Game and Fowl - Janny de Moor

Chicken with almond sauce

Janny de Moor — Wed, 21 Jun 2017 14:41:52 +0000

Ingrediënten

Serves two

3 tbsp olive oil
1/2 pitta bread (pre-baked, 25 g)
50 g chopped almonds
2 chicken legs (organic)
peper, salt
plain flour
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp chili powder
1 chopped onion
1 chopped clove garlic
100 ml dry white wine
about 125 ml water

Side dish

potatoes
haricots verts
olive oil
red onion in rings
garlic sliced
smoked bacon in cubes
cumin seed

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Pollo con almendras is a dish from the extremely interesting cuisine of Córdoba. The town that once – during the reign of Calif ‘Abd-ar-Rachman in 10th century – was the most important place in the world. Remaining are the splendid Mezquita (once a magnificent Mosque), beautiful Spaniards and an art of cooking with a still discernable Middle Eastern influence. It is stated that the Romans, who once subjected the country, also contributed to the cuisine, but the sauce in this dish is definitely Arabic. The use of cinnamon with chicken is Arabic too, but the wine is of course a Spanish element, just as the chili powder.

Heat 1 tbsp olive oil in a non stick frying pan. Crumble the bread and sauté it with the almonds until light brown. Ladle into a measuring jug. Wipe the pan clean.
Heat the rest of the oil. Season the chicken legs with pepper and salt, dust with flour and cook until light brown. Sprinkle with cinnamon and chili. Add onion and garlic, sauté for a moment.
Put the chicken legs with the round side under in a microwave dish. Pour the wine over the meat. Cook it covered with a microwave cap or clingfilm for 10 minutes at about 500 W. Afterwards keep chicken warm in a flameproof dish.
Pour the chicken-wine into the frying pan. Let boil for a moment. Pour this liquid into the measuring jug, add the water and with a hand blender mix it into a smooth sauce with bread and almonds. Maybe you will need some more water.
To serve: pour the sauce under the chicken, garnish with parsley.

Side dish: Judías verdes con patatas.

Boil potatoes and beans until done. Fry onion rings in olive oil with smoked bacon and some cumin seed. Warm potatoes and beans for 5 minutes in this mixture

Wine: Red Rioja

Menu suggestion

Starter : Ensalada Cordobesa. Arange onto leaves of cabbage lettuce: tuna from a tin, small tomatoes, green olives, hard-boiled egg, green pepper, vinaigrette.
Dessert: Melon con vino. Reduce 100 ml water with 1 cinnamon stick and 1 tbsp sugar to half. Cool. Mix with 100 ml white wine and 2 tbsp cognac. Scoop little balls from a small melon. Mix with the cinnamon wine in a bowl. Cover and cool.

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Granny’s Chicken (Kip van Grootje)

Janny de Moor — Sun, 27 Sep 2020 14:08:11 +0000

Ingredients

Garnish:

1 kg red stewing pears*
1 vanilla pod or a tsp vanilla extract
3 tbsp sugar
dash of red wine
20 g potato starch

Chicken:

1 free-range (barnyard) chicken
1 whole onion
1 chopped onion
lots of lemon balm**
pepper and salt
butter
750 peeled waxy potatoes, sliced potatoes
100 g lean smoked bacon in cubes
lemon balm leaves

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The farmers on the clay grounds along the big rivers in the Netherlands were far better off than those living on the sand in the Dutch provinces of Drenthe and Gelderland. The somewhat more affluent farmers there even drank wine. Every year a cask of Medoc came into my grandmother’s whitewashed cellar. On special occasions she drank it with her friends, each time lifting the veils of their hats to take a sip. That cask lasted a long time! They were Calvinists.

My grandmother didn’t wear a hat when she went to pick out a chicken in the evening in the very large coop. During the day they had run around in the orchard and farm yard, where my grandma assembled them around her rattling the feed and calling keep, keep, keep… which in Dutch is dialect for “dear chicken”. In Holland these free-range chickens were hard to come by for a long time, but nowadays they are once again for sale.

Granny Dina was a very good cook. She boiled her chicken before braising it. It is my idea to improve her recipe a bit by using a Römertopf.

Leave the pears whole when peeling. Remove the calyx from the base, leave the stalk. Wash and place with the vanilla pod (extract) and sugar in a heavy pan with water almost to cover. Bring to a boil. Lower the heat, cover and simmer for at least 3 hours with the lid on the pan. Add the dash of wine after 1 hour.
Using a slotted spoon place the pears in a wide bowl with the stalks upright. Measure out half a liter of pear juice and bring to the boil. Mix the potato flour in a bowl with some cold water to a paste. Remove the boiling liquid from the heat. Add the paste while stirring. Then bring to the boil again while stirring. As soon as the moisture starts to thicken, remove the pan from the heat. Pour the sauce over the pears which will then shine beautifully. Leave to cool.
Soak a Römertopf (clay-pot) in cold water for 15 minutes. In the meantime, cut the excess fat from the chicken and fill the interior with the peeled onion and lemon balm. Rub the chicken with salt and pepper and put it in the buttered pot. Place in the cold oven, set to 250 ° C /475 F/Gas 9.
After 30 minutes, arrange the potato slices, mixed with some salt and pepper, around the chicken. Sprinkle the diced bacon and the chopped onion on top. Cover the pot and return to the oven for 45 minutes. Then, if necessary, remove the lid from the pot to give the dish a nice brown color in 5 -10 minutes. Total cooking time approx. 1 hour and 20 minutes.
Garnish with lemon balm leaves and serve the chicken straight from the pot, handing the pears out separately.

Wine: Medoc.

* Best species: Giesser Wildeman. As far as I know not for sale in the United Kingdom. Try to find a small stewing pear, that becomes kind of red when cooked long enough. We appreciate this pear so much that my daughter who lives in England brought a young tree from home. It is growing now on English ground.

** Lemon balm is an easy herb. It walks through your garden if you do not watch it. According to the German medieval abbess Hildegard von Bingen the herb is very good for your nerves. This is still believed in the Netherlands. A nervous business man who had bought a lemon balm drink from an alternative medical provider discovered when he was halted by the police that his “medicine” was very alcoholic: 75%! He had become an addict. Natural or organic can be dangerous!

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Istanbul Pilaf

Janny de Moor — Mon, 10 Sep 2018 11:56:07 +0000

Ingredients

Serves two:

2 chicken legs
250 g cleaned carrots
150 g peeled waxy potatoes
1 peeled onion
pepper, salt
750 ml boiling water
100 g basmati rice
4 tbsp cooked chickpeas
2 tbsp butter

Garnish:

Turkish grilled red paprika
dill sprigs

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In every country you can buy street food, but not as varied as in Istanbul. There you can collect a delicious menu while on the go. They themselves say “Food tastes better when it’s got some dirt in it”. At least according to Orhan Pamuk in A Strangeness in My Mind (2015).

Leading character Mevlut Karataş, who in the evening hawks boza (a slightly alcoholic millet drink), sells pilaf with chickpeas and chicken during the day from a beautiful barrow which can be seen all over the old town. His wife cooked the dish and if anything was left it was just reheated for the next day. How I would have liked to know about this history of the city before I stayed in one of the dashing streets.

The author does not give recipes for the combination of Pirinç pilavi nohutlu (with chickpeas) and Tavuklu pilav (with chicken) but those can be found in almost every Turkish cookbook. Without the chickpeas the dish was even served at the court of the Sultans, writes my Turkish friend Nevin Halici in one of her cookbooks: From ‘Sini’ to the tray (1999).

Place the chicken with the whole vegetables and salt and pepper in a large pan. Pour in the boiling water, cover; cook for three quarters of an hour.
Rinse the rice in a sieve under a hot tap until the water runs clear. Let it stand in hot water for five minutes. Then drain.
Bring 250 ml of the chicken stock to the boil in a small pan. Sprinkle in the rice. As soon as the stock is boiling again, cover and simmer for about 15 minutes until all the moisture has been absorbed. Stir in chickpeas and butter.
Brown the chicken legs under a hot grill, place on top of the rice.
Drape peppers around, garnish with sprigs of dill.

Wine: dry Rosé.

Menu suggestion:

Starter: Carrot soup. Puree carrot, potato and onion with a hand blender in the remaining stock of the main course. Spoon warm into the plates, top with some chopped parsley and a spoonful of melted butter, in which some mild paprika powder is stirred.
Dessert: Turkish yogurt with a dollop of cherry jam and some liquid honey.

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