so fraiche

30. Chicken cooked in beer

Creme fraiche is expensive in Australia. You think all that Masterchef stuff would've driven up demand somewhat, given the contestants use it in everything. Oh well.

Anyway, this recipe grabbed my attention right away for reasons Julie Andrews articulated so well in The Sound of Music

Chicken sauteed in butter
Australian pale ale
Juniper-flavoured alcohol
These are a few of my favorite things

When the dog bites

When the bee stings

When I'm feeling sad

I simply remember my favorite things

And then I don't feel so bad

Or maybe not.

Anyway, to cook a chicken in beer you joint a small, whole bird--me, because I'm cooking for two, I just bought a couple of 'marylands'. You brown the chicken pieces in butter and then add a couple of shallots to the pan. Once they're softened, you deglaze the pan with gin and pour in 400 mL beer and 60 mL creme fraiche. The cooking liquid is flavoured with a bouquet garni, a pinch of chilli powder and a large handful of sliced mushrooms. The chicken is cooked for 45 minutes and then removed from the liquid. You then reduce the sauce and enrich it with an egg yolk and more creme fraiche.

The recipe didn't specify the kind of beer I should use. I'm not a fan of most mass produced lagers. And stout? Well, I thought about it, but I reckon the intense bitterness wouldn't work in this dish. I opted for a pale ale: Cooper's Pale Ale, to be precise. A drinkable but inexpensive beer. Given the idea is to reduce the cooking liquid into a sauce--a beer sauce--I wanted something that was actually interesting without being domineering. On the gin front, I used Tanqueray London Dry.

After a few recipes that weren't necessarily duds but just weren't that interesting--the moussaka, the tajine, the sausages--it's nice to stumble onto a winner. The sauce retained more of the flavour of Coopers Pale Ale than I expected it to. This is a simple dish that could easily be produced in great quantity for a crowd. One to hang on to.

31. Sauteed raw potatoes

A different take on the sauteed potatoes I cooked a couple of weeks ago. This time around, as the name of the recipe suggests, you don't boil the potatoes before you slice and saute them--you simply dump them, thinly cut, of course, into fat and cook them for 25 minutes. The recipe suggests using a combination of olive oil and butter but I just can't resist using duck fat. I also threw in a small sprig of rosemary.

The potatoes were okay. Soft and fluffy. They were nowhere near as crisp as the pre-cooked sauteed potatoes. I'd cook that recipe in preference any day.

32. Preparation (of asparagus), 33. Cooking (asparagus) in water & 34. Asparagus served hot


Who knew the simplest of vegetable preparations would see me knock over three recipes at once? I never ate asparagus as a kid--never knew what it was, even--but I've come to like it. Maybe even love it. Mostly, at home, I use Heston Blumenthal's method for preparing it. See his old show, Kitchen Chemistry, for details. Larousse suggests a very different method to what he suggests.

To prepare the asparagus you first cut all the stalks to the same length and then peel them. You tie the stalks into small bundles and then plunge them into boiling salty water and cook them for 20-30 minutes--which seems like a long time to me--depending on the thickness of the stalks. The asparagus is then drained and served with clarified butter, which you can jack with a squeeze of lemon juice.