Tag: thyme

Categories
The Book Vegetables

192. Baked Breaded Acorn Squash p.579


The recipe

Here’s a very simple and quite cool looking preparation for acorn squash. All you do is mix bread crumbs, thyme, salt, and pepper in a bowl. Melt butter in another bowl, and dip slices of acorn squash first into the butter, then coat with the bread crumb mixture. You then bake the squash slices for about 20 minutes.

The Good: I wouldn’t have guessed that acorn squash and thyme had such an affinity for one another, that was a very pleasant surprise indeed. Baked bread crumb toppings are generally good things, and this was no exception.

The Bad: I didn’t have any regular bread crumbs, and decided panko would be an acceptable substitute. I didn’t consider that because panko is so much lighter and has much more surface area than regular dry bread crumbs, it cooked much faster. When the recipes recommended 20 minutes in the over were up my bread crumbs were starting to burn so I had no choice but to pull the squash out. Unfortunately the interiors of the squash were still quite firm. I had to nuke the squash to get it to soften up. The bread crumb topping survived the trip through the microwave better than I would have expected though.

The Verdict: While the panko substitution was my fault, the cooking time for this recipe was too short, and that’s The Book’s fault. The flavours were excellent, and it was a very simple way to make an impressive looking side dish. I’ll certainly be making this again, but I’ll stick a little closer to the instructions next time.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

164. Beef Bourguignon p.440

The recipe

I grew up on boeuf bourguignon, we could be guaranteed to have it at least once a month during the winter. Since a braised dish like this is better a day or two after it’s cooked, my mom would usually make it on a Sunday, and it would sit on the chilly garage floor in her big orange Le Creuset Dutch oven until dinnertime on Tuesday. I remember being very small, and being tasked with bringing the stew upstairs, I swear that cast iron pot weighed more than I did, and it was so cold it burned. Since a bottle of wine goes into a boeuf bourguignon, and even after a long braise not all of the alcohol cooks off, I’m wondering if this dish didn’t contribute to some of excellent sleeping we got done as kids.

The recipe starts with some home butchery, getting beef shoulder off the bone, and cubed. The cubes are then seasoned, coated in flour, and thoroughly browned. The meat then braises for an afternoon with sweated onions, garlic, and carrots, tomatoes, red wine, and a bouquet garni. While that’s going on you get to blanch and peel boiling onions. I hate peeling boiling onions, but I did it anyway. The onions then get browned with some butter, and simmered until tender. You then sauté some mushrooms in butter, and add the mushrooms and onions to the braise, and let it simmer for a few minutes. Once everything’s done cooking you can eat it right away, or better yet stick in in the back of the fridge and forget about it for a couple of days. The Book recommends serving this dish with buttered potatoes, but I’ve always been a fan of egg noodles with boeuf bourguignon, so that’s what we had.

There’s an error in this recipe. The first ingredient listed is a quarter pound of bacon, and the fist cooking direction is to simmer the bacon in water for a few minutes. That bacon is never mentioned again. The linked Epicurious recipe has the error fixed, you’re supposed to crisp up the bacon in the pot before starting the braise, but it’s mystery bacon if you follow The Books version. I guessed that it was meant to go into the braise, and that worked out well, but I hope they’ve caught this mistake in the updated version of The Book.

I was entirely satisfied with this dish, it tastes just like what mom used to make, it’s hearty, rich, stick to your ribs, winter cooking. The flavours were right on, this is not a difficult dish to get close to right, but making it really well is a challenge. This is a really solid boeuf bourguignon recipe, my only complaint is that it was a bit too salty. I’ll certainly be making this one again next winter.

Categories
Soups The Book

162. Onion Soup Gratinée p.114

I can’t find a recipe for this soup online.

Typically onion soup is a socially acceptable excuse for sitting down to half a pound of melted cheese. Trying to maneuver those long strands of gooey cheese into ones mouth without getting it all over your front is a social bonding experience best shared with close friends. If you ask people what they like about onion soup they’ll probably say it’s the cheese. This recipe takes the radical position that the cheese is just getting in the way of a really good soup.

This recipe uses the Beef Stock from last time as its main ingredient, along with caramelized onions, vermouth, a bouquet garni, cognac, and Worchestershire sauce. It’s topped with toasted baguette slices, and a thin layer of grated Gruyère and Parmigiano-Reggiano, then popped under the broiler for a bit. The end result is a nice onion soup, but it’s lacking in the cheese department. I agree that sometimes the cheese can be overwhelming, but half the joy of onion soup is the melty strands of cheese that come up with every bite. The soup itself was a little heavy on the booze and Worchestershire sauce, and not as onion flavoured as I would have liked. As I mentioned last time, making the stock for the dish was a big pain, and didn’t have a great pay-off. It was a perfectly fine basis for the soup, but it was hardly better than the store bought stuff.

While I enjoyed my dinner, there are better onion soup recipes out there. My dining companion makes French onion soup often enough, it takes her twenty minutes, and tastes far better than this all day affair.

Categories
Basics The Book

161. Beef Stock p.928


The recipe

I can’t escape the conclusion that I’m a food snob. I take satisfaction in looking down on packaged and processed foods, and I give people points for making meals from scratch, double points if the ingredients come from an ethically superior source, and triple points if they grew the food themselves. The ultimate ridiculousness of snobbishness is that no one can live up to the standards they judge others by. I enjoy pickling my insides with Doritos, I pay outrageous prices for a tiny package of hummus that I could make at home for twelve cents, and I don’t find that organic vegetables taste better than their fertilizer drenched cousins. My ultimate sin though, is that I don’t make my own stock.

Stock making and apartment living aren’t an obvious combination. Making stock takes most of a day, so you’ll want to make up a big batch. That’s well and good if you’ve got a spare freezer in the basement, but our tiny freezer is spilling over with leftover ravioli, pesto ice cubes, and pork tenderloin that went on a crazy sale. There’s just no room for three liters of stock. The food network has filled hundreds of hours by having famous chefs repeat the refrain that the biggest reason the professionals’ food tastes better than home cooks’ is that they make their own stock (and use unconscionable amounts of butter). The sin that will get me kicked out of the food snobs annual picnic is that I don’t think that store bought broth is all that bad, in fact I like it. It’s convenient, perfectly servicable, and unless you’re using it as a gigantic component of your dish no one is going to be able to tell the difference. You usually have to reduce the salt in the rest of the recipe, because even “low sodium” broth isn’t all that low in sodium, other than that store bought broth is perfectly fine, and not at all a pain in the ass.

Making this stock was a pain in the ass. It’s not actually difficult, but it’s messy and takes six and a half hours. Your day starts with a trip to the butcher, who is happy to provide meaty beef and veal shanks, but thinks you’re an idiot when you ask him to saw them into one inch slices. He’s been making stock his whole life, and doesn’t think this step is necessary. He’s old and Italian, so he’s probably right. You then bike home with a plastic bag full of chopped up bones hanging from your handlebar, and dump them into a roasting pan along with some carrots and onions. Roast this mess, stirring occasionally for an hour at 450. Stop cursing Ruth Reichls name, because the house is starting to smell pretty good. Make a bouquet garni by tying parsley, thyme, and a bay leaf in cheesecloth. Start cursing Ruth again, because you’re going to be running the stock through a fine mesh sieve later on, and a bouquet garni is totally unnecessary. Transfer the roasted bones to a stockpot. In transferring them drop several meaty bones on the floor, this is interesting for the cat, but annoying for you. Deglaze the roasting pan, and transfer the scraped up brown bits to the stockpot along with celery, the bouquet garni, and water. Bring it to a boil, and spend half an hour skimming the nasty meat froth that rises to the surface. Disgust your girlfriend by sneaking up on her with the meat foam while she tries to read the paper. Let the stock reduce for 3 to 5 hours. Don’t leave the house, because that’s a fire hazard. Break up the monotony by skimming more foam every once in a while. Once you’ve got 8 cups of liquid left, fish out all the bits of bone and mushy vegetables, and get rid of them. Then try to set up a sieve over another big pot, and pour the stock through the sieve. Mess this up, and have the sieve fall into the filtered stock. Do it all again. Touch the hot stockpot and burn yourself. Swear for a while. Do a side to side comparison of your stock to Campbell’s low sodium beef broth, and realize that they’re really not that different. Swear some more.

This tastes like tetra-packed beef broth from the store, only it takes a long time. Homemade does have more gelatin in it, so it has a richer mouth feel, but I’m sure blooming an eighth of a teaspoon of gelatin in store bough broth would nullify this difference. Final verdict, totally not worth it. I used it as the basis for French Onion Soup, which specifically calls for making this stock, and suggests that it won’t be nearly the same with store bought, but frankly the stock wasn’t amazing in the soup. Maybe there are beef stock recipes out there that will blow the cheap, readily available, and very convenient competition away, but this is not one of them.

Categories
Soups The Book

136. Mushroom Barley Soup p.113


The recipe

This soup suffers from a serious branding issue. If it had been billed as barely soupy barley stew, with extra barley, some carrots, and hardly any mushrooms at all, I would have known what I was getting into. The blurb for the recipe talks about all the contrasting mushroom flavours and blah blah blah, but I really had to do some food styling to get any mushrooms in the photo at all. I picked this recipe because I wanted a mushroom soup, and I was looking forward to a little added body from the barley, and a nice background of aromatics. I ended up with a perfectly OK barley stew that I wasn’t at all in the mood for.

The recipe starts by browning garlic and onion in a large pot, then adding sliced white mushrooms, soaked and sliced shiitake’s, soy sauce, cooking out the liquid, then adding sherry and evaporating that too. The liquid is then added in the form of chicken stock, water, and the mushroom soaking liquid. The barley, carrots, and dried thyme and rosemary are added and the soup simmers for an hour. When it’s ready it’s seasoned with salt and pepper, and some parsley is stirred in just before serving.

The texture was very thick and hearty, with most of the flavour coming from the chicken stock and aromatics. It actually tasted a whole lot like my mom’s beef and barley soup, but without the deep beef stock and hearty chunks of meat that made that a satisfying winter lunch. The chicken stock left it tasting thin and whimpy, and seriously overpowered by the mushy barley texture. I should reiterate that for a mushroom barley soup, mushrooms were not a flavour consideration.

Unfortunately this soup was in a rotten in between spot. With less barley and four times more mushrooms it could have been the nice mushroom soup it advertised itself as, or using a more concentrated stock, and adding rich chunks of meat, could have resulted in a thick barely stew worth eating. As it was, it was perfectly edible, but nothing to look forward to.

Categories
Fish and Shellfish The Book

133. Poached Salmon in Aspic p.318


The recipe

I had so much fun making and presenting this, that even if it been inedible, it would have been worth it. Luckily, it tasted quite good. I absolutely knew that I needed an occasion to serve this dish. In honour of the aspic coated days of yore we organized a retro-potluck extravaganza. People brought cheese balls, bean casseroles, cocktail weenies, deviled eggs, mac and cheese, potato salad, and old fashioned cocktails. Then I brought out a cold fish covered in salmon flavoured Jello. Most people weren’t too sure what to make of it, but it certainly caused a stir.

For people who’ve been following along for a while now, it should be clear that I have an abiding affection for old-school, kind of nasty, but kind of great, dishes. For me this is the ne plus ultra of that style of cooking. It’s got the pressed linen and polished silver grandeur of days gone by, as well as a gross out, dare your friends to eat it, backwardness. I’ve been thinking about trying a salmon in aspic for a couple of years, but after an enlightening conversation with my dining companion’s mother, in which I accused her grandmother of having been a great aspicker, I was determined.

The recipe was quite involved, and time consuming. I started by poaching the salmon in water, with lemon, onion, carrot, celery, bay leaf, parsley stems, thyme, and peppercorns. Then whole poacher went into the fridge for 8 hours to let the flavours infuse. The recipe calls for a 24-inch fish poacher, which I don’t have. The biggest one I could borrow was 19 inches, so I used a smaller Atlantic salmon (4 lbs instead of 6).

Once the fish is chilled, it’s removed to a cookie sheet, and the broth is strained, fortified with white wine, Madeira, thyme, and salt, then reduced. Meanwhile the most painstaking part of recipe begins, the removing of the nasty bits of salmon. Beyond a little trimming of excess bones, and floppy fatty folds, it involves peeling all the skin and dark flesh off the fish. It’s an easy instruction to read, but a delicate and painstaking job.

Once the broth is reduced, it gets a further addition of leek, carrot, celery, egg whites, and crushed up egg shells, and gently simmered. You’re basically making a fish consommé in this step, using the egg whites and shells to trap little particles in the protein net they form, all the nastiness forms a raft at the top, and once you run the broth through a couple of layers of paper towel you end up with a crystal clear broth. This is one of those incredibly simple cooking techniques, that’s undeniably cool. People were going nuts about using gelatin filtration to make unusually flavored consommés a couple of months back, but making the original had its own charms.

The reduced and perfectly clear broth is then added to some bloomed gelatin, and allowed to simmer for a couple of minutes ’till everything is dissolved. The mixture is then chilled in a metal bowl, sitting in a water bath ’till the gelatin just begins to set. Then it’s time to work quickly and get the aspic over the fish. I’ve read more than a few aspic disaster stories, of the gelatin just sliding off its target, or clumping up unattractively. So I was a bit worried about this step, but it worked flawlessly. I spooned on a thin layer, chilled the fish for a while, then topped it with some blanched leeks, and applied another layer of gelatin. All of the remaining aspic went into a baking dish and was allowed to set. I then cut it up and surrounded the fish with little wiggly aspic cubes.

The whole point of covering a salmon in aspic is to keep it moist. Obviously the aspic adds flavour, and texture, but really it’s all about protecting the fish for a banquet presentation. I have to say it did a very good job on that front. The salmon was quite delicious, mild and delicate. For all the aromatics that went into this, nothing overwhelmed. It was more of a subtle background array of flavours. The aspic had a much more concentrated dose of flavour, and I was surprised to like it quite a bit. I wouldn’t sit down to a bowl of aspic, but it had a rich mouth-feel that complimented the salmon, and added little highlights of flavour

It was quite warm the night I served this dish, and we packed about 35 people into our apartment, so it got intolerably hot. Unfortunately the aspic didn’t hold up well under the heat, and mostly melted off my fish within about 15 minutes. Those who got an early serving tried it as it was meant to be, but latecomers only tried poached salmon in Jello soup. I suppose if you were doing this professionally you’d put your serving dish on a bed of crushed ice, but our ice supply was devoted to mixing old-fashioneds, martinis, and Singapore slings.

I was really happy with this dish, from a showmanship perspective this was absolutely worth it. The flavour was very nice, but it couldn’t live up to my expectations for such a dramatic looking dish. It was very mild, and pleasant, which for a crowd pleasing buffet is exactly what you’re looking for. I’m impressed that the recipe is as clearly written and step-by-step easy to follow as it is. I was very afraid going in that this would turn out to be a spectacular failure, but it couldn’t have gone more smoothly. If you’ve ever considered doing something like this, I’d definitely recommend going for it. It was an excellent experience, worthy of a five mushroom rating.

Categories
Fish and Shellfish The Book

120. Scallops Provençale p.319


The recipe from Epicurious is similar to The Book’s version, but only makes half as much.

I made these for my dining companion’s parents, who came for a surprise visit. The last time I cooked for them the pyrex pan I had my gravy in exploded, so I was a bit nervous about this dinner. We decided on a scallop and shrimp first-course, and duck for the main-course.

I had a great time shopping for ingredients with them. My dining companion’s father really enjoyed going to the cheesemonger’s, the butcher’s, the baker’s, the fruit and vegetable stand, and the fishmonger’s shops instead of a one stop mega-mart. It’s one of the things I love about my neighborhood, but sometimes I take it for granted.

The scallops were a very nice way to start our meal, and it was an easy dish to put together. The scallops are simply seasoned with salt and pepper and then seared. Once the scallops are done a two-minute tomato sauce is brought together in the pan with garlic, thyme, and basil. The tiny shrimp in the photo were seared, the pan was deglazed with pernod, and finished with tarragon.

The scallops were magnificent. I got lucky and cooked them just right, with a tastily browned crust on the outside, and a just barely cooked centre. I’ve had difficultly with scallops before, particularly little ones, but these jumbo scallops were wonderfully easy to work with, and had and amazingly fresh and mild maritime flavour. I really dislike the metallic flavour scallops can sometimes have, but there wasn’t a trace of that in this preparation. I was careful to rinse them thoroughly before cooking, which may have helped.

The sauce was nice, but nothing particularly special. My main complaint was that it was too oily. The scallops had a fairly subtle taste, and the tomato and garlic tended to overwhelm it a bit. I very much like shellfish tossed in a tomato based pasta sauce, where the flavours mix and mingle, but in this case I was really enjoying the clean flavour of the scallop all on its own. The thyme and particularly the basil enhanced the scallop’s flavour without covering it up though. I ate most of the sauce with the little anise flavoured shrimp, which was wonderful combination. I think I might add a bit of pernod to my next pasta dish.

I thought this worked really well as a first course, it was a very pretty dish, and it really wasn’t very much trouble to put together. Those gigantic scallops aren’t inexpensive, but since you can get away with one per person as a first course, or two to three each as a main, they’re not out of reach. I’d certainly make this again, but I might tone down the sauce a bit.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

102. Spaghetti with Handfuls of Herbs p.204

I couldn’t find a recipe for this online, but this is more a concept than a specific set of instructions anyway. The idea is to toss spaghetti with extra virgin olive oil, butter, minced shallots, and any and all herbs growing in the garden. The pasta is then sprinkled with bread crumbs which you’ve toasted in olive oil. The heat of the pasta releases the flavours of the herbs, without wilting them too much, and the uncooked shallots are warmed but retain their sharpness.

There are no specific instructions for which herbs to use, or in what proportions. It’s totally dependent on what you have on hand. I had a grand old time out on the balcony with a pair of scissors. I ended up with basil, thyme, rosemary, oregano, parsley, chives, sage, lavender, and lemon balm. Those last two were unexpected flavours, but they absolutely made the dish for me. I got really lucky and randomly combined my herbs into a near perfect flavour medley. I couldn’t repeat the process, I just snipped a bit of this and a bit of that, and I ended up with a completely delicious and intensely fragrant plate of pasta. My dining companion thought it was good, but not transcendent, but for me it was exactly the right dish at exactly the right time. It was perfectly suited to a warm night out on the balcony.

The bread crumb topping adds a textural counterpoint to the pasta, but not one I thought was really necessary. The Book says that the bread crumbs don’t weigh the dish down the way cheese would, but I just found them oily. Admittedly my bread crumbs weren’t coarse, and they might have worked better if they’d been more like tiny croûtons. Mine were more of a sandy coating on my pasta. It didn’t really detract from my enjoyment of the dish, but I think they ruined it for my dining companion.

You may also notice that I didn’t use spaghetti in this spaghetti dish. I can’t bring myself to care about the different shapes of pasta, and I resent having to remember all of their names. They’re all exactly the same, shells, spirals, round strands, flat strands, big tubes, and small tubes all interchangeable in my mind. Sure, some shapes hold on to some sauces better, and finding things hidden in little shells can be cute. But, the idea that we all need to keep fifteen different shapes of pasta on hand to do justice to the traditions of some particular Italian hamlet is just annoying. They all taste exactly the same, and I’m going to use them as such. The only downside is that the different shapes really do differ in surface area. The amount of sauce needed to coat is proportional to area, which has little to do with mass or volume, so it does take some guesswork to avoid over or under saucing.

The concept of this dish is great, it’s simple and summery. It uses herbs at their peak, and allows for creativity around a central theme. It also has the advantage of not heating the kitchen up too too much. I was thrilled with the flavours at work in my version, and I can only hope you get as lucky as I did if you try this for yourself.

Categories
Grains and Beans The Book

101. Cassoulet de Canard p.273


The recipe

This is The Book’s definitive and official cassoulet recipe. I wrote about the Easy Cassoulet recipe a couple of months ago, which skipped steps and cut corners, but still resulted in a very delicious dinner. This adaptation of Julia’s from Mastering the Art of French Cooking takes two days, and goes out of it’s way to find traditional steps for you to follow.

On the first day you soak the beans. But you don’ just soak them. You bring them to a boil and let them sit for 50 minutes. Then you bring them back to a boil, with a bouquet garni, onions, salt, and pork rind you spent the preceding 50 minutes ritualistically rinsing, boiling, and slicing. Then it’s simmer and skim for the next 1 1/4 hours. The beans are then left to cool overnight.

Day one’s activities continue with the skinning, defatting, and shredding of the duck legs, the browning of mutton (I used veal) bones in a whole cup of goose fat, and the caramelizing of onions in that goose fat. The duck, the bones, the onions, and let us not forget the fat are brought to a simmer with bay leaves, stock, tomatoes, garlic, and white wine. After an hour and half on the stove it’s left to cool overnight.

Day two is fairly straightforward. You brown and slice some sausage, and remove the inedible bits from the now cold beans, and the duck mixture. Then the cassoulet is assembled in alternating layers of beans and meat, then topped with bread crumbs and parsley. The recipe calls for a 10 quart enameled cast iron pot, but the biggest one I could get my hands on was 7 3/4 quarts. I managed to get almost everything into the smaller pot, but the full sized pot would have been better. The cassoulet is brought to a simmer on the stovetop, the baked for about an hour until the juices are bubbling up through the crust.

There were a lot of steps, a lot of tricky to source ingredients, and some strange cooking instructions here. It resulted in a rather delicious cassoulet though. I cheated in more than a few places, and messed up in a few others, so I’m not sure the dish came out exactly as it did in The Book’s test kitchens. For the record I had a mix up with the bouquet garni and ended up putting in 15 cloves instead of 5, which really changed the flavour of the beans. I didn’t peel the tomatoes, because I hate peeling tomatoes and I don’t find it’s really worth the effort. I didn’t make beef stock, and I did used the specifically forbidden canned variety. I used a cured garlic kielbasa instead of the fresh garlic sausage called for. I also couldn’t stand the idea of serving the dish with all that goose fat in there, so I removed most of the fat that floated to the top of the meat pot. It was still decidedly rich and fatty, but not nearly as oily as the recipe intended.

That is a long list of cheats, normally I do my best to stick to the recipe as closely as possible, but this time I just wasn’t in the cards. I made the recipe for The Boys on one of our weekend getaways, and I was cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen, with only the equipment I’d thought to bring with me (they don’t cook much, so the facilities are minimal). I couldn’t find some ingredients, some of the steps I just didn’t have time for, and there were a couple of honest mistakes thrown in for good measure. I think the final dish was pretty close to what the original intended though.

In the end the cassoulet tasted great. It was similar to the easy cassoulet, with the duck and sausage flavours predominating. However, the beans in this version were really worth all the effort. They were tender with a bit of bite left to them, and packed with flavour. Unfortunately a lot of that flavour was cloves, but the smoky bacon, and pork belly were there, with the thyme and onions adding a nice backdrop.

The breadcrumb crust was a bit of a letdown. The easy cassoulet had an amazing crust, made by turning the duck skin into cracklings, and toasting the bread crumbs in some of the duck fat and garlic. That topping was just out of this world, whereas the topping on this dish is just there to absorb some liquid. The recipe has you throw away the confit duck skin and its fat, but then add in a whole whack of goose fat. I really didn’t understand the rationale, it seems like an obvious missed opportunity.

This dish was labour intensive, and I don’t think it would have been nearly as much fun without the help of my co-chef Al. Whenever it’s time to make an excessively fatty fat fat dish, I can count on him. I should also thank the other boys for washing the seeminly endless sink-fulls of goose fat coated dishes this produced. Cassoulet is an absolute indulgence, and indulging is much more fun with friends, especially if you’ve had to work for your reward.

I feel that this recipe is one I’ll make again and again, until I get it just right. My first attempt tasted about as good as the Easy Cassoulet, but I’m sure that with practice this recipe has the potential to blow the easy version out of the water. It’s the kind of dish that people perfect and refine over lifetimes, to get just the right texture in the beans, the perfect amount of bacon flavour, the ideal thickened but still runny texture in the juices. Next time I’ll be much better prepared for some of the more obtuse steps, and counterintuitive instructions. I can see some improvements I’d like to make, but overall it was a delicious, and faithful rendition of a very classic dish.

Categories
Poultry The Book

98. Chicken Fricassee p.372


No recipe this time.

This was a fairly successful and simple recipe. It’s real comfort food, chicken in a creamy mushroom sauce served with noodles. Like most comfort food it’s fatty and a bit bland. The preparation was as simple as you could wish for. Break a chicken down into serving size pieces, and brown them in a skillet. Remove the chicken and make a sauce of onion, celery, garlic, thyme, mushrooms, and chicken stock. The chicken is added back in and simmered ’till it’s cooked through. Then the remaining sauce is bolstered with heavy cream and an egg yolk.

I often complain about chicken skin and wet cooking methods. The skin tends to turn into a gross mush. In my opinion there’s no point in eating the added fat of chicken skin unless it’s crispy. This is a wet cooking method, but the skin managed to retain at least a bit of texture, and loads of flavour. The chicken parts are simmered in the sauce, but only the bottom halves are covered. The skin gets steamed, but not bathed in liquid, so the caramelization you built stays in one place.

The sauce worked really well on the pasta. The sauce actually had more chicken flavour than the chicken did, and the cream and egg yolk gave it a really silken texture which coated the noodles perfectly. I ate some of the chicken, but the dish was really all about the pasta and sauce for me. The thyme and mushroom flavours were prominent, fortunately that’s a great flavour combination. I found the first few bites bland, but the addition of a good dose of fresh ground black pepper picked things up quite a bit. I sprinkled Parmesan on some leftover noodles the next day and they were even better.

This dish had very straightforward flavours, it hit all the marks of a crowd pleaser. It has the added advantage of not containing anything people really object to (except celery, but that’s just me). It tasted good, but it wasn’t really inspired, or particularly interesting. I guess you can’t have it both ways. I would have preferred something a little more novel. Combining loads of carbs, a healthy dose of fat, the unobjectionable flavour of chicken, and some pantry staple spices is a no brainer. This dish would fit in well on a family restaurant’s menu. This kind of comfort food isn’t actually the stuff I crave after a bad day, but TV tells me this is what people want when they’re upset. It tasted good, but it wasn’t really memorable.