Basque Chicken Stew

Today we're heading into southern France, the Basque region to be specific. Once again, if you're trying to keep your fat intake down, move along. This one is loaded with it. Extremely tasty as a result, but not for those on a serious diet. Moving along, we're once again using Simple French Cooking.

The menu goes something like this:
Basque Chicken Stew
Vegetable Soup
1/2 c. Orange Juice
5 oz. Chardonnay


Ingredients:
1 Red bell pepper
1 Green bell pepper
2 chicken breast halves, 2 thighs, 2 legs
1/4 lb. Thickly sliced bacon (Cut it into pieces 1/2 inch wide, easiest to do while partially frozen)
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 yellow onion, cut into thin wedges
1 lb. small white boiling potatoes (Yukon gold or White rose), peeled and cut in halves or quarters, depending on size
1 lb Ripe tomatoes (peeled seeded and chopped)
2-3 sprigs fresh Italian parsley
3 sprigs fresh thyme
1 bay leaf
1 stalk celery (cut crosswise into 4 equal pieces
1 1/2 Tbls All purpose flour
1/2 c Dry White wine, heated (I used a chardonnay. It was already open)
1/2 c chicken broth, heated
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Ground Cayenne pepper

How to:
1) We'll start with roasting the peppers so we can peel them. Pre-heat the oven to 500 degrees. Cut both peppers in half and seed them. Place them flat on a baking sheet. Let them cook in the oven until the skin starts to blister and blacken. Pull them out of the oven and cover the baking sheet with aluminum foil for 10-15 minutes. They should be cool enough to handle at that point. Once that happens, the skins should be loose. If you need to get it started, use a paring knife starting at one end to get between the skin and the pulp of the pepper.

2) Cut the peppers into strips about 1/2 inch wide. Set those to one side.

3) Skin the chicken pieces and remove the fat from them. Cut the breast pieces in half crosswise.

4) Heat a large saute pan over medium heat until it's hot. Cook the bacon until it is golden. It shouldn't take more than about 10 minutes. Use a soup spoon to transfer the bacon into a soup pot. After that, turn the heat for the saute pan to medium-low. Add the garlic and onion immediately. Saute the garlic and onion in the juices from the bacon until they're soft, about 6 or 7 minutes.

5) Once again, use the slotted spoon to transfer these to the soup pot with the bacon. Pull the saute pan off the heat (Keep the juices, we'll need them in a little while) and add the roasted peppers, tomatoes, and potatoes to the soup pot as well.

6) Create a bouquet garni using the herbs. We do this by bundling the bay, parsley, and thyme inside the four pieces of celery and tying it off with butcher's string. Make one end of the string long enough to hang over the pot's edge for easy retrieval. Add it to the pot.

7) Bring the saute pan back over medium-high heat. Put the chicken in the saute pan with the bacon grease after it's heated. Saute the chicken until it's started to brown, only 5-6 minutes per side. We're just searing them here. Put the chicken in the soup pot, bones and all.

8) Now we can pour off the fat from the pan, reserving one Tbls which we add to the soup pot.

9) Turn the heat under the soup pot to medium. Add the flour to the pot and stir until it's blended with the juices already there. Cook and stir for 1 minute, then add the heated white wine and heated chicken broth. Keep stirring the mixture and scrape any browned bits from the bottom of the pot. These carmelized bits are where a lot of our flavor is hiding out so we want those mixing around with everything else in the pot.

10) Keep cooking until the broth starts to thicken. It should only take about 2 or 3 minutes. Ladle the sauce over the chicken, we still want to mix the flavors up some more.

11) Time to spice. Add Cayenne, black pepper and kosher salt until the taste is where you want it.

12) Cover the pot and bring it up to simmer. Back off on the heat to keep it barely simmering while covered for the next 25 minutes or so. The juices will increase and give us a better broth.

13) We're still not done cooking this beast. Rearrange the chicken and veggies in the pot, cover it again and keep simmering everything until the chicken is tender. It will probably be another 20-25 minutes. You'll know it's done when the chicken is opaque all the way through.

14) Take one final taste and adjust the seasonings to your palate. Remove the bouquet garni and transfer all everything to a warmed serving dish and serve it up.

Other Thoughts:
I love the roasted pepper in this. I might look for some orange peppers to change up the colour scheme a little bit. Maybe find something else green to liven things up. Zucchini pr carrot shouldn't change the hearty nature of the dish too much. The recipe says it serves four, but that must have been a really small chicken. We get 6-8 servings out of it. The serving sizes make it a dish best used with company because it really doesn't keep that well. That lovely broth is, after all, composed of all the juices that have a leaked out of our meats and vegetables with a little bit of wine and yet more chicken broth to fortify the flavors.

Oh, do yourself a favor, order the bacon from a butcher. You want it lean, and you want find that in a pre-packaged batch from the grocery store. Trust me, I've looked. It doesn't matter how good it looks in the part you can see. I might try some sage or rosemary in the bouquet, just to see what it adds to the flavor mix.

Tools:
Soup Pot
Saute Pan/Skillet
Slotted Spoon
Butcher's twine

Health Info (Assuming 6-8 servings):
4 Meat servings
2 Veggie servings
3 Fat servings
2 Starch

::Malloreth out::