Découpez le poulet

The first step in making a poulet braisé au vin rouge (coq au vin style) is to cut up the chicken. It dawns on me that you could buy chicken parts — you need two boneless breasts, two drumsticks, two thighs (boneless or on the bone), and two wings. You can use skinless chicken parts or leave the skin on. If you'd rather cut up a whole chicken to get these parts, you can make broth out of the carcass and trimmings.

Above left are the raw chicken pieces listed above. Above right are the same pieces after I poured on most of a bottle of red wine to start the marinating. The other ingredients in the marinade are carrot (diced or sliced into disks), parsley sprigs, chopped onion and garlic, thyme, black peppercorns, a couple of bay leaves, and (optionally) a few allspice berries.

Above are the same chicken pieces after they spent nearly 24 hours in the marinade (vegetables and red wine) and in the refrigerator.

Ce que nous allons manger ce weekend

Well, it's not these exact birds (which I photographed in 2005), but we are going to have chicken. Coq au vin, or Poulet au vin rouge if you prefer. This morning I'm preparing the ingredients for a marinade and cutting up the chicken, which I bought at the supermarket, into pieces we can braise in red wine (with smoked pork lardons) after they've spent the night soaking in the marinade.

Rain rain go away

I suppose plants like the ones above, which seem to be two different kinds of cyclamens, need weather like what you see below. Right now, it rains nearly every day — not hard rain, but never-ending rain, or fog, or mist, or drizzle. Today's forecast is for more of the same. As they used to say in Rouen (Normandy) when I spent a year there: Ici il ne pleut pas beaucoup... mais il pleut souvent.

Pouding au pain

Pouding means "pudding" and pain means "bread." So "bread pudding", which is a kind of pain perdu. I made some yesterday and flavored it with diced apple, whole pecans, yellow raisins, apple brandy, vanilla extract, sugar (cassonade which I remember being sold as "raw" sugar in the U.S.), and a small amount of maple syrup. The three main ingredients are stale bread — in our case, that means stale baguette cut into cubes (crusts and all), whole milk or even half-and-half, and eggs. Above is a photo of the pudding as it came out of the oven.

Here's is a photo showing what it looked like before I cooked it. And here's
a link to a post with a recipe that I published a decade ago.