Roast chicken, veggies and ginger

It's still a few days away from Thanksgiving, but this weekend I decided to roast a chicken anyway. It was a 4 1/2 pound chicken (about 1 1/2 pounds more than I normally roast); I followed Mark Bittman's recipe from How to Cook Everything. Rather than using a rack, I piled the chicken on top of a bed of chopped potato and carrot chunks, plus a few unpeeled garlic cloves and some sliced ginger (a couple of inches worth of ginger, sliced thin); also two cups of homemade chicken stock to keep everything from burning.

The ginger was a last-minute inspiration, but it worked great. It gave a certain zing and clarity to the roasted veggies (possibly abetted by the chicken stock). You don't have to eat the ginger if you try this; it's intended to add flavor to the dish only (in the vein of adding a bay leaf to soup or stew).

Coq au vin

I can't believe that I haven't blogged about coq au vin before, but searching the blog archives indicates as much. The first foreign language I studied as a kid was French, and I have fond memories of dining at Pierre au Tunnel in NYC with my dad. Coq au vin was always one of my favorite French dishes.

It's also one of those dishes with five billion variations, and I think I have a lot of them in my food library (even though it's a small library by my standards). As a result, this is the way I did it this time, but I've done it differently before and probably will again (I was out of dried porcini mushrooms this time, which is usually a must-have ingredient). My basic recipe comes from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything.

Take four bone-in skin-on chicken thighs, pat dry, roll in all-purpose flour seasoned with salt and cracked black pepper. Shake off the excess. Fry some chopped bacon (in this case, maple-honey bacon from the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers Market, but any bacon will do). Remove the bacon from the pan and saute the chicken thighs in the bacon fat until brown. Remove the chicken from the pan, pour the remaining oil into a pot, then saute one chopped onion, two chopped portobello mushroom caps and two chopped garlic cloves in the oil. When the onion starts sweating, add a cup each of red wine and chicken stock, a good squirt of tomato paste, a bay leaf, chicken blood if you have it, the bacon and its juices, the chicken thighs and their juices, a couple of sprigs of fresh thyme and another shot of salt and cracked black pepper. Cover, turn the heat to medium and let simmer for a while.

After at least an hour, uncover the pot and turn the heat up to reduce the sauce. Coq au vin works well with crusty bread, noodles, rice or potatoes.

About that chicken blood: it's a traditional ingredient of coq au vin, in the vein (sorry) of using everything for the dish (which was originally a peasant stew intended to use up an old played-out rooster). But just do a search online and find plenty of argument about it. I don't go looking for chicken blood, but just taking the juices out of a chicken package (particularly a whole chicken intended for roasting) will involve some blood. I've made coq au vin with and without blood, and both are good, but it does make a difference. Coq au vin with blood has a unique blackish tint and an extra something to the flavor that is difficult to describe, but you know it when you taste it.

Apres-holiday

I'm one of those tiresome folks who is descended from one of the English people who landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620. My blog handle, in fact, is derived from one of those people. Thanksgiving is a lot of things to a lot of people, but to me it's always been a family occasion: an anniversary of an arrival in a new place, but also an occasion to honor the native people without whom the Pilgrim settlement would never have survived. Some contemporary Native Americans find that a troublesome legacy (and I don't blame them), but I think of a hard winter in a new country, when the English transplants were sick and dying, and the native people did what any decent human being would have done; they offered help to their new neighbors. That they were repaid so poorly is one of history's tragedies.

Thanksgiving found me alone again this year; partly from circumstance, partly from inclination. I turned to Mark Bittman and the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers Market. Bittman's recipe for "Turkey Thighs Braised in Red Wine" (from How to Cook Everything) seemed just the ticket, and the farmers market was happy to supply a turkey thigh (one thigh is plenty of meat for one person). The seasonings ranged from porcini mushrooms to juniper berries, all simmered in some Ravenswood Vintners Blend Zinfandel. This would qualify as another "hearty food" kind of dish, with the dark thigh meat standing up to the intense red wine quite well. I added a twist to Bittman's recipe by frying some bacon in the pan first, then browning the turkey thigh and simmering; just to add a little something extra to the sauce. Not your typical Thanksgiving meal, but more than adequate and suitable for a festive special occasion.

Dessert was the traditional pumpkin pie, also from the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers Market. On Friday, I introduced The Deacon to the market; she has been seeking a good meat counter ever since her favorite butcher shop, Heinz's, closed a few years ago. During my tour, I noticed a new heap of Mennonite and Amish cookbooks in the furniture-and-tchotschkes section; that definitely spells trouble.