Very timidly, without calling a lot of attention to what I’m doing (Tantara Tantara Zing Boom!), a new feature. I’d have introduced it two weeks ago, but I haven’t been able to find a banner image that suited.

¶ Chicken Thighs Normande. A recipe from Classic Home Cooking, one of my five or six everyday cookbooks. Disaster! I thought I’d made this dish before, but no. I’d thought about making it. But something put me off, the 18oz of hard cider probably. Hard cider is hard to get.

But Kathleen brought home a bottle of fizzy gimme the other night, a souvenir of some event. Woodchuck Granny Smith Draft Cider. I don’t think that it’s what the authoresses of Classic Home Cooking had in mind, but the booze wasn’t the problem.

The problem, in my view, is that the recipe’s first step was omitted. It ought to have read, “Sauté the leeks and the Canadian bacon in a knob of butter and a teaspoon of oil. Remove the leeks and the bacon from the pan. Brown the chicken thighs, five to eight minutes per side. Add a minced clove of garlic and continue cooking for a minute. Remove the chicken and the garlic from the pan. Pour in the cider and deglaze.”

That’s what I’m going to do next week, anyway, when I give the recipe another try. That way, the chicken will be cooked when it comes out of the oven. The idea is to prevent having to slice into inedible rubber tires at the table.

It won’t do any good, will it, to tell you that alarm bells sounded in my brain. “Twenty to twenty-five minutes? That’s just not enough time. Let’s put it in the oven for thirty-five.” Which also was just not enough time.

Happily, I boiled a lot of elbows for sopping up the sauce. That turned out to be dinner.

PS: Anybody who can decipher the heading is a dirty old man!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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