Poulet en Cocotte Grand-Mère

Whisk Wednesdays: Poulet en Cocotte Grand-Mère (Braised Chicken Casserole with Bacon, Mushrooms, Potatoes, and Onions):

        The recipe prepared for this week is from Class 20, Part 2:  Poulet en Cocotte Grand-Mère (Braised Chicken Casserole with Bacon, Mushrooms, Potatoes, and Onions).  It can be found in the cookbookLe Cordon Bleu At Home on pages 296-297.

Okay, it's basically roast chicken.  Nothing terribly fancy about that, and in fact, this was described as a sort of "grandmotherly one-pot dish" originally. 

      Make no mistake about it, my grandmothers did cook fine roast chickens in their days, but that said, OMW...THIS is my roast chicken recipe from now on.  Seriously. 

What a great dish...again, it's the layering of the flavors.  It's magical how these recipes take very simple ingredients and bring layers and layers of flavor to a finished dish with the techniques used, making it taste like nothing you have ever tasted before.  It was that good.

      It got rave reviews around here...when the husband is extremely happy with his dinner, there is no end of good things that result!   Okay, I know you are thinking he was just very appreciative of having homemade food again, and he was, but truly, this is one of those recipes that is very easy, and very tasty...worth getting to know.  We enjoyed it very much...moist, tender, flavorful.

      The recipe was easy (Shari has it posted on Friday, January 23rd's date), all the ingredients are common, easy to find, and went together quickly.  (Five pans, but I have learned to just tell myself that I enjoy using all my pans/cookware and get over the pan count each week.) 

The recipe states that in France, grandmothers would put all these things in one pot and cook them.  It goes on to say that now this recipe has all the ingredients being cooked separately and then being brought together in the end for about a 20 minute cooking time of all being in the same pot.  (Photo:  at the end of the cooking, and please excuse the incredibly incompetent trussing as I am not terribly good at that, and it all was coming undone by the end of the cooking time.  I need a whole lot more practice in tying things up properly.)

      It works...all the ingredients taste very much of themselves, and then there is also a sort of blending of flavors.  In most, if not all, my recipes, the one-pot dishes end up with everything in them pretty much tasting the same at the end (I am thinking of a pot roast, carrots, and potatoes, for example).  In this dish, cooking the ingredients separately, i.e. pearl onions, potatoes, and mushrooms, ensures that at the end you can taste the best of the three separate ingredients on their own.  Hard to explain, just try it.  Absolutely wonderful. 

If you would like to see how the other Whisk Wednesday members fared in this class, click here, and then on the Whisk Wednesdays connect to individual bloggers, or better yet, come and join us!  Shari has the ingredients posted on her site at the click, so while we can't post the recipe instructions, you can at least look at the ingredients, and I bet you can figure out a lot of it from there.