Hühnerfrikassee

When I was a child, I loved Hühnerfrikassee. My mother cooked it rarely, which made it all the more special.

In a nutshell, you take a whole chicken, boil it for a couple of hours, take the meat off the carcass and stir it all together with a bunch of veggies in a large pot.

As it happens, we bought a large pot just the other day. Simultaneously my daily-recipe-newsletter from ‘Brigitte.de’, a German woman’s magazine, sent along a Hühnerfrikassee (chicken fricassee) recipe. Providence? Maybe. Itching fingers to try something new and different. Definitely!

So we went to the market yesterday morning, in search of a plumb chicken, carrots, Suppengrün (bouquet garni) and other assorted ingredients. My usual herb guy wasn’t there, but a different stall provided fresh herbs to tie into an aromatic bouquet for cooking the chicken.

The chicken. One needs one of those for a chicken fricassee, doesn’t one? We were quite shocked at the per kilo prices for the little critters. Yet, we bought one to stick with the program.

a bit of ginger

fresh garlic – so yummy

and my favorite spice – coriander seeds

Throw it all in that spanking new pot, with some freshly ground pepper and dry white wine.

But wait.

The recipe calls for 2.5 to 3 liters of water to submerge the chicken completely. Yet, after adding four darn liters of water, my chicken is still exposed to the elements. It appears that our new pot is too big. Not in volume, but diameter. What to do?

Put on kitchen gloves. Grab the kitchen scissors. Cut the chicken along its breastbone, and even if your kitchen scissors are cheap Ikea products, that won’t cut properly, put your best effort in it! Cut, damn it!!! Then grab the already pretty hot chicken and pull it flat. Force that flattened Tyrannosaurus Rex into the pot! Then put a heavy stoneware dish on the critter to keep it submerged.

Cook the chicken gently for a couple of hours, then take the meat off the bone.

What a disappointment – our 1.7 Kg chicken was reduced to a mere 497 gr of meat. Plugging every teensy weensy little bit of chicken meat off those bones – and I know, how to find all of it, being a retired anatomist – that’s a lot of trouble and it turned this into one heck of an expensive chicken dish, considering the labor going into its preparation.

Fortunately, it also made for quite a tasty meal.

And it was fun to cook in a new pot, in our new kitchen, in our new town, in our new country 😁