Photographing poultry is not easy. Desserts are so much prettier.
Try this:
Click here for images of chicken. Click here for images of dessert.
I rest my case.
This is the last in the series about poultry (next week is frog legs!), and the recipe calls for guinea hen (or guinea fowl). I like my white meat, and this bird is generally dark meat so I had a feeling I wouldn't like this meal.

For this dish, you will have to sauté and set aside many times, which for some reason reminded me of square dancing calls (not that I square dance, but I have watched relatives!).

Circle right.
Bacon, blanch and fry.
Set aside.
Pearl onions, peel and sauté.
Set aside.
Mushrooms, sauté.
Set aside.
Guinea hen, dry, dredge and sauté.
Set aside.
With half the wine, deglaze.
Half Sashay.
Add Bouquet Garni, lardons, pearl onions, and mushrooms.
Split Two.
Cover and bake.
Promenade.
Pan drippings, reserve.
California Twirl.
Chestnuts, sauté.
Set aside.
Arrange chestnuts, lardons, pearl onions, mushrooms, and guinea hen in casserole and bake.
Couples Circulate.
For the sauce, shallots, sauté.
Rollaway.
With the last of the wine, deglaze.
Dosado to a wave.
Pan drippings, pour in.
Weave the Ring.
Reduce.
Pass thru.
Whisk in butter and serve.
Alamo Style.
Recipe: Pintade à la Cévenole (Guinea Hen with Mushrooms and Chestnuts)

Serves 6 (picture shows half a recipe)

Ingredients:

Here is a challenging recipe. First, you need to find quail. [Plus you need to forget how tiny and cute they are.] Then, you need to have veal stock in your freezer or make some, which means finding veal bones that are just as difficult to source as quail. [Plus you must get over your guilt about veal.] Next, you need to find fatback, or "pork back fat" as my butcher called it. If you can, you must find crème fraîche, or make it yourself the day before, which I forgot to do. Finally, you have to find Calvados, an apple brandy from Normandy in France. I'm sure all these ingredients are much easier to find in the heart of France and not in the Canadian Shield of Ontario.

Luckily, Ottawa has a wonderful butcher (Glebe Meat Market) where I was able to buy "jumbo quail". [They still look tiny to me.] Plus I have veal stock in the freezer that I made recently. A different butcher (The Butchery) always carries fat back, so I bought more than I needed the last time I was there. As for the Calvados, on one of my foodie field trips last week, I was in Quebec and stopped in at a wine store. Just as I was about to purchase a large bottle of Calvados, I saw they had minis! The only thing I can't buy locally is crème fraîche, and I should have made my own. I used heavy cream instead, and my sauce wasn't thick enough.

After you have all the ingredients, making this dish isn't hard and only requires a baking pan for the apples and toast and a roasting pan for the quail.

Recipe: Cailles à la Normande (Quail with Cream and Apples)

Serves: 6 (picture shows half a recipe)

Ingredients:

You can find the recipe for Cailles à la Normande (Quail with Cream and Apples) in the book Le Cordon Bleu at Home. To see how the rest of the Whisk Wednesdays group fared with their recipe, click here (or check out the sidebar) and then click on each blogger!

Tasting Notes
Quail are tiny. This sauce needs crème fraîche. The best part was the Calvados. I'm glad I bought more than one mini of Calvados so that I can enjoy Le Trou Normand with the remaining bottles and pretend I'm in the heart of Normandy.

Next Class
• Pintade à la Cévenole (Guinea Hen with Mushrooms and Chestnuts) pages 187-188 {You can substitute Duck breast if you like.}

. . . . . . . . . .

Running total: $1,142.78 + $9.49 (quail) + $9.09 (other ingredients) = $1,161.36
($3.10 per serving)

Butter used so far: 9 pounds, 30 tablespoons

. . . . . . . . . .

We're making comfort food. A fricassée (pronounced 'frik-a-see' by English-speaking people or 'frik-a-say' by French-speaking people) makes me think of an Alsatian grandmère in a farm kitchen cutting her chicken, fresh from the coop, into pieces with a sturdy knife while her petite-fille watches on a stool next to her ready to help. Although there's not much to help with in this recipe.

Fricassée is lighter than a stew and perfect for Spring. It turns out Abraham Lincoln loved chicken fricassée, and I'm a fan now too.

After cutting up the chicken, you sauté the meat in olive oil and brown the meat on both sides. Then, add the garlic (without bothering to peel them as I did) and let the garlic soften a bit. Sprinkle everything with salt, pepper and sliced sage and add the wine. The wine helps deglaze the pan and scrape up all the tasty bits stuck to the pan. Let the wine come to the boil and then throw it in a 400˚F oven to stew for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, cover for another 15-20 minutes until the chicken is cooked through. Strain the sauce, making sure to push all the softened garlic through the strainer (leaving the garlic peels behind), and reduce by half.

Recipe: Fricassée de Poulet à l'ail et à la Sauge (Chicken Fricassée with Garlic and Sage)

Serves: 6

Ingredients:

1 cup dry white wine

For the next few classes, we're learning about different types of poultry. Cornish hen is on the menu this week (since I couldn't find guinea hen at the butcher). According to Wise Geek, the term "Guinea hen was used to refer to these small poultry servings but Cornish game hen has become more popular."

The Cornish hen is a plump all-white meat bird. Its original breeder was Alphonsine "Therese" Makowsky. Here is a video explaining the history of the Cornish hen. There is another theory that chicken mogul Donald John Tyson created the Rock Cornish game hen by cross-breeding White Rock hens and Cornish hens in 1965.

Cabbage and Other Vegetables
Again, this recipe calls for many pots. In Saucepan #1, the cabbage is blanched. Mon petit chou. I love boiled cabbage that's then drizzled with butter. Its subtle flavor is very comforting. In this dish, it's blanched and served along with the carrots and onions and plays its supporting role very well.

In Large Casserole #2, the onions are cooked until tender, and then the carrots are added. The cabbage joins the milieu along with a Bouquet Garni and 2½ cups of water and this mixture simmers for about 1 hour.

Poultry
I rinsed and dried the Cornish hens with paper towels and then threw a garlic clove, a thyme sprig, and a bay leaf in each cavity and seasoned them with salt and pepper. After trussing, they were ready for Roasting Pan #3 and a 425˚F oven for about 30 minutes.

Bacon
While the hens were roasting, I prepared the bacon. Although the recipe called for lardons, I used bacon strips. Using Twitter, I asked how people like to cook their bacon and got these answers: Since my oven was taken up with the roasting hens, I used the stove to cook the bacon this time. For this recipe, I cut the slices into 1-inch strips, blanched them in Saucepan #4 (but probably could have reused Saucepan #1 to save on one dish) in boiling water for 1 minute to take away the extra saltiness and drained them in cold water. Then, in Frying Pan #5 I fried them in some butter and oil until they were golden and almost crispy. [I'm not sure I really needed to use the butter and oil since bacon has enough fat on its own.]

Polish Sausage
Polish sausage from Butcher Boy Meats in Regina, Saskatchewan with some dill cream cheese and table water crackers was a staple when I was in university. I haven't been able to find Polish sausage that tastes as good as theirs yet. This sausage was tucked into Sauté Pan #2 along with the vegetables, bacon and hens, and cooked along with everything else for awhile. Once everything had finished cooking (about 20 minutes later), I sliced up the Polish sausage and dinner was ready.

Recipe: Pintadeaux au Chou (Guinea Hen with Cabbage)

Serves: 6

Ingredients:

¾ pound Polish sausage