Chicken w/Herbes de Provence

Weekly Menu

Every week we make a weekly menu. It serves two purposes, one is that it helps the shopping list and two is that we don't have to worry about what to eat for the day. For a while, we had problems with buying foods and they went bad in the refrigerator, especially vegetables. Thanks to the weekly menu, we just bought the vegetables that we would use for the week.

Our weekly menu varied week to week. We could go Chinese one week, then Vietnamese in another week, American, Mexican and so on. The weekly menu could also be sandwich week, pasta week, stew week, "bad" week(fast food type foods), etc...

This week, we decided that we would go French:

Tues: Chicken breast in Herbes de Provence.

Weds: Pot au feu

Thurs: Coq au Vin

Fri: Salmon w/ Mustard_Herb Butter

Sat: Roast pork tenderloin

Every country has certain generic ingredients that would be used in most of its dishes. For Vienamese, they are salt, pepper, onion, garlic, fish sauce. For Chinese, soy sauce, ginger, onion, garlic, sesame oil. For Mexican, chili, onion, garlic, oregano, cumin, salt, pepper.For French, carrots, celery, onion, garlic, thyme, parsley, wine, butter(don't dare to ignore it).

Today, We chopped up bunch of carrots, celery, onion, garlic and divided them into two bowls. In one of the bowl, we added fish sauce, white wine, herbes de provence to marinate some chicken breasts that we will cook tonight. In the other bowl, we added red wine, oregano, thyme, again, fish sauce, to marinade a cut-up chicken for coq au vin which we would cook the next day.

People tend to be intimidated by French cooking. But if you sit back, take a deep breath and look at the whole picture, you will find that the French cooks do not use any cooking methods that are different from what we are using everyday. Ooo!La!La!, you have to make the sauce! No big deal. Sometime, they just simply added some butter then cook down the cooking liquid to few tablespoons, the sauce would thicken somewhat. It's not necessary that all sauces have to be thick. If you want to make a thick sauce, you always first make a "roux, cook a roughly equal part of butter and flour in a sauce pan for few minutes, then add the liquid a little bit at a time to achieve your thickness preference. The amount of time that you cook the flour/butter mixture, depends on the color of the roux you want( the darker the color, the longer the time). The liquid that you add to the roux could be wine, stock or just plain water.

The procedure for the chicken in Herbes de Provence is pretty straight forward. First, we take the chicken pieces out of the marinate and brown them in all sides. Remove the chicken,

then add the vegetables(and mushroom, optional) and the marinade liquid into the pan and cook down the liquid somewhat. Drain the liquid through a sieve. Start a roux with about one tablespoon of butter and equal part of flour. We only want to cook the roux for a minute or two, because this is a light color sauce, then add the marinate liquid, a little butter and taste for seasoning. If needed, ad some salt and pepper. Put the chicken pieces, mushrooms back into the pan, cook for about 10/15 minutes until they are tender.