Adventures in Coq Au Vin

I finished Julie and Julia around Christmas-time last year and was immediately jealous that I hadn’t first thought of the idea of cooking every recipe in Mastering The Art of French Cooking in one year.  That sort of challenge has “Kristi” written all over it.  But, unfortunately, around the time Julie Powell was cooking her way through that extensive cookbook, I was taking Algebra and worrying about which pair of pajama pants I was going to wear to school tomorrow (I have always been stylish).  However, after receiving the cookbook as a Christmas present, I came up with my own mini-Kristi and Julie and Julia project.  Instead of cooking all the recipes in one year, I would simply cook a meal from the book every Sunday.  That was four weeks ago.  It has happened exactly once.  Those recipes are HARD!  There are so many steps!!  SO MUCH BUTTER!  (yum)

For my first recipe, I went with coq au vin.  There was no reason for this, except for the fact that I love The Melting Pot and one of their cooking styles is coq au vin.  And I like it.

Now, the first challenge with using a cookbook from the 1950′s is deciphering the ingredients.  Luckily, my dad is old and therefore was able to tell me that a “frying chicken” is a real option from the butcher section of a good grocery store.  I was planning on buying a bunch of various chicken parts and hoping that would suffice.

So, I went to Central Market, and approximately one million dollars later came back with all necessary ingredients.  Including this!

Blake posed these. Obviously.

Chicken pieces artfully positioned on the cutting board, I began with the healthiest part of the recipe – cooking bacon in butter.  Being a Martha Stewart fan, while also finding myself diametrically opposed to her particular brand of perfection in just about any way possible, I followed her sage advice of setting out all my ingredients before I began and read through the recipe multiple times.  Here is my ingredient arrangement:

This is as neat as humanly possible (for me)

See how much I am concentrating!!

This recipe has a bunch of steps.  Many of which I forgot even though I read through the recipe like 10 times before I started.  Cooking mushrooms was one of these missed steps.  I also managed to do things like, add the bacon to the mushrooms only to find myself frantically scooping the bacon back out of the mushrooms one second later.  It was a very typical Kristi cooking experience, with messes everywhere, and ingredients forgotten or burned, or cooked in the wrong order – but this recipe was fail-proof!  It was amazing!

Approximately 4 hours later, Blake and I found ourselves inhaling about 1 cup of bacon fat, a full pound of butter, a bottle of cooked wine, and an entire chicken.  It was delicious!!

This tasted way more delicious than it looks!

I find pictures of food to look gross – but let’s just say that with all that bacon fat and butter, it would be pretty hard for it not to be completely delicious.  AND IT WAS!