Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

If you can’t buy chicken wings with the tip to stuff, why not buy a whole chicken and joint it? A good idea in principle, but not in practice if your butcher trims off the wing tips when they prepare it. Oh well, if you need a cocktail stick to seal the top you might as well use another to seal the tip end even if it means you don’t have a neat bit of bone to hold when eating the end result.

As J. claims to disapprove of meat stuffed with meat, I prepare a duxelles while jointing the chicken and deboning the two wings. For some reason, Bresse chicken wings are much harder to debone than cheapy ones… I end up with one useable chicken wing tube which I stuff with the duxelles and secure with cocktail sticks. The end result after deep frying:

It’s OK, but I’m not sure the end result is really worth the effort.

Better worth the effort is potatoes dauphine: deep fried blobs of mashed potato mixed with choux pastry. Not really that difficult, either.

And if you need choux pastry for the potatoes, you might as well make some eclairs…

As I’ve never had compressed strawberries in a restaurant, just seen various desserts with compressed X or Y on Masterchef, I’ve nothing to compare these with, unfortunately. But, like the pommes dauphine (and unlike the chicken wings), a good return on the time invested in the preparation.