lumps in the mixture will become lumps in your sauce. Spoon a little sauce from the pan into the cornstarch mixture to warm it up. Spoon in some more. Seriously. Then slooooowly drizzle the cornstarch mixture into the sauce, stirring constantly, to avoid lots of nasty little lumps from forming in the sauce. All this said, you probably won’t totally avoid a few little lumps. Oh, well.

Now here’s a strange thing about thickening sauces with cornstarch: You have to do it at the very end. Your sauce will thicken, maybe even to the point that you have to add a little water to thin it back down—which is great if you want to make [a little bit] more sauce at the end. But if you continue to cook the sauce, it will thin out again.

Divide the chicken among four plates, a drumstick and thigh for each, and place a serving of rice next to it. Spoon carrots and sauce over the rice and spoon a little sauce around the chicken. Green beans, asparagus or a mesclun salad make good accompaniments.

Kitchen Notes

I’ve found the most efficient use of skillet space for cooking this dish is to arrange the chicken pieces in a pinwheel. It also just looks elegant if a guest walks into the kitchen, invited or otherwise, while you’re cooking and plating the meal.

To rinse or not to rinse. Salmonella is an ongoing issue with uncooked chicken. So do you rinse it or not? Current wisdom says no. You’re going to cook the chicken thoroughly anyway, and rinsing it can just splash water—and probably salmonella-causing bacteria—all over the sink and counter.

For dried herbs and spices, my go to place in Chicago is The Spice House. Their merchandise is always fresher, better and less expensive than the ubiquitous jars in the grocery store. And there is waaaaay more to choose from. I know I will rave about this place more in the future, so I’ll stop for now. They have locations in Chicago’s Old Town, Evanston and Milwaukee; they also sell online.

Personal Note

One more reason I launched Blue Kitchen with this dish is that it’s the first dish I cooked for my wife Marion, on our second date. She had cooked for me on our first date. I recently read somewhere that cooking for a date is a big damned deal step that should be saved until you’ve been dating a while, and it’s really easy to scare someone off. I guess Marion and I aren’t that easily spooked.

Also this week in Blue Kitchen

Nada. No boombox, no WTF. They’ll be back next week. So will we.