The Wine Book Club....

This is awesome. I always want to know more about the things I love. Especially wine. So thank you to Good Wine for Under$20 for turning me onto this new Wine Book Club. Yes I have books on my night stand with over an inch of dust on them and any excuse to read more is always a good thing. The first book of the club is Vino Italiano, The Regional Wines of Italy. This should be good, it has wonderful reviews and I know nothing really of Italian wines beyond Chianti. Now Missouri wines, California, even some limited knowledge of French... those I know.. but Italy is going to be a whole new experience. This should be fun. If it sounds fun to you also, check out the article at McDuff's Food & Wine Trail.

Coq Au Vin - Can we improve on Alton Brown's recipe - I think not.

Alton Brown, wow. What a guy. For me, he is the pinnacle of culinary excellence. He is all that I aspire to be...lol. Watching his episode, Crazy for Coq Au Vin, on Good Eats, I knew I had to make this dish. That was a couple of years ago. Since then I have made this dish several times, and made a few small changes here and there. Have I improved it? I don't think I could do that. But what I have done is made it my own. I have tried variation of this dish, from fairly classic to quite modern takes on this dish. And I keep coming back to Alton's. His take on Coq Au Vin is fairly classic, but he keeps it very easy. I encourage you to make it your own too. This classic dish calls for Burgundy wine, which is a French wine made from the Pinot Noir grape, and is region specific to France. You can save quite a bit of money and buy a local, or Californian bottle of Pinot Noir. If I don't get a local Missouri wine, I like the Kendall Jackson Pinot Noir. The differences in wine make a huge impact on this dish, because you are going to basically marinate the chicken overnight in a ton of wine, so get a wine with flavors you like. Don't cook with it if you wouldn't drink it is the rule of thumb. I also like to add Cognac near the end for a little added richness.

The Ingredients:

Pearl onions, like 30 of them little suckers.
4 chicken thighs and legs, or 1 large stewing chicken, cut into serving pieces. I have also used a mix of thighs and breasts, but be careful that the breasts do not get dried out.
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
8 ounces salt pork, cubed - like bacon but even more fatty and tasty good!
12 ounces button mushrooms, quartered
2 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 and a half bottles good quality red wine, preferably pinot noir. Good quality doesn't mean expensive. I wouldn't pay more than $12 bucks a bottle.
1 Small bottle of Cognac, preferably good quality VSOP - also around $12 bucks here.
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 medium onion, quartered
2 stalks celery, quartered
2 medium carrots, quartered
6 cloves garlic, crushed
6 to 8 sprigs fresh thyme - I use lemon thyme, because thats what growing in my herb garden.
2 bay leafs
2 cups chicken stock or broth.

The Cooking:

Sprinkle the chicken on all sides with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper. Place the chicken pieces, a couple ,at a time, into a large (1 or 2-gallon) sealable plastic bag along with the flour. Shake to coat all of the pieces of the chicken. Remove the chicken from the bag and place on a metal rack.

Cut off the root end of each pearl onion and make an "x" with your knife in its place. Bring 3 cups of water to a boil and drop in the onions for 1 minute. Remove the onions from the pot, let them to cool, and then peel. The onions should just pop right out of their skin. Set aside.

Add a couple of tablespoons of water to a large, 12-inch saute pan over medium heat along with the salt pork. Cover and cook until the water is gone, and then continue to cook until the salt pork cubes are golden brown and crispy, about 10 minutes. Remove the pork from the pan and set aside.

In the same pan, using the remaining fat, add the onions, season, and then saute until lightly brown, approximately 10 minutes. Remove the onions from the pan and set aside. Next, brown the chicken pieces on each side until golden brown, working in batches, don't crowd the pan. Then put the chicken into a large cast iron dutch oven, or a large roasting pan.

Add the mushrooms to the same saute pan, adding the 2 tablespoon of butter if needed, and saute until they give up their liquid, approximately 5 minutes. Store the onions, mushrooms and pork in an airtight container in the refrigerator.

Pour off any remaining fat and deglaze the pan with approximately 1 cup of the wine. Pour this into the Dutch oven along with the chicken stock, tomato paste, quartered onion, carrots, celery, garlic, thyme, and bay leaf. Add all of the remaining wine. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

The next day, preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.

Place the chicken in the oven and cook for 2 to 2 1/2 hours, or until the chicken is tender. Maintain a very gentle simmer and stir occasionally.

When the chicken is done, remove it, put it in a heatproof container, cover it, and place it in the oven, turned off or set on 125 to keep your bird warm. Strain the sauce with a colander and remove the carrots, onion, celery, thyme, garlic, and bay leaf. Return the liquid to the pot, add about half of the bottle of cognac, drink the rest, and then place over medium heat. You could flambe here if you wanted to, I however don't. Why waste good alcohol? Now you want this to reduce by about a 1/3. Depending on how much liquid you actually began with, this should take a half hour up to 45 minutes. We want a nice thick sauce.

Once the sauce has thickened, add the pearl onions, mushrooms, and pork and cook for another 15 minutes or until the heated through. Taste and adjust seasoning if necessary. Reduce the head, add the Chicken, let simmer for 3-5 minutes and then serve. Alton suggests serving over egg noodles; I like garlic mashed potatoes, or potatoes browned in duck fat. Maybe add some bacon wrapped asparagus. Whatever you like!

Note: If the sauce is not thick enough, you can add a mixture of equal parts butter and flour. Take 1 tablespoon of each and knead it together. Whisk this into the sauce for 4 to 5 minutes.

Have fun with this recipe. It takes a little time, but oh my, is it ever worth it! Serve with Pinot Noir. Now I have had people ask for a merlot when I serve this, refuse them at all cost! Ha.
Make it your own and have fun with it. People ask me to make this all the time! You will love it! Thanks AB for introducing such great classic recipes to the masses!

DIY Balloon Wine

Balloon wine, oh my. Where do I start.
Balloon wine, is generally not fine wine. But balloon wine can sure hit the spot on these hot summer days. And it is a good place to jump into wine making if it is something you are interested in, and it is pretty easy. I have made six batches, each one better than the one before it. You have complete control over your wine. Not only the flavor but the quality of the wine itself all depends on the decisions you make.

First off you need a large glass jug. I use one of the large Carlo Rossi jugs. It needs to be sterile, so I let it soak filled with fairly strong bleach water. I also sterilize my utensils.

Once rinsed out clean, I add three containers of concentrate grape juice. Here is one of the first decisions you need to make, what kind of juice do you want to use. I have used anything from Welches Concord, to a White Grape with Rasberry and Apple. You could mix and match if you wanted to. Or you could buy concentrated grape juice intended for wine making and step the quality of your wine up a little bit.

Now normally if you are making juice, you add three containers of water for each container of juice. When making wine, add two containers of water per container of juice. But don't add it just yet...

The next decision comes in the form of how sweet do you want your wine to be? This will determine how much sugar we will add. A cup of sugar will produce a very dry wine. I have used up to 3 cups and got a fairly sweet wine. You could use more if desired. I brought my six cups of water to a quick boil, for sanitation, and then added my sugar to the water, so it mixes a little easier as well. Then add this to your juice now in the jug.

Mix. You can stir or shake(with the lid on). Let it cool for a few minutes.

Add your yeast. I have used Fast Acting bread yeast, just one packet of Fleischmann's does the trick. Or you could get real wine yeast and again step up the quality of the wine quite a bit.

Now take a balloon that will fit over the opening of the jug, and don't inflate it, but poke a few holes through it with a needle. As the yeast converts the sugar to alcohol, aka, fermentation, Co2 is produced as a waste product. The gas will expand and cause your balloon to swell. The holes will let the Co2 out of the jug, and the internal pressure will keep oxygen from coming back in side. Or you can use a bung and an air lock and again step up the quality of the wine considerably.

Now store the wine in a warm dark place for a couple of weeks. Once the balloon starts to fall back over, the fermenting is done. Strain with a cheese cloth, or siphon the wine into a new jug. You could drink it now, or you could let it age for a while. I prefer to age mine a little. I have drank it as soon as two weeks later with much improvement. And I have let a jug age up to six months with a great improvement in flavor. You can age in the jug or you can bottle individually.

As you can see, you have many options and choices when it comes to making Balloon wine. The flavor and the quality is all up to you. Anyway you do it, have fun with it!

I won, I won!

So yesterday, Amy of Cooking With Amy, had a contest for a free book, The United States of Arugula, by David Kamp. It is all about how we became so obsessed with FOOD! To enter the contest you had to know some food trivia! And I won a free book!

The Questions were:
1. The characteristic orange-pink color of salmon is due to a chemical relative of the carotene pigment that colors carrots
True or False..

Which is True.

2. The olive tree was most likely cultivated
a) 5,000 years ago
b) 2,000 years ago
c) 1,000 years ago

Jesus gave his famous Sermon on the Mount, from the Mount of Olives more than 2000 years ago.. so they had to be older than that!

3. Sake is best drunk
a) As young as possible
b) When aged

Young, there is not much aged Sake out there on the market, because I believe it only has about a 6 month shelf life before the taste starts to go.

4. Surimi in Japanese means
a) Fake fish
b) Fishcake
c) Minced fish

Minced fish, its like a paste almost. Surimi means puree or slurry. It's how they make Krab Legs here in the US.

5. Bean curd was invented in Japan
True or False

Nope, that was invented in China actually.

6. The word sausage comes from the Latin word
a) Cure
b) Salt
c) Stuff

The latin word is botulus, or salus, meaning Salted or Preserved, just like a Cure.

7. Eggs are what percent of a hen's weight?
a) 5%
b) 3%
c) 1%

3%, I took a wild guess at that one.

8. Which is richer?
a) Pound cake
b) Butter cake

Definitely Pound Cake.. Some of the old recipes call for as much as a POUND of Butter!


I have to say Thank you Amy! It was a fun quiz and I am really excited about reading this book!