Coq au Vin

Short story: Cook's Illustrated is offering their recipe for "Modern Coq au Vin" (as part of a menu for a full meal with salad and dessert) for free on their website now. This is a great, fairly easy recipe to make--go check it out if you like to cook!

Long story: I don't get to cook as much as I used to when I was a student; I just don't get home early enough any more to cook dinner. But I try to cook once a week, on Sunday evening, when I cook something big enough to generate lots of leftovers for me and GPG to take for our lunches during the week. For one thing, I think homecooked food just tastes better than most things you can buy at a restaurant/deli. For another, I like having something nice and hot to warm up for lunch at work, instead of going out to grab an overpriced cold-cuts sandwich.

This week I made "Modern Coq au Vin" from, as always, Cook's Illustrated. I got the idea after reading a post about it on Two Sheep. June of Two Sheep is also a Cook's Illustrated fan, and she had good things to say about the recipe, so I decided to try it out this week.

GPG loved it. He said it was "great" when he usually says things I make are "good" or "really good." (It's not that GPG doesn't like my food; he's just not effusive about it. At least, I think.) It was also fairly easy to make, and I don't think my substitutions made a big difference for the taste, while they made my life easier: I used dried thyme instead of fresh (and strained the wine/broth mixture) and a whole onion, chopped, instead of pearl onions. The recipe calls for a whole bottle of wine, but I bought the Three Thieves' Bandit Cabernet Sauvignon for about $9 and it worked perfectly.

(If you can find Bandit in your grocery/liquor store, it's worth checking out--the Three Thieves' shtick is that they sell their "Bandit" wine in a tetra-pak box to lower the price. The box is admittedly not the classiest way to buy your wine, but you get a full liter of wine (equivalent to 1 1/3 bottles) and it's quite drinkable, to boot. I'd buy it again just to drink, but it also works well for a high-wine-content recipe like Coq au Vin.)

Anyway, Cook's Illustrated's website regularly offers a few free recipes that change every couple of days. They're offering "Modern Coq au Vin" as one of their free recipes at the moment, so I wanted to post a link to it so that non-subscribers can snag a copy of the recipe while it's available. I made up some mashed potatoes to go with it and the full recipe generated at least 9 meals for me and GPG. It's a great cold weather dish to make and will give you lots of leftovers (or serve lots of people), if that's your thing!