Coq au Vin — the soul-satisfying, heartwarming French classic — is a magnificent dish to make at home

By Leslie Brenner

A chill winter day is the perfect opportunity to make coq au vin — chicken marinated overnight and then braised in red wine and aromatics. Not only is the classic French dish fabulously delicious, it feeds a crowd (or lasts a few days into the workweek), and it will fill your living space with gorgeous aromas.

Seems like I’m not the only one craving this type of old-fashioned French comfort food; it’s having something that feels much bigger than a moment. A few days ago, The New York Times published a story about 25 essential dishes to eat in Paris. (The only one I’ve had is the first on the list — cassoulet from L'Assiette — and I couldn’t agree more. Go eat it, if you can!) Classic-style French bistros and brasseries are drawing crowds in Los Angeles, New York (always!), Chicago, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Dallas — and every other American city with a heartbeat. Buvette — which chef Jody Adams opened in New York a dozen years ago — now also has locations in Tokyo, Seoul and Mexico City (as well as Paris and London).

Oddly, for many crave-able bistro and French-home-cooking dishes, it’s not easy to find outstanding, workable recipes. For coq au vin, I’ve used (or consulted) probably no fewer than 20 recipes from various usually-excellent sources. (The great Julia Child fell down on this one; the coq au vin recipe in her Volume I of Mastering the Art does not have you marinate the chicken in the wine first; you merely braise it.)

The marinade: Start with a bottle of red wine.

For well over a decade, I’ve been working on my own recipe, informed by everything I’ve learned along the way. At long last I feel it’s worth sharing.

Developing it has required some accommodations. For one thing, traditionally the dish is made with a big old rooster — that’s the coq. These days, both stateside and in France, coq au vin is usually made with chicken. Either way, the bird is cut up, marinated in red wine and aromatics overnight (or up to two or even three days), browned then braised in the marinade and and garnished with mushrooms, pearl onions and lardons.

No problem with the mushrooms; you can use either white mushrooms or crimini. And you know what? I find the mushrooms so delicious in coq au vin that I’ve doubled the amount most recipes use — that way each person gets a generous amount.

Lardons, however, may be problematic for many American cooks, as it has become difficult to find the required slab (unsliced) bacon in supermakets, even the best ones — at least where I live, in Dallas, Texas. (Readers in better-provisioned cities like New York, L.A. and San Francisco may have an easier time.) Happily, we do have an old-school butcher shop that carries it; perhaps you do, too.

Pearl onions are another problem. No so long ago, I used to find them, or cippolini, fresh at our better supermarkets; alas, no longer. You can buy a bag of frozen pearl onions from Birds Eye or at Trader Joe’s — already peeled, which is nice, but they’re pretty flavorless. I’ve taken to hunting down the smallest shallots I can find and treating them like baby onions; sometimes it means pulling two or more cloves apart from a larger one. To tell the truth, the shallots add such nice flavor I actually prefer them to baby onions. If one day I can’t find small enough shallots, I don’t know; I’ll probably punt and use the frozen pearl onions. Or relocate.

In place of an old rooster, I had been using a whole cut-up chicken, but because it’s smaller than a coq, I added a couple of extra thighs or drumsticks. Who wants to go to all this trouble for just four servings? Lately, I started using only thighs and drumsticks — and why not? Everyone in my orbit prefers dark meat, and dark-meat only simplifies the preparation. (Though our recipe allows for either approach.)

The versions of coq au vin that most informed mine are Anne Willan’s, from her wonderful 2007 book The Country Cooking of France, and one from Le Grand Livre de La Cuisine Française. Published (in French only) in late 2020, the latter book — which clocks in at 1,148 pages and weighs more than 8 pounds — comes from Jean-François Piège, one of France’s most renowned chefs. His book is an instant classic. I’ve cooked from it quite a bit (and referred to constantly) since the French cooking spree I’ve been on since I first lugged it back in my carry-on two years ago, having picked it up in a bookstore in Bordeaux. Imagine me literally running — with that anvil of a volume in tow — in order to make my connection (barely!) in Paris at Charles de Gaulle to come back home.

Piège’s and Willan’s recipes have much in common, but like many of the recipes in Piège’s tome, his is very restaurant-y. For instance, the chef assumes we will have on hand a liter of brown veal stock, 10 cl of sang de volaille ou de porc (poultry or pork blood), and some marc de Bourgogne (an eau de vie made from Burgundy grape must, like a French grappa) with which he wants us to flambé the bird first, and the garniture later. Oh, and that bird is either a coq or a Bresse chicken. He has us turn the mushrooms, sauté them in lardon fat and set them unsauced atop the finished dish, rather than cooking them in the sauce. Call me a peasant (or even a pheasant), but I like to simmer the mushrooms briefly in the sauce for a bit of flavor-exchange. (Willan’s recipe does that, but only for three to five minutes.)

One of the key issues with coq au vin is how to give the sauce enough body. Ideally, you’d use homemade chicken stock — that would have enough gelatin to give it a great texture. Most of us don’t have that lying around our freezer, though, so my recipe calls for store-bought chicken broth. Many recipes rely on whisking in beurre manié — softened butter mixed with flour — at the end. That works, but I don’t love its raw floury vibe; I’d rather leave the sauce a bit thinner and sop it up with lots of great crusty country sourdough. Recently, I came around to the idea of including a small amount of optional purchased veal demi-glace, which you can find in the freezer section of better supermarkets (or online at D’Artagnan). It’s expensive, but you can freeze and keep what you don’t use, and it does add silkiness and a bit more depth.

The wine question

I know what you’re wondering: What kind of wine should I use? First, don’t spend too much — pick up a bottle to cook with for $10 or less, if you can. Pinot noir, Beaujolais, Dolcetto d’Alba, Barbera, Sangiovese and Tempranillo are all good choices. Spend more, if you’re so inclined, on a great bottle to drink with it.

Besides the crusty bread, coq au vin is traditionally served with boiled potatoes tossed in butter and parsley, or maybe less frequently, pommes purées — mashed potatoes. I have also seen references to buttered noodles, which I have served chez nous. That raised an eyebrow on the face of the Frenchman to whom I am married, but all was forgiven once he dove into the saucy, fragrant, flavorful dish.

Don’t forget that you do need to start this dish the day before you want to serve it. The marinade needs to cool down completely before you add the chicken, so best to achieve that in the morning (it’s just 10 minutes or so of active time). Cool it down during the day, and plop in the chicken that evening. The next day, you’ll be ready to roll, whenever. Want to make the whole thing in advance? It’s even better, reheated, the next day.

I hope you enjoy this dish half as much as I do.

RECiPE: Coq au Vin

---

If you like this story, we think you’ll enjoy:

READ: Rich and soulful, beef bourguignon is always in style

READ: Easy, fabulous and just a little bit boozy, say ‘bonjour’ to Apple Calvados Cake

READ: Chef Daniel Boulud gives a humble French dish, hachis Parmentier, the royal treatment

READ To make a traditional gratin dauphinois, step away from the cheese

READ: A stellar Quiche Lorraine (custardy, bacon-y, buttery-crusted!) is easier to make than you might think

RECIPE: Café Boulud Short Ribs with Celery Duo

RECIPE: Céleri Rémoulade

ALL COOKS WITHOUT BORDERS FRENCH RECIPES

Want free recipes delivered to your inbox? Sign up below!

This sheet pan chicken dinner, with spices that evoke Morocco, is easy and spectacular

We love the idea of sheet pan dinners — the notion that you can plop everything on a pan, shove it in the oven and pull out something fabulous.

Unfortunately, most sheet pan dinners suck. Either some components are overcooked and others undercooked, the cooking instructions are so involved it might as well not be a sheet pan dinner, or, well, it’s just kind of blah.

I think you know what I’m talking about.

But I kept thinking a glamorous one could be dreamt up. Something with deep, interesting, evocative flavors — a dish so transporting that by the time it floated to the table you’d forget it was a sheet pan dinner. And yet it needs to be easy. And to work as advertised.

I love the smell of Moroccan spices cooking with tomato and cinnamon (as it does in a chicken and lamb couscous, for instance), and I thought that would be lovely to inhale on a busy weeknight. I put that together with that thing canned diced tomatoes do when you roast them, getting nice and concentrated and deep, and imagined them — zhuzzhed up with cinnamon and harissa — on top of chicken thighs with Moroccan-ish root vegetables. And onions cut so the edges get a little charred. Like that couscous dish, the one I dreamt of would have turnips and carrots.

I didn’t realize the dish would make its own pan sauce. What a delightful bonus!

So, how to you put together this dreamy deal?

First make a spice mix — toasted and ground cumin and coriander seed. Stir a little into a glug of olive oil, and toss the root vegetables in that. Put the turnips on the sheet pan first, and give it a 15-minute head-start in the oven, while you coat chicken thighs in the same mix plus cinnamon and a little harissa.

When you pull out the sheet pan to add the chicken (skin-side down), the pan is hot enough to give a little sizzle — perfect. Scatter the spiced carrots and onions around and back in it goes. Fifteen minutes later, flip the thighs and spoon on top of the tomatoes, and slide it in the oven again. Your kitchen fills with those beautiful smells, you have 35 minutes to relax with a glass of wine while the chicken finishes cooking.

It’s so simple you’ll have had time to clean up everything even before that last 35-minutes of roasting.

In fact, you’ll even have time to make a green salad — or roast some broccolini — and still enjoy that glass of wine.

For the broccolini, you don’t even need a recipe (though we’ll supply one just for kicks). Here it is in talk-through form: Toss two bunches of broccolini on another sheet pan with a thin-sliced lemon, a tablespoon of olive oil, half a teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of Aleppo pepper. Pop it in the oven during the last 20 minutes of your Moroccan-spiced sheet-pan chicken dinner, and everything comes out at once.

Easy peasy. And pretty damn good.

RECIPE: Sheet Pan Chicken Thighs with Turnips, Carrots and Harissa

RECIPE: Roasted Broccoli with Lemon and Garlic

Did you enjoy this story? Read about who we are and what we do.

Our Cluckin' A List: Cooks Without Borders' 5 most popular chicken recipes

For poultry-lovers, it probably comes as no surprise: The most clicked-on stories and recipes on Cooks Without Borders are those that celebrate chicken.

This all came home to roost last week, when a fried chicken recipe by one of our favorite L.A. chefs easily and quickly smashed all our records.

Without beating around the hen-house, here are the Top 10:

#1: Fried Chicken LudoBird Style

Crunchy, craggy and preternaturally juicy — with a delightful whiff of the South of France via herbes de Provence — chef Ludovic Lefebvre’s take on fried chicken broke the popularity index the very day it was published. If you’ve never made fried chicken before but always wanted to, this is the recipe for you. Here’s the story, and here’s the recipe.

#2: Lucky Peach’s Lacquered Roast Chicken

This is the chicken that changed our lives a few years ago — and then inspired a duck. You can see it before it was carved up at the top of this story.

#3 The Ultimate Butter Chicken (Murgh Makhani)

An infatuation with Urvashi Pitre’s viral InstantPot version of the popular Indian dish got us wondering about murgh makhani’s origins — which led us to the Butter Chicken King, Monish Gujral. Gujral’s book On the Butter Chicken Trail unlocked some secrets, and an interview with Gujral helped put everything in perspective. Our recipe (adapted from Gujral’s and approved by His Highness) was born.

#4 Chicken Chile Verde (Quick and Easy Pressure-Cooker Version)

We loved J. Kenji López-Alt’s astonishingly easy chile verde on Serious Eats, and felt a few minor tweaks could make it even better. Doing so proved to be a bonding experience for a stodgy boomer and a plucky Gen-Z’er. We’re currently working on an old-fashioned, slow-cooking, aromatic and soul-stirring stove-stop version.

Here’s the quick-and-easy miracle recipe.

#5 Crispy-Skinned Southeast Asian Grilled Chicken Thighs

Our easy-going soy-based marinade is the ticket to fabulously flavorful grilling all summer long.

Is there a chicken dish or technique you’d like us to tackle? Let us know in a comment!

RECIPE: Fried Chicken LudoBird-Style
RECIPE: Lucky Peach’s Lacquered Roast Chicken

RECIPE: The Ultimate Butter Chicken (Murgh Makhani)

RECIPE: Chicken Chile Verde

RECIPE: Crispy-Skinned Southeast Asian Grilled Chicken Thighs

How Ludovic Lefebvre's insanely delicious Fried Chicken LudoBird Style turned me into a fry queen

I have a confession to make: Until last week, I had never made fried chicken.

Yes, I know, it’s weird. I’ve always been an otherwise fearless cook. Partly it’s that deep-frying thing: I’ve never made frites, either, and by extension I’ve never made French fries. But there was also a lack of motivation: Why attempt something so challenging and messy when the pros do it so well?

I’d gotten it into my head a month or so ago that at long last I’d dip my proverbial toes in the hot oil. Fabulous looking recipes in two cookbooks-of-the-moment had caught my eye: one in Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking and another in Sean Brock’s South: Essential Recipes and New Explorations. The books are each nominated for both a James Beard Award and an IACP Cookbook Award this season. I’d read a heap of background material about frying chicken, and deep-frying in general, so I had sense of the landscape. A deep-frying thermometer was ordered and on the way. Time to stop being such a fry-baby.

Wylie was rarin’ to go. Every afternoon, he’d say, “Tonight — fried chicken?” I kept coming up with excuses. We were missing an ingredient. We didn’t have the right sides. Not enough oil. Deep-fry thermometer hadn’t arrived. Couldn’t decide which of the two recipes to try. Mercury in retrograde.

Then, the day the deep-fry thermometer showed up, I saw a post on Ludovic Lefebvre’s Instagram feed: The Los Angeles chef would be making fried chicken on his IGTV series, “Ludo à la Maison.” I’m a Ludo fan from way back, and had been wanting to check out the French chef’s live cooking show. In this episode, he’d be preparing the “buttermilk Provençal” fried chicken served at his two LudoBird restaurants.

No more excuses. We’d watch the live show on Saturday afternoon, and maybe even cook along. Friday night I brined the chicken according to Lefebvre’s advance instructions.

You might be saying, why on earth would you look to a French chef as a guide to an iconic dish of the American South?

I suppose because I suspected Lefebvre would make it comfortable and relatable.

Which he did: So entertaining and instructive watching him butcher the chicken, as Krissy videotaped, provided commentary and read real-time questions from viewers. At some point their young daughter Rêve wandered into the kitchen, wanting a piece of chicken; she then hid in the pantry.

Ludo set up three stations for consecutive pre-fry dipping and dredging: first flour, then buttermilk, and finally seasoned flour. For the third, Ludo poured in a few spoonfuls of buttermilk, rubbing it into the flour to make it lumpy. So each piece got a dip in the plain flour, then the buttermilk and finally the lumpy flour mixture — which Ludo smushed into each piece of chicken, pressing hard to create a super shaggy coating that would form that gorgeous craggy crust. (Surprisingly, he had removed the chicken’s skin.)

The seasoning itself was pretty interesting: Most notably and unconventionally, it included a generous scoop of herbes de Provence.

He poured the oil into a Dutch oven, explaining that it shouldn’t go higher than halfway up the sides of the pot. Good, important knowledge. He talked about the importance of having the oil at precisely the right temperature: between 325 and 350 degrees F. And not frying more than two pieces at a time, as introducing chicken into the oil immediately lowers the temperature, and three pieces would lower it too much.

Watching him tend the chicken once it was in, checking its progress every couple of minutes and pulling it out when it was gorgeously golden-brown: All this was completely confidence building.

An hour later, Wylie and I were excitedly setting up our own dredging stations, heating the oil, fitting a sheet pan with a rack to received each fried piece.

We set the table. Poured ourselves glasses of wine. Checked the temperature of the oil. Dredged the first two pieces, and started frying.

How liberating! And how utterly, crunchily, juicily delicious the result. Honesly, this was some of the greatest fried chicken any of us had ever eaten; we couldn’t believe how fabulousness of the result. I felt like constant monitoring of the oil temperature was key.

Thank you, Chef, for showing us the way in.

And thank you all for reading. If you happen to fear deep frying — even just a tiny bit — I hope you’ll dive in, too. Come on in; the oil’s fine! Here’s the LudoBird Style recipe:

If you’re not entirely comfortable, watch the video first, then fry. Please post a comment and let us know how it goes. Oh, and by the way, if you clean your oil carefully after frying, you can re-use the oil at least several times. The headnote in our recipe gives the details.

Next deep-frying deep-dive: pommes frites.

RECIPE: Fried Chicken Ludobird Style

Obsessed with butter chicken: Our recipe follows the world’s favorite Indian dish faithfully back to its origin

The ultimate murgh makhani — also known as butter chicken

Several months before The Great Confinement, I became obsessed with butter chicken.  

It began with a problem I needed to solve for a client, for which an Instant Pot seemed like a possible solution. Never having used one, I Googled — and found a nearly two-year-old New Yorker profile of one Urvashi Pitre, “The ‘Butter Chicken Lady’ Who Made Indian Cooks Love the Instant Pot.”

Butter chicken? I’d never given the dish much thought — always assumed it was an Indian dish concocted for American tastes, as chicken tikka masala is for the Brits.

How wrong I was. And how silly I felt, and still feel — mostly because of the missed opportunities to indulge in murgh makhani (butter chicken’s proper name) during a lifetime enjoying Indian food. 

Meanwhile, if exemplary butter chicken could be easily achieved at home in less than a half hour using an Instant Pot, well, then, I had to get an Instant Pot.

My young-adult son Wylie was living with us at the time. Though suspicious of the plug-in-pot contraption, he’d always been partial to the charms of butter chicken, so he was keen to give the recipe a whirl for dinner one weeknight. It was remarkably easy: You put nearly all the ingredients — chicken pieces, a can of diced tomatoes, spices and salt — in the Instant Pot and turn it on. Then you pull out the chicken, use a stick blender to blitz the sauce, swirl in butter, cream, more spice and cilantro, put the chicken back in, and that’s it. Wylie started prepping everything just as I was leaving my office to head home; when I walked in 20 minutes later, he was swirling in the cream.

Wylie’s first (Instant Pot!) butter chicken. Delicious — and so easy!

The Instant Pot butter chicken was astonishingly good: rich, nicely spiced, altogether satisfying. And in so little time, with so little effort. Bravo Urvashi Pitre! 

Urvashi Pitre, a.k.a. the Butter Chicken Lady, with her instant pot murgh makhani in Southlake, Texas

Now I wanted to meet the famous Butter Chicken Lady — who happens to live not 25 minutes from me. I had the perfect opportunity. Another one of my clients, in process of opening a new store and cafe in Southlake, Texas, asked me to recommend a local cooking personality for the store’s inaugural Supper Club series. The Butter Chicken Lady! The event was an instant sell-out, and the guests (some of whom flew in from other states) loved it. What a kick to dine on delicious murgh makhani seated literally next to the extremely delightful Butter Chicken Lady. (Check out her excellent blog, Two Sleevers, where you’ll find hundreds of quick-and-easy recipes.) 

Meanwhile, I was getting curiouser and curiouser about murgh makhani. What were the origins of the dish? Were they knowable, or, like most dishes, something with hazy beginnings, a dish that evolved over eons? Would other versions include onions, which were conspicuously absent from Urvashi’s version?

The simplicity of the answer to the origin question threw me for a loop: Butter chicken — murgh makhani — was created, according to a 2018 Washington Post story, in the late 1920’s or early ‘30s in Peshawar (then India, now Pakistan) by a chef named Kundan Lal Gujral. It’s exceedingly rare that a dish has origins so precisely knowable, but butter chicken’s origin story is uncontested, the smart story by Andreas Viestad asserted.

I found the piece just as I was headed to Massachussetts to visit Juliet, a brilliant web designer (and gifted cook) who is now my partner in Cooks Without Borders. As we drove from the airport to her house, I told her about the Post piece, which profiles Monish Gujral, the grandson of Kundan Lal — who also created (incredibly!) tandoori chicken. His grandfather had wanted to create a dish for his mentor that was lighter than the usual dishes of the region, so he had the wacky idea of roasting a chicken in a tandoor oven, which at the time had normally only been used for baking bread. Tandoori chicken was a hit that put the restaurant — Moti Mahal — on the map, and later Kundan Lal created butter chicken as a way to use leftover tandoori chickens. Bathed in a rich, tomatoey, buttery, beautifully spiced sauce, murgh makhani made Moti Mahal famous throughout India. After partition in 1947 (when Pakistan and India were separated), Kundan Lal moved to Delhi, where he opened his own Moti Mahal. His grandson Monish apprenticed with him, becoming a chef at Moti Mahal after graduating university, and eventually taking over the family business — now an empire of some 250 restaurants.

Having eyeballed the WaPo adaptation of Gujral’s recipe, I thought it looked remarkably quick and easy — maybe even as quick to put together as Urvashi’s Instant Pot version. “Let’s make it!” said Juliet. Leave it to my friend to have all the ingredients already on hand.

The WaPo adaptation had us quick-roast pseudo-tandoori chicken pieces in the oven, having slathered on a yogurt-and-spice coating, but not leaving it to marinate before roasting. The sauce came together quickly on the stovetop.

The butter chicken Juliet and I made from the Washington Post story.

Again, this was delicious — perfect for a flavor-happy weeknight dinner.

But I couldn’t help but wonder how close this was to the original; the tandoori-approximation seemed a bit quick and clipped, and did the dish maybe want a little more depth?

Monish Gujral’s book, On the Butter Chicken Trail, offers a recipe slightly different than the adaptation in the WaPo piece. It calls for making an actual tandoori chicken first, marinating a skinless chicken first in lime juice, chile powder and salt, and then in a yogurt-spice blend — for at least four hours altogether, so all those flavors soaked in — then skewering the soaked bird and roasting it in a tandoor oven or grill.

Most cooks I know do not have a tandoor, and grilling isn’t always an option, but those two marinades seemed very worthwhile, and I wanted to do something a bit closer to the original than the WaPo recipe. Chicken thighs strike me as more practical for most American cooks, always flavorful, of course, and easier to cook evenly in high oven heat than a skinless whole chicken. Our recipe calls for roasting the thighs on a rack over a baking sheet so the pieces don’t braise in all the juices that collect otherwise.

[EDITOR’S NOTE Oct. 19, 2020: In honor of the first-ever World Butter Chicken Day, October 20, 2020, commemorating the 100-year anniversary of Moti Mahal, we have published a new story and created a new, streamlined version of our recipe. The new version is called World Butter Chicken.]

I also adapted the wonderful garam masala Gujral uses, which gives the dish a gorgeous aromatic underpinning. (The recipe for garam masala in Gurjal’s book yields nearly a pound of spice mix — more than most cooks I know would use in a lifetime; I scaled it down to a twelfth of that.)

Kundan Lal Gujral, the creator of murgh makhani — a.k.a. butter chicken. Gujral also is credited with with creating tandoori chicken. Photo courtesy of Monish Gujral.

Finally, while Gurjal’s recipe calls for 14 medium-sized ripe red tomatoes, that is an awful lot of tomato for one chicken; one 14.5-ounce can of diced tomatoes seemed and tasted like the right amount, and canned tomatoes are more practical outside of tomato season.

That left me with one question: While the WaPo recipe called for Kashmiri chili powder, with 2/3 paprika and 1/3 cayenne offered as a sub, the recipe in the book called for “red chilli powder” without specifying a type. I tested it with the paprika and cayenne combo, and that seemed perfect. But what was ideal — and how much does it matter?

I went straight to the source, and asked Gurjal, whom I had no trouble finding through Facebook.

Now I was just beside myself — first I got to meet the Butter Chicken Lady, and now I was corresponding with the Butter Chicken King himself! Juliet pointed out that he was really more like the Butter Chicken Prince, as he was descended from the dish’s creator, but to me the fact of his world-wide murgh makhani empire makes him the Butter Chicken King.

Gurjal clarified the red chile powder question: Kashmiri chile powder, or a commercial blend called Deggi Mirch (a powder of Kashmiri chiles and red bell peppers), or the paprika-cayenne alternative work well. I sent him my adaptation of his recipe pre-publication, we discussed the switch to canned diced tomatoes and my adaptation of his garam masala, and he approved of the whole package. He was careful to add that you don’t want to blend the sauce too fine; you want it to have a bit of nice texture.

When we chatted later on the phone, he told me about his two grown children (his daughter is a lawyer at the High Court in Delhi; his son is in law school in London). “When they’ve been away and they come home,” he said, “right away, they always want butter chicken.”

Of course they do. It may well be the world’s most beguiling comfort food.

RECIPE: The Ultimate Butter Chicken

Treat yourself: This Chinese-style lacquered roast chicken will add outsized joy to your life

If you can get a chicken, you can make this smashing dish.

We all need something delicious in our lives right now, and the ingredients to make many of our fall-back comfort foods have become, all of a sudden, unattainable. Depending on where you live and how you shop, it may be difficult or impossible to find pasta, eggs, dried beans and flour, for instance. Flour’s elusiveness is particularly annoying, as it stymies bread-baking, cookie making and cake creation.

Where I live, in Dallas, Texas, eggs are hard to come by, but we can get chickens — something my brother in L.A. failed to turn up in his extensive hunt yesterday.

If you live somewhere where you can put your hands on a bird — and you possess (or can get) a little soy sauce and honey — you can, with very little effort, make one of my favorite dishes ever: Chinese-style lacquered roast chicken. (Substitute tamari for the soy sauce, and it’s gluten-free!)

It comes from Peter Meehan’s 2015 cookbook Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes. Though it requires preparation 12 to 48 hours in advance, that preparation is super quick and easy, requiring only about 15 minutes of active prep: Combine soy sauce and honey, paint the bird with it, wait 15 minutes, paint again, sprinkle salt on, and tuck into the fridge. After 12 hours, or two days later, pop it in the oven to roast, hands-free — no basting or turning over the chicken (no need to flip the bird!).

Serve it with a stir-fried or steamed vegetable; fortunately things like broccoli, asparagus and baby bok choy have not been difficult to obtain. I love this recipe (also adapted from the Lucky Peach book) for stir-fried baby bok choy with whole garlic — and garlic, as we know, is great for boosting our immune systems. The book calls for a choice of baby or regular bok choy — or spinach (Meehan specifies regular, not baby spinach) or pea greens.

Ideally, you’d also want to serve the glorious chicken and beautiful veg with rice. I did manage to snag a bag of jasmine rice at the online supermarket this morning (I’d been seeking it for a week); otherwise it seems to be all manner of brown rice crowding the real and virtual shelves. With this chicken, and this bok choy, brown rice sounds positively dreamy.

We at Cooks Without Borders and your fellow cooks would love to hear from you in a comment — if you try one of these two dishes, how’d you like them? Any issues? Were you able to find appropriate ingredients?

Stodgy boomer, plucky Gen-Z-er share in unlikely Instant Pot epiphany; miraculous chicken chile verde results

A few weeks ago, Wylie chicken-shamed me. 

Maybe you know the drill: following a long day at the office, you stop at the supermarket on your way home and pick up a roast chicken. I was about to do just that, and texted home to see if I should pick up anything else. 

“Just buy a raw chicken,” said Wylie, who is temporarily living with us post-college-graduation in a figuring-things-out moment. “I’ll roast it. It’ll be so much better, and it’s so easy.” Who could argue?

While the hunt for a job in his field has not been thus far fruitful, he has taken full advantage of the parental larder — and our delight at being cooked for  — in order to develop his kitchencraft. 

Wylie making pasta dough from Evan Funke’s ‘American Sfloglio’

Like many fledgling cooks of his generation, Wylie really gets into cooking projects — the more elaborate the better. The most gleeful I’ve seen him since graduation was when we spent two days making tagliatelle al ragù della vecchia scuola from Evan Funke’s American Sfoglino cookbook — a process which started with putting various meats through a manual meat grinder for the ragù, and passing simmered tomatoes through a food mill. (My favorite line in the recipe: “Begin tasting for tenderness and seasoning after 5 hours.”) We used a rolling pin to roll the pasta dough, and a knife to cut it; Funke’s philosophy is summed up in his hashtag #fuckyourpastamachine. 

And so, when through a curious set of circumstances I brought a shiny new Instant Pot — one of those countertop pressure cookers — into the house, he regarded the thing with contempt.

Not that I blame him; it’s the way he was raised. But for reasons having to do with my consulting business, I wanted to explore the possibilities. And if by some miracle I took to the thing, well, maybe it would lead to fewer supermarket roast chicken situations post work-days.

Because precise timing is involved, and the thing was utterly foreign to me, I couldn’t just dive in and start improvising; I had to learn the basics first. I went to a couple of admired and reliable sources: New York Times Cooking and Serious Eats. 

It was at the latter that I turned up a recipe that looked so implausible I couldn’t wait to try it: J. Kenji López-Alt’s Easy Pressure Cooker Green Chili with Chicken. In other words, chicken chile verde. 

I couldn’t wait to show Wylie, who naturally scoffed. The recipe would have us believe that you could throw raw chicken thighs, onion, garlic, tomatillos, spices and chiles into the vessel, push a button and (once the machine came to pressure) 15 minutes later you’d have something gorgeous and profoundly delicious. 

First time around Wylie insisted on browning the chicken thighs on top of the stove first. So we tried it like that. Then we tried it exactly as written. Then we tried it giving the poblano, Anaheim and serrano chiles, along with the onion, garlic and tomatillos, a quick char on a comal, as you would in a traditional chile verde recipe. 

I’m here to tell you it was very good each and every time. We served it once with home-made corn tortillas (fantastic!), with handmade tortillas picked up from a nearby Mexican restaurant when we were out of masa harina and couldn’t find any nearby (also fantastic) and with corn tortillas we bought at Trader Joe’s and reheated in the microwave (even that was pretty good).

• We stirred a couple tablespoonfuls of masa harina (a traditional thickener for these types of braises) into the finished dish: perfect! 

• We also added an optional garnish of crumbled queso blanco, which rounds out the flavors beautifully; if you’re wrapping the chile verde into tacos, some crumbled queso blanco added in each one is lovely.

What of our various other attempts at improvements? 

• Because the Instant Pot is all about ease, our recipe uses boneless, skinless chicken thighs instead of using skin-on, bone-in thighs and then removing skin and bones (if the dish lost any depth of flavor as a result of not cooking with the bones, I couldn’t detect it). 

• Browning the chicken, however, did not noticeably improve the dish, so we jettisoned that step. 

• Charring the chiles and garlic cloves (in their skins) adds slight value — a subtle charry, roasty flavor — do that only if you feel like it and have an extra few minutes (meanwhile, it’s easier to seed charred chiles than raw). 

• Don’t bother charring the onion or tomatillos because the charry payoff is less, and it’s a little messier.

Though our version of the recipe — which we call Chicken Chile Verde (Quick and Easy Pressure-Cooking Version) — calls for boneless, skinless thighs, of course you can also use bone-in, skin-on thighs as the original recipe suggests, simply removing the bones and skin before shredding the chicken. Also, for whatever it’s worth, one time I forgot to buy Anaheim chiles, and so just made it with poblanos — and there wasn’t much of a difference in flavor.

OK, then — a quick walk through. The only active time it takes to speak of is prepping the onion, chiles and tomatillos, which get husked and quartered; the chiles are seeded then roughly chopped, like the onion. (If you’re going to char the chiles, you’d do that before seeding and chopping, and you can toss the garlic cloves in their skins on the skillet, comal or griddle to char as well.) Toast a tablespoon of cumin seeds in a small pan till fragrant. Set the pressure cooker to SAUTE, and toss in all of those things, along with three pounds of boneless, skinless chicken thighs and a pinch of salt. Once it sizzles a bit, seal the pressure cooker and cook on HIGH PRESSURE for 15 minutes. Release the steam, remove the chicken and shred it. Add López-Alt’s brilliant secret ingredient (Asian fish sauce!), along with salt to taste and a handful of cilantro, blitz the sauce — either with an immersion blender or in a regular blender or food processor — then stir in a couple tablespoons of masa harina. Shred the chicken and return it to the sauce. Garnish with more cilantro, and (if you like) some crumbled queso blanco. Serve it with warm corn tortillas and maybe some limes and more crumbled queso blanco.

Here’s the recipe. Please (please!) let us know how you like it.

Or, if you’d prefer an old-fashioned, long, lazy and aromatic braised-the-on-the-stove experience, let us know that as well, and we’ll hurry up with Chile Verde (Stovetop Version).

[RECIPE: Chicken Chile Verde]

Wow your friends with Chinese lacquered duck (or chicken!) to celebrate Lunar New Year

Lunar New Year celebrations will begin on Saturday, January 25 and continue for 15 days until the Spring Lantern Festival on February 8. If we know you as well as we think we know you, you’ll be looking for some spectacular Chinese dishes that’ll wow your friends and family.

This weekend, the gorgeous lacquered duck pictured here can be yours — and remarkably easily, believe it or not. Though a couple days of preparation are required, there’s very little work involved — basically you just slap a marinade/glaze on the bird, stick it in the fridge, forget about it till the next day, brush on more marinade, then pop it in the oven the next evening.

In other words, bird alert: If you want the amazing lacquered duck on Saturday night, you’ll need to start preparing it on Thursday. We’re telling you now, so you can run out and buy your bird in swift order. In our neck of the woods, ducks disappear out of supermarkets like Whole Foods and Central Market after Western new year, but you can always pick up beautiful ducks (and for a lot less money) at Asian supermarkets.

Here — take a look at the recipe so you can swing by the market later. There are only four ingredients (duck, salt, soy sauce and honey), and you probably already have three in your pantry!

This spectacular lacquered duck can be yours!

Or center your Lunar New Year kickoff dinner around a lacquered chicken. Same drill, but the chicken can be achieved in as little as 12 hours advance notice. And oh, baby — it is outstanding as well.

We are working on some new recipes that would be perfect to serve with either, and hope to get them posted in the next day or two. In the meantime, you’ll find some tasty accompaniments like baby bok choy with whole garlic and two versions of fried rice in our Chinese cooking section.

Winner, winner chicken dinner: A crazy-good, winter-into-spring one-pan wonder

As Sam Sifton wrote in a delicious story today in The New York Times Magazine, we're in that frustrating shoulder season when cooks are tired of winter and longing for spring.  Like Sifton, I'm finding inspiration these days – when it's too early for asparagus and English peas – in cabbage. In my case it's gorgeous, crinkly savoy cabbage, which, in my neck of the woods, has been turning up recently with lovely regularity in supermarkets. 

In the past, I've always had trouble figuring out how to treat savoy cabbage right. Usually I braise it, and that's good. Lately I've been roasting it – even better!

Also lately, I've been wanting to create one of those sheet-pan recipes that are so trendy right now. The reality has proved less miraculous than I'd hoped. Though I love the idea of tossing everything onto a pan, shoving it in the oven and forgetting about it for an hour, the truth is that things have different cooking times. Roast chicken thighs with turnips until the chicken is done, and the turnips won't be as tender, golden-brown and caramelized as you'd want them.

Adding the three main components of this dish – chicken thighs, turnips and savoy cabbage – one at a time to the pan solves the problem, deliciously. In fact, I think this one-pan dinner is one of the best things to come out of my kitchen in some time! Chicken thighs are great because they're chicken thighs. The turnips cook longer than everything else, so they get soft and caramelized almost to the point of sweetness, with really concentrated flavor. And the cabbage, which gets an umami boost from shiitake mushroom powder and soy sauce, roasts till it has all kinds of wonderful texture, from soft and silky to crunchy on the edges. The flavors and textures of the three meld together gorgeously. 

It's a dish so simple you can toss it together for glorious weeknight dinner, but it's impressive enough that you could serve it at as a main course for a dinner party. Here's a bonus: It's super-healthy, even for someone watching their carbs. (Turnips have way fewer carbs than, say, potatoes.) 

Here's the way it goes. Toss the turnips in a little olive oil, salt and pepper, throw 'em in the pan and roast 15 minutes. Push them to the side of the pan and add the chicken thighs skin-side down. These you've tossed with a little fennel seed, garlic, salt, pepper and olive oil. 

Next whisk together a little more olive oil and fennel seed with shiitake powder and soy sauce – for that blast of umami. Toss the Savoy cabbage leaves in that mixture to coat, then add them to the roasting pan. Thirty-five minutes later, dinner is ready.

Oh – unless you want a little sauce to pass with it. Either way, with or without, it's pretty great. If you do want sauce, arrange everything on a warm platter, deglaze the roasting pan with white wine or water (the recipe tells you how), and strain it into a pitcher to pass with the chicken.

Want the recipe? You got it: 

Bon app – and happy almost-spring!

How to grill the best Southeast Asian crispy-skinned chicken thighs

View fullsize

There are days – usually on lazy summer weekends – when nothing hits the spot like grilled Southeast Asian-style chicken. The thighs are ideal: They turn out plump and juicy, super-flavorful, with incredible, nicely charred crispy skin. 

View fullsize

Toss together a marinade in the morning – fish sauce, soy sauce, ginger, garlic, lime, cilantro stems, scallions and such (you get the picture!)  –  and let them loll about, soaking up flavor, till you're ready to grill. So many Asian marinade recipes include sugar or honey, but I prefer one that's not sweet, and this one (I have to say!) is pretty great. 

Thighs are fabulous for grilling, first because dark meat takes so well to smoky flavor, and it doesn't dry out easily. And second because their fairly uniform shape makes it easy to cook them evenly. 

Still, a little care (and time) is required so they don't char to blackness while they're still raw inside. I use bone-in thighs because feel like the bone adds depth of flavor, but you can use boneless ones if you prefer. 

The trick is building a good, hot charcoal fire (I use an old-fashioned Weber grill) and moving the coals to one side. That's where you'll sear them till they're nicely charred but not burned, about 5 minutes on each side. Then move them to the less-hot side of the grill, cover the grill and let them cook till they're just done – about 20 minutes or so. Have an instant-read thermometer on hand in case you're not sure – they should be 165 degrees when tested at the thickest part.  

Got it? Here's the recipe:

Let 'em rest about five minutes, then get ready for crispy-skinned happiness.

The chicken that killed Grandpa: It's like Tex-Mex for produce lovers

I've been making this fabulous, colorful chicken stew as long as I've been a cook, and eating much it longer. It started life as a recipe my mom clipped from The New York Times Magazine sometime around 1970, written by Craig Claiborne, who was the Times' longtime restaurant critic and one of the premier food writers of his time. Some 35 years later, I wrote about the dish for the L.A. Times. As Claiborne conceived it, was called Rose de la Garza's Texas Chicken. And that's what my mom always called it, until her uncle Sam died the night after she served it to him and Aunt Ruth. Ruth and Sam raised my mom after her parents died when she was a wee thing, and we grew up calling them Grandma and Grandpa.  Was it being orphaned that gave my mom her evil sense of humor? Who knows. But after Grandpa died, she renamed the dish in his honor. 

Since moving to Texas in 2009, I started thinking about the dish's Texas origins. With chiles, summer squashes, corn scraped off the cob and lots of cilantro, it feels so right in the Lone Star State – Tex-Mex for produce lovers. I make it frequently in the summer, and always think of Grandpa. And my mom. And her mordant wit.

Originally, you didn't brown the chicken, nor deglaze the pan, nor use cilantro or coriander seed.  But the recipe, which has evolved over time, is basic and easy.  The original called for a whole cut-up chicken – which I still sometimes respect, if someone's coming over who prefers white meat. But Thierry, Wylie and I are all dark meat lovers, so I recently switched to whole legs. Brown them in olive oil, sweat some onion, garlic and serrano chile with toasted coriander and cumin, deglaze the pan, add the chicken back in and dump on top of it a bunch of zucchini, tomatoes and corn. Cover and simmer. When it's halfway done, add fresh cilantro. Simmer some more. That's it. For very little work, you get something pretty delicious. When the okra looks lovely (slim and small), I might slice a bunch of them in half vertically and grill them, adding them at the last minute. 

We're not there yet with the okra, and it's not really tomato season yet. Go ahead, use a can. You'll use fresh ones when they're gorgeous and plentiful. 

I give you the chicken that killed Grandpa. Now you're part of my (crazy!) family.

The Chinese lacquered roast chicken that changed my life

Now and then, a recipe comes along that feels truly life-changing. The short crust pastry for the lemon-raspberry tart I wrote about earlier this week was one for me. It wasn't a new recipe when I discovered it a few years ago – it had been right under my nose in the Chez Panisse Desserts cookbook forever, but it was new to me when my friend Michalene pointed me to it. Today it's my go-to recipe for tart crust.

Now a Chinese lacquered roast chicken has changed my life.

There's nothing more delicious than roast chicken, and every cook should have a favorite recipe for it (at least one!) in his or her repertoire. For years, my go-to roast chicken has been the Judy bird – that is the Zuni Roast Chicken from Judy Rodger's The Zuni Cafe Cookbook. It's the spectacularly flavorful, crisp-skinned chicken you have swooned over if you've ever gone to San Francisco's Zuni Cafe and ordered roast chicken for two. I will write about the Zuni chicken soon here on the blog and give the recipe, but the technique is basically this: Tuck fresh herbs under the chicken's skin, rub it all over with a lot of kosher salt, and let it sit in the fridge like that for one or two days. When you're ready to roast, wipe the chicken dry, heat a skillet on the stove, plop in the chicken, transfer it immediately to a very hot oven, and let it roast. No basting, but you  have to flip the chicken a couple times and fiddle with temperature. It always results in a fabulous bird.

When I don't plan ahead, I've used the Judy technique without the advance salting, and sometimes even without tucking herbs under the skin. It's still always excellent. I thought my abbreviated version was the simplest great roast chicken possible without a rotisserie.

So when I read about author Peter Meehan's roast chicken approach in the new cookbook Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes, I sat up and took note. "We are advocates of a hot-and-lazy approach: one high temperature, one pan, one position, one great result." He talked about how seasoning a bird ahead of time and letting it sit uncovered in the fridge lets him have an easy dinner to pop in the oven anytime in the next three days, and now I was really sitting up straight. This man is sensible! When he wrote, "I started doing this after I fell under the spell of Judy Rodger's Zuni Cafe Cookbook," I dropped the book and ran out to buy a chicken. Invoking Judy's name confers instant credibility.

In the Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes cookbook, Meehan offers three roast chicken recipes. For me, it was a no-brainer: Lacquered Roast Chicken.

Irresistible, right?

Here's the deal. This is the easiest roast chicken recipe in the universe, and the result is magnificent. 

All you do is this: Paint a chicken with a mixture of half-honey, half soy sauce, then sprinkle it with salt. Let it sit uncovered in the fridge for one or two days, then roast it in a 400 degree F. oven for 50 minutes. That's it. No basting, no flipping, no lowering and raising temperatures. Let it rest 15 minutes, then carve it and here's what you get:

View fullsize

I kid you not. The skin was wonderfully crisp, the meat super-flavorful and both dark meat and white meat were perfectly cooked. The white meat was moist, juicy and delicious as the dark meat. A miracle!  I can't wait to try it again.

Here's the recipe:

Want something smashing this weekend? Pick up a chicken tonight or tomorrow, paint it with lacquer and it'll be ready to pop in the oven Friday or Saturday evening. Or paint a bird with the lacquer on Sunday afternoon and leave it in the fridge so you can roast it for an easy weeknight dinner next week. And please let us know – in a comment here – how you love it!

Meanwhile, I told Michalene about it, and what she said glued me to the ceiling: "Have you tried it on a duck?" Oh, man.

NOTE: I later made the chicken again, and it required ten minutes longer to cook – about an hour total roasting time. When it's done, the skin will be mahogany, and the legs will wiggle freely at the joints "like you could almost tear them off," as Meehan writes. The internal temperature should be 165 degrees F at the thickest part of the breast and where the thigh meets the breast. Also, when you're preparing the bird, don't worry if some of the glaze falls off the bird – it doesn't matter. That's why we have foil lining the pan.

Our first guest cook: Yasmin Halima whips up her family's wonderful thummi letho – Burmese chicken curry

The table is set for thummi letho, Burmese chicken curry, with all its garnishes.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story about Yasmin Halima, her daughter Seema Yasmin and their family was originally published back in January 2016. We are republishing it now because it has been one of our most popular stories over the years, and it feels particularly relevant at this moment.

Yasmin Halima, the mother of my young and brilliant colleague Dr. Seema Yasmin, was eager to get back into the kitchen. During the holidays, she and her family lost their house in one of the tornados that tore through the Dallas area – so devastating. When they came to dinner on New Year's Eve, I told Yasmin she was welcome to come cook in mine whenever she liked, and Seema emailed me a couple days later: Her mom really missed the kitchen and would love to come — and she’d share a recipe as a guest cook here at Cooks Without Borders.

Yasmin sent me a list of ingredients to pick up. She would be preparing (and teaching me how to make) her family's favorite comfort dish, thummi letho – Burmese chicken curry.

Yasmin and Seema respect Muslim dietary restrictions and only eat halal meat, which poses no problem at all, as there' s a halal butcher in a wonderful Asian grocery, Indo Pak Market, not far from our house. It's super fun doing the shopping there, hunting down chick pea flour (labeled as besan) and coconut milk and tamarind purée, which comes in a plastic-wrapped block. 

Yasmin arrives, and we chat for a while. Though her daughter is my colleague, Yasmin is a year younger than I! Then we head into the kitchen. Once we start chopping peanuts and slicing garlic and stirring and sautéing, she relaxes and tells me her story – a remarkable one. 

Born on India's west coast, near Surat in the state of Gujarat, Yasmin moved with her family to England when she was six. She grew up there, in a tiny industrial town near Coventry, in the Midlands, with a conservative Indian Muslim upbringing. (Her grandparents and father were born in Rangoon, Burma, where they had textile factories.) Yasmin had an arranged marriage, and when she was only 19, gave birth to Seema. 

Yasmin lightly sears cubes of chicken coated with chopped garlic.

The marriage was not a happy one, and when she was 26, she made an unfathomable decision: She would leave not only her husband, but her community. "I wanted an education, and I wanted my daughter to have an education," she tells me, as she stirs a pot of chicken, lightly searing the pieces, which she's tossed with chopped garlic. Such a thing – leaving, or even making any kind of life decision – was unheard of for a young woman of her upbringing. Yasmin did it anyway.

Her family supported her as she left for university and then moved to London as a researcher for the national department of health. She raised Seema on her own, but credits her sister with ensuring her daughter was educated about her faith and culture. None of it was easy.

Yasmin tells me she succeeded in getting her undergraduate degree in educational research and psychology and Seema – a star pupil (who by the way met her husband Emmanuel when they were both 17) – managed to achieve her own dream, gaining admittance to Cambridge University to study medicine. While Seema was at Cambridge, Yasmin – who was working for a non-profit aid organization – realized a dream of her own, to study at an Ivy League university. Admittance to a graduate program at Columbia brought her – and later Seema and Emmanuel – to the United States. Yasmin spent three years in New York, then seven years in Washington, D.C., running an international non-profit organization called Global Campaign for Microbicides followed by a few years working in public relations, before moving with Seema and Emmanuel to Texas. 

Amazing how you can get a know a person when you're cooking together. Before the evening is through, I learn that she'd like to start catering – on a small scale: cooking Indian and Burmese dishes for private dinner parties. 

So. It was Yasmin's sister who taught her how make thummi letho, the dish we're putting together. "Part of what we do to heal is we cook," she says. "And we feed. We make this dish that makes you feel good. We have emotions attached not just to food, but to dishes." Thummi letho, Yasmin tells me, "is such a basic, homely dish. We eat it to make us feel warm and safe." She sees food as a connection back to her family, too, along with observing certain Muslim traditions – praying and eating halal. "It's my umbilical cord back to my family and community." Neither she nor Seema wear the veil.

Seema, Emmanuel and Lily will be here in a bit, along with Yasmin's sister's son, Luqman, who just flew in last night from his home in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to help the family through their crisis. "They're very close," Yasmin says about Luqman and Seema. "Like brother and sister." 

Yasmin Halima

When she makes thummi at home, Yasmin takes her time. "In the morning I might do a couple of things" – preparing some of the garnishes, say, and making the Basmati rice – "and in the afternoon I might do a couple of things." 

The dish has several parts: what she calls the "base dish" – rice, cellophane (mung bean) noodles and linguini, all tossed together and garnished with sliced potatoes and eggs and chopped peanuts; a coconut milk-based chicken curry; and a variety of garnishes, to be passed at the table. 

It's a lot of elements, but the curry itself is very simple, taking less than a half hour to make. If you want to simplify it, you can serve the curry on plain Basmati, or on plain cellophane noodles, and serve it with just a garnish or two – maybe lime wedges and chopped cilantro. 

Yasmin sprinkles a couple teaspoons of chile powder onto the chicken, then thinks again and adds another. "You don't want it bland and boring!" A can and a half of coconut milk goes in, then it simmers till the chicken is just cooked through. While it bubbles, she toasts the chickpea flour in a dry pan till it's fragrant and it changes color slightly to pinky-gold. ("Can you see how it changed?" she says. It's pretty subtle.) That gets stirred into the curry, along with a couple spoonfuls of peanut butter, and voilå. 

Thummi letho

The garnishes have been prepared and put in small bowls: crushed, roasted peanuts; the limes and cilantro; fried garlic chips; fried chile flakes; tamarind paste. 

Seema, Emmanuel and Luqman arrive, followed by Thierry and our friend Habib: thummi letho party! Seema has brought a galette des rois for dessert, given to her by Marina, another colleague. I'm glad Thierry and Habib will be handy to explain that tradition (they're both French). 

Seema's excited about the thummi. "When else can you eat noodles and rice in the same dish?" she says. "It's not fancy food; it's comfort food, and it tastes so good. There are so many ingredients!"

Yasmin puts the plates together for us, as if she hasn't done enough. First the noodles and rice, then she spoons some curry over, topping it with a slice of potato and one of egg. Then the garnishes: limes, cilantro, a drizzle of sweet-sour tamarind paste, some chopped peanuts. It's wonderful: coconutty and tangy and hot and rich with peanuts. I can see why it's a family addiction. 

Naturally we all go for another round.

Later, Thierry and I take the galette to the kitchen to insert the small ceramic king figurine inside, then bring it back to the dining room and explain the game: Whoever gets the piece with the king inside wins the crown – and chooses a queen. I slice it, happy that my knife doesn't hit the ceramic piece. It's much more fun if you don't know where it is. We taste the cake – puff pastry filled with almond frangipane (thank you, Marina!). Bingo – Luqman gets the king! 

He places the glittery paper crown on his head, and we ask, "Who's your queen"?

"Emmanuel!" he cries. How lovely: Burma meets France to bring a little sweetness, a little spice, into the new year. 

RECIPE: Yasmin’s Thummi Letho (Burmese Chicken Curry)

Emmanuel Farrugia (left) and Luqman Vorajee, le roi.