Viva La A!

At the end of a long, fun, and eventful week, A was granted his Phd on Friday. So this week, the food for the blog is celebratory (and French). I left A's party early on Friday, after becoming inexplicably sober in a bar where being merry was essential, so I wanted to put on a meal to restore him and H (who had lasted considerably longer than me) after their jolly-making, and to make up for my early exit. Cooking coq au vin and tarte tatin had a certain 1970s dinner party charm, and I thought they would be good for feeding to over exerted friends.

Our local Sainsburys, to my astonishment, does not sell joined cockerel, but it did have chicken thighs. I would recommend these, they're cheap and tasty. I would always counsel for the use of free-range meat, but if it's the end of the month and the budget won't stretch or you can't get hold of it (our supermarket had been ransacked for barbeque fodder, so choice was limited) this dish's sauce is so robust, you won't notice if the meat's not top of the range.

Having said from the inception of this project that I would not be using James Martin amounts of butter, I have used another of his butter rich recipes, this one for coq au vin is very good, though. It's easy too; you can do it all in one pot and it's just a matter of chucking in one ingredient after another, the only things you need to chop are the shallots (assuming you crush the garlic, although I doubt that chucking it in whole would do any harm beyond delivering a few surprising mouthfuls to your guests). I'm afraid it's not the most photogenic dish, although, believe it or not, I did try to pretty it up for you.

I adore Raymond Blanc. I like that he says voila after taking almost every dish out of the oven, I like his die-hard enthusiasm for food, and, unlike some TV chefs, I like that he doesn't patronise by only  presenting only easy recipes. And now, I love his tarte tatin recipe. I love it despite the fact that two kilos of apples is blatantly too many for an 8 inch dish. I probably used just over half that. I also confess that I made a mistake with the apples which exposes my own deep levels of food based ignorance. I assumed dessert apples, as requested in the recipe, were apples that went in desserts, not in fact, eating apples which are sweet enough to eat for a dessert. Also, I do not own a tatin dish, just a deep pie dish. That was fine though, I just made my caramel sauce in a pan and then transferred it to my pie dish. (I shovelled on an extra tablespoon or two of sugar on top of the apples to make up for using the wrong sort.)

I'm always nervous about food which requires turning out, as quite often my dishes seem to have some kind of invisible glue which holds their contents in. But, after a second of holding the dish upside down, thinking that I was just going to have to serve it by shovelling, it slid out gracefully in one piece. This recipe was an unqualified success with its eaters--it brought sheer joy to last night, we ate nearly all of it between three of us and had to use superhuman levels of self control to leave Sam a bit. Did it matter that I used the wrong apples? To use a Yorkshire phrase, did it heck.