Cooking With Joy: Coq au Vin



When I get overwhelmed I love to watch The Food Network, specifically The Barefoot Contessa. Everything about her calms me down. She has such an ease to everything she does. One of the dishes that she makes is Coq Au Vin. It’s always been something that I have wanted to try, just had to figure out how to make it easier and kosher. Thank you Jamie for giving us exactly that!

Before I continue on about the Coq Au Vin, I just want to talk about the actual chicken for a minute. I don’t have such a great relationship with bone chicken, so I opted to use cutlets. Not all chicken is created equal. The quality of the meats and various cuts at Evergreen, are things you can’t always find in other places. The whole store is like this, but specifically the meat department- you could just spend time looking at everything and become inspired- at least that is what I do. When you have good ingredients the recipes always taste better. And that is just one of the reasons why I love shopping there.

Coq au Vin with Veal Sausage, Thyme, and Merlot page 148
DRESS IT DOWN Quick Coq au Vin 

I combined the dressed up and dressed down versions. I followed the recipe for the dressed up version, yet used cutlets to make the recipe cook faster. I love using Jacks sausages, so I used the Kilbasa again, just because its SO GOOD! Again I left out the thyme, and the dish turned out pretty good if I do say so myself.  I used a really nice bottle of Merlot. Of course I had to taste it before pouring it into the pot, it was surprisingly sweet, with fruity notes (look at me talking about wine and being all fancy) Seriously though, the wine lent itself beautifully to this dish. When cooking with wine, make sure it’s a bottle that you would want to drink, since the flavor and the quality is what will be passed onto the dish.

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The aroma of the wine was filling the house and it was making me really hungry. After I took the pot out of the oven, I let it cool just enough before diving in. I put a bite of mushroom, pearl onion, sausage and chicken onto the fork (my mouth is watering as I write this) together, dipped it into the wine for good measure and ate. The richness of the sausage and mushrooms combined with  the silkiness of the pearl onions- WHOA!! I tried to find the words to write, but honestly I just kept going back for more.

Special thanks to Yehoshua Werth of The Grapevine for sponsoring the Merlot. Next time you are in Monsey go visit them. They have a gorgeous new store, wide selection and very friendly knowledgeable staff.