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 July 7, 2006 Friday
Chicken Mushroom Dish
After the successful etag soup dinner last week, Aklay agreed to make our cooking lesson a weekly one, Fridays preferably, to coincide with Janet's visit. Cool! the more, the merrier. He asked me to buy 1 kilo of chicken. With what he already set aside, we had the following:
Ingredients:
- half kilo of bacon
- 1 kilo of chicken
- 1 kilo of potatoes
- 3 carrots
- 3 onions
- 2 garlic
- bay leaf
- chili
- pepper
- 1 kilo of wild mushroom
- salt
He gave me the following instructions,
which I followed to the T:
- cube the bacon and put it in low fire (to extract the oil) while I continued to cut the other ingredients.
- toss in the chicken pieces, turn up the heat until the chicken browns
- remove the chicken and bacon, leaving only the oil in the pan
- toss in the potatoes in high heat until it browns
- toss the other vegetables (except the mushroom), mix a bit for about 2 minutes
- toss in the chicken and bacon, mix together, cover and put in low heat for 20 minutes, stirring after every 5 minutes
- mix the whole thing (to make sure nothing is sticking together) and toss in the mushroom.
- after 5 more minutes, the dish is done. Season with salt according to taste.
Dish Name
I asked him what the dish was called. I was hoping he would utter a French-sounding name like coc-au-feu alà Bretagne...or something like that. He gave me a disbelieving look and said, 'chicken with mushroom and bacon'. Yeah, I should have seen that coming.
With garlic or whole wheat bread and butter to accompany the meal,
Aklay, Janet and myself were rewarded with a
satisfying meal.
Haute cuisine
I was eager to press on for the next Friday meal. I suggested anything haute cuisine. Aklay gave me another of his disbelieving look and said, "you mean the stuff that takes 10 chefs to prepare for 5 guests, taking half a day to cook which the guests will eat in 1 hour?" I guess any other remark short of that sarcasm would have disappointed me.
--- TheLoneRider
- wash and scrub the potatoes, but don't peel them. After cutting, rinse it again before tossing it into the pan. The final rinsing is not for cleaning it further, but to wash away the starch that oozed out when it was cut. Starch when fried gets sticky...we want to avoid that.
- always heat starchy food on high heat, again to keep it from getting sticky
- cut the stems from the mushroom, and clean by brushing. Don't wash since adding water to mushroom which is already mostly water, makes frying difficult
- cut the chicken at the joints
- commercial chicken would cook in 25 minutes. However, if it's free-range native chicken, it's 1 hour 30 minutes, 'coz the muscles are tough from running around
Comments? Email webmaster@thelonerider.com
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