Poulet à l'ail

I got some bad news from North Carolina yesterday. It has to do with the health of a relative (but not my mother or sister). I won't go into detail. I'm waiting for more news. Nothing has yet arrived by e-mail. For the time being, I'm going to assume that no news is good news. This morning I've just been sitting here for more than an hour looking through all the photos I've taken recently and wondering what I have to write a blog post about. Enough with the flowers. Enough with the vineyard scenes. Enough with the Callie photos.

So here's a food report. Last Saturday morning, Walt went to the outdoor market on the main square in Saint-Aignan to get some local asparagus and strawberries, which are in season right now. I asked him to buy a chicken from our favorite poultry vendor. I had picked up a package of 6 heads of garlic a week earlier, and some of it needed to be used. We also have a lot of sage growing in the garden now. And there was a bag of red potatoes down in the cellar. All that sounded like the makings for a good Sunday dinner.

Before he left to do the shopping, Walt asked me what size chicken he should buy. I said, off the top of my head, oh, not a huge one — maybe a kilo and a half. That's what he asked for chez le volailler. The woman waiting on him laughed and said: « Mais monsieur, ça n'existe pas ! » It seems the minimum weight for one of their birds is two kilos. Walt said he felt like the laughingstock of Saint-Aignan.

Who knew? At the supermarket I often get 1.5 kg chickens. At the market, when you buy a chicken you buy it with the feet and head still on, and the guts giblets still inside. You pay for it, they hand you a ticket, and you either stand and wait or go off and do other shopping. Twenty minutes or more later you go back and claim your purchase, which has been beheaded, befooted (?), and gutted. The heart, liver, and gizzard are stuffed inside the bird, and you can claim the head and the feet if you want them.

 The man who prepares the poultry also singes off any stray feathers using a blowtorch. Having the bird prepared that way is optional, of course. You are welcome to take it home with the feet, head, and guts giblets still attached. Remember the quails that I bought and prepared a few weeks ago? In the case of this chicken, it was so big that I decided we didn't need to cook the whole thing. Instead of cutting it in half, I decided to cut off the legs and thighs and put those in the freezer for later.

I would cook the just breast and wings as a roast, setting it on a bed of sage leaves and surrounded by about 20 unpeeled cloves of garlic. I would drizzle some olive oil over it all, pour in a little bit of rosé wine, and roast some potatoes in the same pan. After cutting off the legs and thighs, I also cut out the chicken's backbone and saved that, the neck, and the giblets for making stock later.

There's a recipe that you can find all over the internet for chicken cooked with forty cloves of garlic. My version was half a chicken cooked with twenty cloves of garlic. We enjoyed it.

By the way, I took these photos with a 10-year-old Panasonic Lumix FZ7 digital camera. We had it in storage and I decided to get it out and see what it was like and how good the photos would be. Judge for yourself.