I wanted to mention a certain breast of chicken, again. I requested that Lynn make it again at camp last weekend, as I couldn’t stop thinking about it since the first time we tried it. It’s basically a very simple country French kind of thing: chicken with a white wine (creamy cal chard), heavy cream and mustard sauce. And on the side grits with heavy cream and sharp cheddar cheese blended in, pureed cauliflower, corn cut from the cob and green beans for visual contrast. But it is mostly how the chicken is cooked that makes the combination delirious. And don’t be afraid of salt.
First you brown it in the same pan that you insert in the oven to bake it subsequently and make the sauce in afterward – in a little olive oil – and then bake it at 350 until the thermometer reaches 140 degrees F. – not 150 or 160, as 99% of people would do, I think. At 140 there is just the hue of pink throughout the white, not just in the center with the meat nearer the surfaces white. It is completely consistent throughout, with just the very surface browned and a touch crispy with olive oil. The rest of the meat can be cut with a spoon with nearly no pressure applied, almost by just the weight of a fork, which you would normally use to eat it, or have it melt on your tongue, more accurately. The reduced heavy cream in the sauce bridges to the cream in the grits, before you take a tiny bite of cauliflower to reduce the nearly orgasmic sensation of the body so that your senses do not become overloaded. The corn kernels swimming (in our case fake, but delicious artificial) butter complete the rescue from overload adding a temporal texture letting you know that you are actually not in heaven, before taking the next bite of chicken and going right back in.
Our lowly, cabin loving 2003 Chateau Lynch Moussas also added to the whole affair. It is like a little first growth, in the way that our mountain lake cabin is like a little heaven. Over the weekend, the lake was motionless, like a looking glass, the reflections on which bringing the forest and hills across into our room. And I swear that there has commenced a sea change in willingness for families to come anywhere near the lake or even to the north woods after Labor Day. They still like to water ski and such, but solitude and reflection have no relevance anymore with American families. I believe that nearly everything is about texting if you are young, and since virtually every family has young people in it, they can’t move out of range of text messages as a unit anymore. Properties on the lake have stood unsold for a couple of years, now, and nobody who owned them and grew too old to travel north anymore will reduce their prices to make them more palatable, out of the value of love, once you have relaxed there. You would rather die than sell something you love below the value you place on it. So we are totally alone on weekends. You can’t hear a sound other than an occasional lonely loon over the mist and the crackling of the wood stove. But back to civilization and work today. Arg.
