6 posts tagged dinner

Here in the UK (and a number of other Commonwealth countries like Australia and Canada), the Tuesday before lent isn’t Mardi Gras — it’s Pancake Day. For no good reason¹, we eat pancakes on this day.

Normally, I make something fairly simple — a big pile of American style thick panackes or British-style thin ones (which are very similar to, although not quite, French crêpes). This year I decided to do something different and serve up three courses, all with pancakes done different ways. Here, then, is my Pancake Triple.

Appetiser: blinis with smoked salmon, cream cheese, green onion and cucumber. All credit here to my wife Danielle for the lovely presentation, including the genius idea of piping the thick cream cheese through a cookie press.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t source any buckwheat flour, so I had to use just plain wheat flour instead. They still came out good though.

Main course: galette complète with a salad of avocado, bacon, balsamic vinagrette, and goat’s cheese.

Dessert: crépes with homemade blueberry syrup and vanilla ice cream.

The syrup recipe is amazing and definitely something I’ll be making again. A few small notes. UKians should note that the “1 cup” of blueberries it calls for weigh about 100 g, which is about half of a standard supermarket punnet. If using fresh blueberries, go easy on the water. Leave it to stand briefly after simmering and it’ll thicken a little more — I found it didn’t form a skin. And don’t skip either the pectin or the balsamic.

All in all, this was quite a lot of prep and cooking to do on a week night but it certainly felt special. My friend Dave said that he made pancake cannelloni this year (exactly what they sound like: pancakes filled with ragù, topped with béchamel, and baked). I think they may be on my menu for 2013. —Rich

Last week I chanced across this Youtube video where legendary chef Jacques Pépin demonstrates how to completely debone a whole chicken. “Hmmm,” I thought to myself, “that looks far easier than I would have thought.” So, naturally, I had to have a go at it today — with somewhat mixed results.

First, the good stuff. Without cutting myself more than a little tiny bit, I started with this…

… and 37 minutes later (after a lot of headscratching, fumbling, and rewinding and rewatching the Youtube video) I had turned it into this…

In this picture, every bone except the very ends of the legs have been removed, and some of the meat has been strategeically re-arranged. The idea is that you’re left with one neat layer of skin and one neat layer of flesh, of even thickness. Mine wasn’t so neat but hopefully you get the idea. Now, admittedly 37 minutes is a long time; but that’s my own ineptitude to blame, not anything inherently difficult about the technique. I can easily believe that once you’ve done a few of these you can do them in very quickly indeed and I’m sure my next one will be done lot faster.

(Just out of shot is the remainder of the carcass, which I later boiled up for stock with some ginger, chilli, garlic and onions; I’m going to make a noodle soup out of that this week.)

I then took a stuffing I’d made the day before, a simple mushroom duxelles made from finely diced shallots slowly fried with minced chestnut, portobello, shiitake and porcini mushrooms until it reduces into a paste.

(The shiitake and porcini mushrooms were dehyrdated, not fresh; I reconstituted them with a soak in warm water for half an hour first, then mixed the soaking liquid back in with the pan so I didn’t lose a drop of flavour.)

I spread this stuffing all over the chicken and packed it down into the leg cavities:

Then I rolled the chicken up, almost back into the shape I started with but with solid meat and stuffing now. So far, so good. I had some slightly scruffy spots where the skin wouldn’t quite cover all of the flesh because I’d cut into it too ham-fistedly, but nothing too bad.

Sadly, this is where stuff started to go wrong.

I had been unable to locate butcher’s twine in town during the week, so my butcher had supplied me with these elasticated things that they use in the shop. My plan was to use a few of these around the body of the chicken to hold it together. However, as soon as I put one in place, it was obvious this wasn’t going to work: the elastic was too tight, causing the stuffing to shift around and the bird to bulge outwards on either side of it.

Plan B, then: I stuck a few toothpicks through the seam to try and hold it together during the cooking process (I didn’t have any short skewers, which would have been preferable.) Then I considered how I was going to cook it and chickened out (pun intended) of using my usual big roasting tray with a rack; instead, I put it in a smallish earthenware bakeware tray. The idea was that the chicken was a snug fit in the tray, which means it wouldn’t have any scope to fall apart while it was cooking.

Here it is, seasoned and ready for the oven. I roasted it at 180 deg C (350 deg F) for about 1hr 45min, until my digital temperature probe recorded an internal temperature of 80 deg C (175 deg F).

That bakeware was a mistake, on two levels. Firstly, it was too snug a fit and provided nowhere for the pan drippings to go; so the bottom of the chicken was rather greasy. Secondly, it’s rather thick and is light in colour, so tends to be rather heat-absorbing. So when the chicken came out of the oven, it looked pretty good:

But when I cut into it, it was obvious that the bottom half-inch or so of meat was hopelessly undercooked, raw and pink-looking. On top of that, I was unable to get clean slice through the meat; I think my carving knife needs a good sharpening.

Nevertheless, I soldiered on. Well, more accurately, I started to sulk before my wife pointed out that this could still be rescued. I sliced the chicken as best I could and flashed the meat under a hot grill to ensure it was cooked through before serving. Here’s how it ended up looking:

I served it with a gravy made from the pan drippings and a splash of Madeira, some garlic and rosemary roast potatoes, some fantastic glazed carrots (I cannot recommend that recipe enough), and a Yorkshire pudding. Yes, it’s traditional to eat Yorkshire puddings with beef, not chicken; but frankly I don’t care.

All in all, my first attempt at deboning a chicken turned out okay, although there are certainly lessons for me to learn for next time. It tasted great — moist and succulent, with plenty of flavour both from the meat and the delicious duxelles stuffing. I’ll certainly be trying it again. If I can get the technique down, it’ll make a great meal to serve to friends I think — it’s looks impressive and all the complex stuff can be done entirely ahead of time. It’s also a very practical way to cater for a large group from a small oven because what you end up with is a solid ball of meat, as opposed to the space lost to the bones and chest cavity of a normal roast chicken.

Footnote: if you take this process a stage further and do a chicken, and a duck, and a turkey, then layer them one on top of the other before rolling them all up together, you get what us Brits call a three bird roast but some Americans call by the clanging awful portmanteau “turducken”. I always wondered how they were made.