A little bit of red wine
Last weekend we shared a lovely bottle of Tempranillo from Spain via Aldi. But we didn't manage to drink it all so I decided to try and do something with it for dinner tonight. And there is not nearly as much as in this bottle on the left. Maybe there is just one large glass or maybe a tiny bit more. It's definitely not worth drinking after all this time anyway, and thee's not enough to make boeuf bourguignon or something similar either.
Now I know you can simply deglaze a pan with it or marinade things - maybe that's what I should have done, but I decided I wanted to do something a little bit different. I remembered that I had featured wine in one of my cookbooks I made for my children, so I looked it up and found a Jill Dupleix recipe Chicken roasted with red wine and grapes which I decided to go with, although I did consider Robert Carrier's recipe for:
SAUCISSES AU VIN ROUGE
25g butter, 500g Toulouse or (well-flavoured) sausages, 2 tbs dry breadcrumbs, 275ml good red wine, salt and freshly ground black pepper, powdered thyme and bay leaf
Melt butter in a frying pan and sauté sausages over a low heat until they are golden on all sides, turning them from time to time with a wooden spoon. Add breadcrumbs, turn up heat and let breadcrumbs take on colour. Add wine, bring to the boil, lower flame and simmer gently for 10 minutes. Add salt and pepper, a pinch of thyme and a bay leaf and simmer for 5-10 minutes more.
Three things about that. He turns the sausages with a wooden spoon. How interesting. Most of us do it with tongs I'm sure. Breadcrumbs that are fried golden and crisp and then cooked in wine? What does that do to them I wonder? And powdered thyme. I wonder if he was just catering to the masses back then who couldn't get fresh thyme. Or maybe it's a more intense flavour.
Anyway I decided that although it was intriguing I wasn't quite game to test it out on David. Not today anyway.
I didn't have the appropriate kind of chicken either - thighs with the bone in - so I was still thinking about it when we went to the shops. And there on a special were red grapes and so I decided this was a sign. Woolworths however didn't have any chicken with the bone in other than whole chickens and drumsticks. Which confirmed its status in my mind of my least favoured supermarket. Aldi however, did and so the problem was solved although now that I think about it I don't think the skin has been left on. But that's no big deal. David would discard that anyway. Here's what it is supposed to look like.
What was the clincher for me was that it was served with mashed potato. I love mashed potato though David does not, so I shall have to do just plain boiled ones for him. Also it has red onions and I have a couple that really need using up, plus balsamic vinegar which David loves. Very much looking forward to it. Maybe I'll serve it with carrots too and a green salad of course.
So that's what I'm doing but I thought that I would seek out variations and see if it is a classic French thing or not. Most people seemed to infer that it was French. David Lebovitz, who I think is a respected American cook/writer thinks not:
"But I’m not sure this dish has roots in France. I haven’t seen many references to 'harvester’s chicken with grapes' in France. A few searches for poulet vendageur aux raisins turned up some not-very-encouraging results. So it may be something invented by someone who romanticized something that’s less-than-glamorous, namely, grape-picking, but who likes chicken very much and decided to pair it with a big bunch of grapes, like I did."
He calls his recipe Wine Harvester's Chicken and takes his grapes off the stem (which I might do too. He also adds a bit of orange peel, which is very provençale, and some allspice berries. Plus the vinegar is red wine vinegar not balsamic. But it is very similar to Jill Dupleix's recipe.
I found four more similar but always slightly different recipes: Red wine roast chicken with grapes and herbs from Cali Girl, Nigella's Chicken with red grapes and marsala, Simple roasted grape chicken from Food 52 and Pot roasted poussin with pinot, garlic and grapes from delicious.
And one last quickie from Stephanie Alexander who recommends that you "add a handful of grapes to the final juices of a roasting chicken and deglaze with verjuice."
There are lots of other similar recipes but for a braised chicken not a roast one, so I don't consider that to be quite the same. Although it probably depends on how much liquid you use.
I must say it does seem to be a fairly obvious pairing particularly if you grow grapes and make wine, so it is interesting to see that it doesn't really appear to be a classic French dish, though I wouldn't mind betting that you would find a version on menus here and there throughout France.
Anyway that's what you can do with chicken and grapes. But to end here are a few more slightly unusual things you can do with a bit of leftover wine:
freeze in ice cube trays and add to your wine in hot weather. Or any other drink come to that - some soda water maybe? Or unfreeze and use to cook with?
Make icy poles with it - add some fruit purée or actual fruit
Put it in the compost bin - it's good for it
Put some in your bath - apparently it's a really good moisturiser. Not sure what you'd smell like though
Store little bits of leftover wine in a container that you keep in the fridge - one for white and one for red, then you eventually might have enough to do a daube or something similar that takes a lot of wine. Consider it a blend.
Marinade dried fruit in it with a sprig of thyme. Remove the thyme after a week and use the dried fruit in all sorts of imaginative ways.
Make a spritzer - add berries, soda water and some liqueur
grilled wine bread (also from Jill Dupleix, although I think this is more traditional):
4 slices crusty, country-style bread, 1 garlic clove cut in half, good red wine, olive oil
Rub bread with cut side of garlic. Splash bread lightly with red wine to form a nice splotchy pattern. Heat grill or barbecue until hot. Brush bread with a touch of olive oil, and grill on both sides.
I might try the sausages some time and maybe the grilled bread but I'm not sure I'll be trying any of the other things there.
Looking forward to tonight's dinner though. It may even be warm enough to eat it outside which always puts me in a holiday mood.
