Chicken Mistral

Amalia used to like juice a lot. Now she likes the idea of juice, but not the stuff itself so much. As a result we had a bottle of pomegranite/apple juice that needed to be used faster than I could concoct cocktails. So I used it to cook chicken. I will warn you, this recipe calls for ingredients you probably will have to make yourself or procure through a specialty shop.

Inside the rinsed and dried, lavender salted and peppered chicken, I put in a roughly chopped stalk of celery, with leaves, two crushed garlic cloves and half a coursely chopped onion. I put the chicken in a clay Romertopf and rubbed the bird with extra virgin olive oil and put the finely julienned zest of a Moroccan preserved lemon (I do them myself with Meyer lemons and sea salt), the other half of the chopped onion, two more crushed cloves of garlic, and two Italian preserved hot chilis (in olive oil), with the seeds removed. I then poured the juice (one can and probably should use pure pomegranite juice for this, but I had the other stuff on hand), up to about a half an inch from the rim of the bottom half of the Romertopf. I put the lid on and placed it in a 375 degree oven.

When the chicken was done, I put it on my board and covered it with foil. I strained and skimmed the cooking juices and reduced them to a syrup. Then I whipped in almost a whole stick of softened, unsalted, cultured butter and finished with a dash of Spanish brandy.

After I carved the bird, I sauced it liberally and served it with a green salad (I would have served a simple pine nut and raisin couscous, but I was out of couscous) and a Napa Valley Zinfandel (in other words, a Zinfandel pretending to be a Cabernet Sauvignon). Yum.