I could not come up with a guinea hen, so I just used chicken...chicken thighs to be exact, because that's what the guys would eat as they have had chicken breast a couple of times this week and I think that if I serve any more chicken breast, there will be a walk-out. I loved this recipe. It just went together nicely, everything was cooked separately and then placed into the pot and into the oven for the last little stint. There are lots of fun ingredients in this recipe: chicken, shallots, bacon, pearl onions, oyster and crimini mushrooms, chestnuts, and red wine (I used merlot from Mondavi). The whole dish tasted so wonderful! Really lovely moist and flavorful chicken. It was a big hit...well, except Mark did not care for the chestnuts. He indicated that the next time I make this dish, he would be just fine without the chestnuts, so I will either leave them out, sub an additional mushroom type, or keep them in (my first choice as I loved them) and just make certain that none land in his portion. I think they added to the overall flavor of the sauce, and he loved the sauce, so maybe it was just the texture of the chestnuts he did not care for. The only chestnuts I could find were canned ones imported from France (at $9 a can, you can be sure I won't be making it with the canned chestnuts all that often). Chestnut season is definitely not now, and when I tried to see if I could order them online, guess what...none could be found. So, I went with the canned. I am thinking, however, that this is such a great dish (and fairly easy with a low to normal pan ratio) that I might like to try this with the chestnuts I can find in the autumn. Just to see the difference, as I am sure there is one. Sort of like a huge difference between fresh green beans and canned ones. The little chestnuts are actually kind of scary looking...they look like a brain, seriously. I had never had them before and I thought they were good...a nutty meaty taste. Ah, well...despite the chestnuts, this dish won rave reviews. And, I was able to throw it together for lunch between swim sessions, who knew? Now when I go back to the pool and anyone asks, "So what did you do between sessions?" I can say I went home and made and served my family a Le Cordon Bleu lunch. It always makes me seem way more interesting than I actually am. 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. The recipe prepared for this week's Whisk Wednesdays' assignment is from Class 22, Part 4: Pintade à la Cévenole (Guinea Hen with Mushrooms and Chestnuts). It can be found in the cookbook Le Cordon Bleu at Home on pages 187-188.
Next Week's Assignment:
Class 23 Les coquillages, escargots et cuisses de grenouilles – Shellfish, snails and frog’s legs
• Class 23, Part 1:
Cuisses de Grenouille aux Herbes (Herbed Frog's Legs) from Chocolate & Zucchini (if you click on Clothilde's site, she has the recipe posted...she is our guest recipe chef this week as our home LCB book did not include a recipe for frogs legs...and well, what can I say, Shari was all about trying to make frog legs as it went with this class...and the rest of us figured we were all game if Shari was).