The Class with the Pope's Nose

Interesting Fact: The earliest known recipe for meat in a spicy sauce with a bread appeared on tablets found near Babylon in Mesopotamia, written in cuneiform text by the Sumerians from 1700 B.C.

So Thursday night's class was dedicated to the fowl, that is the chicken and other poultry. The lecture was short as there's not much to know about poultry. They're separated into white and dark meat. Its relatively tender all over, they're inspected before and after slaughter and squab is just another name for pigeon. So if you've ever thought about eating squab, you may want to know that.

Then came the knife drill - slicing onions. Chef asked me to demo. I had a rough time - mostly because my knife edge had dulled so chef showed us how to steel our blades. Back to the slicing, much better with a knife that has an edge. We took all of our sliced onions and put them in a pot with a little oil so they would begin to sweat.

While the onions were sweating we took out our chickens. First we learned how to truss a chicken and learned that the tail is also referred to as the Pope's nose. Chef taught us how to cut the thigh/leg out, making sure to get the oyster (not to be confused with a rocky mountain oyster), and then how to separate the leg from the thigh and to debone them both. We then learned how to remove the wing, de bone the breasts and supreme the breast.

We went after our own chickens. Chef added the veal stock we had made the night before and some chicken stock to the onions, as well as some bay leaf and thyme and a bit of sherry. She then let it reduce, reduce, reduce.

Once we were finished with the de-boning and supreming and general chicken dissecting, we took all of our wings and smothered them in a whole slew of spices and popped them in the oven. When everything was over we feasted on some hot wings and a mighty tasty onion soup. This past week has taught me that if I fail at being a chef, I could always become a butcher. Also, chicken is boring. Learning about chickens is boring and cutting chickens is boring.

Tonight we have some fun with thickeners, rendering and egg foams - meringue anyone? The rest of module 1 (through lesson 21 or a week from thursday) is about soups. good times.