Coq (Thighs) Au Vin and Salted Honey Pie

Plus: Another Beet Salad, Rustic Sausage Cassoulet, and Dinner at F&F Pizza.

Hey everyone,

How was your V-Day? I was a real romantic and cooked up a feast for my boo including the Coq au Vin that you see above and a Salted Honey Pie you’ll see below.

For the coq, I made things easy on myself by just using chicken thighs. I also omitted the traditional bacon because we’ve been eating less pork these days (sausages not withstanding). Here’s a video I made of the process, which was surprisingly easy:

@amateurgourmetCoq (Thighs) au Vin for Valentine’s Day. 💘 #eeeeeats #food #foodblogger #foodtok #cooking #foodporn #chicken #frenchfood #francais

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

I didn’t really use a recipe: you can use any coq au vin recipe (try this one!) and just use chicken thighs. If you want to do what I did exactly, the oven was at 350 and the only step that’s not clear in the video is that you toast the tomato paste with the onions, carrots, and celery, add the wine, and reduce it by half before you add the chicken back.

For dessert, I made the Salted Honey Pie from the Four and Twenty Blackbirds Cookbook.

It’s a fascinating pie where you blind bake a pie crust (I had major issues with shrinkage… it’s like it went swimming) and make a filling with honey, sour cream, melted butter, and salt. Think of it like a buttermilk pie that’s quite a bit sweeter.

In fact, it was so sweet that my Valentine (whose name won’t be mentioned even though you know it’s Craig) didn’t finish his slice. After all of the work that I did!

It’s okay: he made up for it by letting me watch The Traitors instead of a Criterion movie.

For Friday’s lunch, I found some golden beets and red beets from my CSA and decided to roast them in separate bundles (you wrap them in foil, drizzle with olive oil, and roast in a 425 oven for an hour). Then I dressed them each separately: the red beets got olive oil and balsamic, the golden beets got olive oil and sherry vinegar.

I also roasted carrots and made a salad that I’ve been making lately by assembling all of the roasted stuff, adding some citrus segments, some toasted pecans, and some Feta.

That looks good enough to eat and, reader, it was.

Last night, I improv-ed a sausage cassoulet by cooking Rancho Gordo cassoulet beans with lots of veggies (carrots, onions, celery, celery leaves, garlic), bay leaves, and a Parmesan rind until creamy.

Then, for the cassoulet, I browned sausages in a separate pan (Italian sweet sausages and Chicken Piccata Sausages from The Meat Hook), removed the sausages to a separate plate, added some veg, deglazed with white wine, and poured the reduced mixture in with the beans.

I put the beans in a 9X13 pan, topped with the browned sausages, and made Dijon bread crumbs by tossing Panko with melted butter, Dijon, salt, and parsley. I baked in a 475 oven and voila:

My only mistake? I should’ve cooked the sausages in with the beans for a bit to get them cooked all the way through; trying to cook them on top of the beans in the 475 oven took a really long time and hard to pull off without burning the panko (a sheet of aluminum foil came in handy). Luckily, our dinner guests Ricky and Larry were patient:

Finally, on Saturday night we met up with our pals Jason and Ryan at the new F&F Pizza sit-down restaurant.

My favorite thing that we ate there was this surprisingly simple-looking salad that had the crunchiest lettuce and the best traditional Italian salad dressing:

I ordered a clam pie (seen on top in the below picture) which brought me back to my favorite pizza restaurant of all time, the sadly closed Franny’s. Craig had the leek and guanciale pie which you can see below that.

Hey, let’s look at some links:

• Does Hillstone serve New York’s best martini? We had it, and it’s possible (The Punch);

• The restaurant where Lorne Michaels takes SNL hosts on Tuesday nights (NYT gift link);

• Fifty Years of Travel Tips (The Technium).

That’s all for today, folks!

See you back here on Thursday….

Your pal,

Adam