French Cooking - Coq au Vin

The other night I thought I would have a crack at cooking something uniquely French. After all I have been here for many months, and I am not sure that buying some cheese and eating it with a baguette really counts as putting together traditional French cuisine.

After scouring some recipe sites on the internet, I came up with something that looked not overly difficult, and would hopefully be pretty tasty. I settled on 'Coq au Vin' (chicken in wine) a traditional French dish, the variation of which I made was Alsace (because I used Reisling) as the major wine.

So I ventured out to the supermarket (in the freezing cold, its like 5 degrees here at the moment) and bought my ingredients, chicken thighs, mushrooms, lardons (cubed bacon) thyme, reisling, onions, garlic, chicken stock, flour and a bay leaf (which I could not find).

After preparing all of the ingredients the first thing to do was to give the chicken a coating of flour mixed with some salt and pepper. Once the chicken was coated, I was to lightly fry both

sides of the chicken in some oil in a large pot, that was to be used for actually making the dish. I gave the chicken about 3 mins on both sides, so the peices were slightly yellowly/brown. (About the same colour of the pretty autumn leaves outside)

I then removed the chicken from the oil with some tongs, which I had to go all the way to IKEA to purchase. Apparently French people do not use tongs. I had looked in pretty much every shop in Paris that sells kitchen utensils for some tongs, with no luck. So I had to go and buy some from the Swedes. I have no idea how they go about cooking sausages here without tongs. I told my French friend, that a kitchen without tongs is like having a car without a steering wheel.

So i removed the chicken from the oil and put it aside on a plate. I turned the heat down a little, and added to the oil, the mushrooms, lardons, onions and garlic. I cooked this for about 5 minutes until the onions and mushrooms began to turn a little brown.

At this point I added my chicken stock and Riesling and mixed it all together throughly. I also added my thyme (and would have added a bay leaf at this point had I had one). It created a

wonderfully fragrant broth. I then turned the heat right up, in order to bring the broth to a boil. Once the broth came to a boil, it was time to pop the chicken back into pot with the broth, turn the heat down, pop the lid on, and leave it to simmer for about half and hour.

After the half an hour, the smell of the dish was wafting tastily throughout the house, making me very hungry.

I had prepared with the dish some mash potatos, couscous, and some green beans. I removed the chicken from the broth and placed it on the plate. I then spooned some generous portions of the broth to cover the chicken as well as all over the potatos and couscous.

We sat down at the table and then it was time for the all important first taste. Smelling the aroma whilst I was slaving over the stove for a half an hour or so, left my mouth keen to jump straight in. I put the first forkfull in my mouth and I was pleasantly suprised with the taste. It wasn't as terrible as I had feared. In fact if I do say so myself, it was pretty bloody good, and we began to eat away at the Coq au Vin. It had the sweetness of the Reisling as a dominating flavour but it was well balanced with the aromatic thyme, salty lardons and

the mushrooms providing a good balance to the sweet wine.

All in all it has left me keen to try something a little more difficult and hopefully even more tastier next time.