October 15, 2013 Fricasseed Chicken with Couscous and Asparagus with a cream sauce

I thawed out four chicken thighs we had bought at Costco a week ago ($2.29/lb).

When Suzette got home we decided to sauté the chicken in butter and oil and I decided to make a cream sauce with Japanese sweet peppers, tarragon, purselane, and garlic greens from the garden.  We discussed what we would cook with the dish and decided upon couscous with the PPI carrots and mint.

I wanted to try a bottle of Chenin Blanc we bought in Vouvray last summer so I fetched a bottle of 2011 Domaine des Aubuisières “Les Plan de Jean” that we bought at the Processing plant in Vouvray last summer directly from the wine maker Bernard Fouquet.   We had been guided to Domaine des Aubuisières by Karen MacNeil’s selection of it as one of the two best vineyards in Vouvray in her great book, The Wine Bible.   Mssr. Fouquet was kind enough to delay a luncheon appointment to allow us to taste and purchase four bottles of his wine.   I don’t know how to describe the wine.  I has a honey like consistency with the flavor of apricots.  It tastes like a mouth full of fruit flavors hitting your palate all at once.  It is a little sweet but the sweetness is balanced with extreme fruitiness.  It went really well with the slightly spicy sauce we made for the chicken.  I discovered tonight that bottle of wine sold in France do not have the label describing the wine and its importer on the back of the bottle.  Here is the wine label.

    

Suzette cooked the chicken for about thirty minutes until the skin turned crisp, but it was still cold in the center, so she suggested that we remove the chicken from the skillet and add use the cooking oil and butter plus chicken drippings to make a roux and add the ingredients to the sauce and when the sauce was made to return the chicken to the skillet and convection bake it in the oven.   We added flour to the oil and then milk and then some PPI Chardonnay to make a sauce and when it became smooth pan gravy we returned the chicken to the pan and baked it in the oven for another thirty minutes. 

Suzette snapped the stalks off asparagus and steamed them and I cooked the couscous in the PPI carrots and mint with 1 ½ cups of water and 1 cup of couscous. 

While the chicken was cooked the sauce had thickened in the pan and we needed to loosen it up .

Suzette added crema but that did not loosen it up very much.  The sauce stuck to the plate and chicken and gave the sauce and dish a very unattractive heaviness. 

 This meal is a good example of the axiom that both the wine and the food need to be well prepared to make a great meal.  This meal had really great wine but one element of the food preparation, the sauce, was not up to that quality.  We would have had a better meal if we had not put the sauce on the chicken and couscous, even though I loved the sauce's pleasant tarragon, garlic chive, sweet pepper and purselane flavor.

We have a half bottle of wine left so we may yet find a fit for its luxurious flavors.

Bon Appétit