Cooking adventures

Some good friends of mine had a baby two weeks ago. In celebration of said event, I decided to cook dinner for them and take it over. Nice, friendly thing to do, right? The fella and I discussed, found a day when we weren't too busy, and made plans for what to make. Well, I had a whole chicken in the freezer, so decided to do something with that.

I should add, when I moved in to my first apartment, my mom gave me a cookbook that she had put together in a three ring binder of recipes that the family makes and likes. One of these recipes in said book is "Coq a Vin". It looked delicious. It had chicken, mushrooms, red wine, and all kinds of other yummy stuff like garlic. Plus, you got to light things on fire. I was sold.

Well, I had to hack up a raw chicken. There's nothing quite like taking cold chicken carcass and cutting it into bits that you're planning on eating to gross you out. It's totally different cutting up a cooked chicken versus a raw one. If you've never had the experience, at least when it's cooked, it comes apart with out serious hacking, and has the texture of meat. It smells good too, like something you'd want to eat. Raw chicken has sinew, and bone, and feels like raw meat. I felt like a butcher. So I was already sort of revolted by the whole project when I started.

I don't know why I didn't expect it to be purple. I expected pretty looking chicken. In retrospect, of course it's purple. You stew everything in red wine. It didn't taste bad, I think it was just the process of cooking it that put me off. For all the world, it looked like something you'd see in a horror movie, complete with bloody looking bones sticking out of a pile of goo. I didn't take pictures of the final creation, but I'm attaching a video of the "Phwoosh" as the fella so aptly described it.

I have to admit, the fire part was cool. I was momentarily afraid our kitchen was going to catch on fire. Word to the wise, Brandy lights up easily and quickly when it's heated.




In other news, my sweater is 1/3 done! Keep your fingers crossed, maybe this one will actually fit...