🐓 au Vin with 🔥

 I'm just little behind but I know you want to see how the Coq au Vin turned out.

Here we go. 

Again, Danyale went on the MtAoFC journey with me. 

We started by watching Julia

Promptly followed by Jamie 

Now fully armed with ALL the information (and perhaps a glass of wine), we dove in. 

First things first, we had to dismember a whole chicken. Let me say that I've NEVER, in my life, dismembered a chicken (or any other animal for that matter). And a more disgusting process I can't imagine. Yes, I've pulled a little bag of giblets (I got ripped off since there was no bag in this chicken) and cooked them for gravy (you know, the whole Thanksgiving thing). 

I'm not as fearless as Julia when it comes to taking apart a 🐓, 🐄, 🐑, 🦞 and so on. The sounds alone were enough to make me NOT want to eat this thing later. 

And this girl didn't finish shaving before arriving at my house. 

After fighting to get this chicken apart, it was time to blanche and saute the lardons. Instead of using bacon, I actually bought bacon ends from the local food coop. So much better. I could have ordered a whole pork belly but glad I didn't (see above about dismemberment). 

Then we browned the chicken (which didn't brown the way I wanted since I took the skin off and I probably crowded the pan - 🤦‍♀️!). While the chicken kinda, sorta browned, it was time to boil the onions to make peeling the skins easier. 

And now we got to play with 🔥. As much as I would like to say that we set things on fire in the most stunning and impressive way.  That didn't happen. The first two tries resulted in nothing. I didn't feel too bad because Jamie had a similar experience (see Jamie & Julia link above). After those failures, I resorted to pouring the booze on while the match was lit. Whoooosh! That worked. 

Now the chicken blushed. A whole bottle of wine into the pot with the chicken and the herb bouquet. 

While the chicken cooked, we finished off the onions and mushrooms (don't crowd the mushrooms). I will fully admit that I somehow read that they needed to be boiled for 10 minutes and forgot all about how I did it with the boeuf bourguignon. It should have been a minute at most. ONE MINUTE! Needless to say, we were puzzled why the onions basically self destructed when we tried peeling them. It was all me. I'll own my mistake. They still tasted good but I won't be forgetting that lesson anytime soon. 

The end result was amazing. Aside from the fact that I never want to dismember a chicken again, I would make this again and again. The sauce is the BEST! Make sure you have a baguette to sop it up because you are gonna wanna do that. You won't want to miss a single drop. 

While we were slightly comatose, I was already looking in the MtAofFC for the next project. 

Postscript: I took this to the bfs this past weekend and he said it was perfect. We had purée de pomme de terre (mashed potatoes) with it. I did invite the younger son to join us and he declined. When he discovered what it was in the morning (apparently his French just isn't), he was disappointed that he passed it up. I took the leftovers with me and Danyale and I polished them off that night.