Hello, welcome to Sunday Sauce, a weekly recipe newsletter designed to inspire your Sundays in the kitchen. This week’s newsletter contains a recipe for coq au vin.
Yesterday felt a little like lockdown.
The Yorkshire Dales Marathon was taking place, its undulating route passing our house and closing down all the roads for the majority of the day. It rained and it rained and it rained. Rosie was away. I stared out of the window and wondered how on earth to entertain the kids on a wet Sunday without resorting to an entire day of television. And the dog needed walking.
Eventually we threw on our coats and walked to the end of the road armed with sweets and words of encouragement for the runners. Having heroically done a couple of marathons myself, along with a few stabs at the joyful Hackney Half, I somehow naively expected to find the route lined with supporters and perhaps the odd brass band cheering on those masochistic enough to literally run up hill and down dale for 26 damp miles.
But it was just us and the crows. For a while we struggled to shift any stock, and the four bags of sweets we’d pocketed began to seem excessive. It’s something I’ve noticed over the years I’ve worked in restaurants - new dishes often take a while to bed in, then once a few people start to order them the pace of procurement increases. Which is to say, once the first couple of runners took us up on the offer of free sweets, more followed, and before long we were cleaned out, and trudged home to a lunch of leftover bolognese.
Lockdown was lifted around 3.30pm and I bundled the kids into the car, desperate to get to the supermarket before the ever-ludicrous 4pm Sunday closure. My parents and sister and her family were coming for kids’ tea/early dinner, and rather than make do with what we had (which wasn’t loads, my lockdown activity having been a full fridge clear-out and inventory (definitely another story for another day - some real game-changing fridge organisation in play there)), I was fixated on making coq au vin.
It had just been one of those throwaway conversations but on Friday I’d asked a friend what he’d had for supper the night before, and he’d replied ‘coq au vin’ in such a matter-of-fact, ‘why would you eat anything else’ kind of way that it was all I could think about all weekend. It’s the perfect dish with which to mark the transition to autumn.
I quite enjoy serving it with heavily parsley'd croutons as the carb, though yesterday was nothing if not a day for mashed potato.
Serves 6
1 chicken, 1.8kg - 2kg
2 tbsp olive oil
80g smoked lardons
salt and pepper
25g butter
2 onions, peeled and roughly chopped
2 carrots, roughly chopped
2 sticks of celery, roughly chopped
4 cloves of garlic, peeled and sliced
200g button mushrooms
2 tbsp plain flour
500ml cheap red wine
500ml chicken stock or water
a few sprigs of thyme
2 bay leaves
to serve
lots of chopped parsley
mashed potatoes, and in our case peas
• joint the chicken. There are videos on Youtube that will show this far better than I can explain it here, if you’re unsure. Or use a few legs and thighs. Cut the breasts into three large pieces, with the fillet separate, so you end up with 8 bits of breast.
• in a large, heavy bottomed saucepan, heat the olive oil over a medium flame and add the lardons. Fry until crispy then remove with a slotted spoon.
• a few pieces at a time, brown the chicken well, seasoning with salt and pepper as you do, setting it to one side as you go.
• add the butter and let it foam, then add the vegetables and cook for 20 minutes over a medium heat, stirring regularly, until softened and lightly browned.
• add the flour and stir for a couple of minutes, then add the wine and bring to a boil. Simmer for a few minutes, then add the stock or water and bring back to a boil. Return the chicken and lardons to the pan, cover, and cook over a gentle heat for half an hour.
• remove the breast pieces and set aside. Re-cover and cook for another 30-45 minutes until the legs and thighs are good and tender. Return the breast pieces to the pan and allow to warm through. Keep warm until ready to serve. No rush.
• garnish with a flurry of parsley and serve with, for example, mashed potatoes and peas.