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Germany: Braunes Geflügelragout / Roast Chicken Stew with Port or Red Wine

A bay of a rotisserie truck. Down at the bottom: potatoes soaking up the chicken juices

When you travel in Germany, one thing you get used to quickly is how well the train stations are supplied with food for the hungry traveler. Most major stations have at least one excellent restaurant (often called a Bahnbuffet or Bahnhofbuffet even if it's not at all a buffet in the normal serve-yourself or food-in-bulk mode). Some stations have several restaurants: the biggest have many. And quite a few stations, large and small, have supermarkets or mini-markets attached.

Even those that already have these facilities will often feature something extra. Often you'll see catering trucks pulled up outside the main entry of the station: and at least one of these trucks will routinely be featuring lots of rotisserie spits with chickens roasting on them. There are always ready-bagged chickens hot off the spit, waiting for hurrying commuters to grab one, pay for it, and hurry off to catch their train.

There are a surprising number of recipes out there tailored to these ready-roast chickens -- the idea being that you don't have to do much to them when you get home. This is one of our favorites.

(And just a note in passing: it doesn't hurt to make extra gravy by doubling or even tripling the ingredients. There never seems to be enough of it. Anyway, making extra and freezing some means that after getting home from a long day at work, you can simply thaw out the gravy in a pot (or the microwave) and shred the chicken straight into it.)

Click on "read more" for the recipe.

Ireland: Chicken and Ham Pie (March 5, 2008)

This dish is one of the great favorites of Irish people at home, to judge by its presence in almost every deli, convenience store and supermarket you walk into (in the latter case, in both fresh and frozen-food case versions). It also turns up on practically every pub menu in the country, usually with a green salad on the side, and sometimes with chips / fries as well.

Once upon a time this near-universal presence might have made sense in terms of a pie being a great way to use up leftovers from when "chicken and bacon in the pot" had been made on the premises within the last few days. But nowadays, when such traditional and somewhat labor-intensive dishes are made a lot less frequently than they used to be, these pies look as if they're being made from scratch most of the time.

The ingredients involved in the basic recipe are simple, but the pie takes a certain amount of work, so this isn't something to embark upon on the spur of the moment.

Readers should note in advance that the "ham" of the recipe title is not ham in the North American sense of the word. It is slow-simmered brine-cured pork -- almost all cuts of which are called "bacon" in Ireland. (What a North American would think of as bacon is called "rashers" in Ireland.) It's fairly simple to duplicate this meat by finding a cut of fresh pork such as collar or butt and then brining it for a couple of days. The recipe below will give more details on how to proceed if you're brining your own pork.

Click "read more" for the recipe.

Ireland: Chicken 'Frigasse' (Sicin in Anlann Bán): March 3, 2008

The technique called fricassée has turned up all over Europe under many different names over the past few hundred years (in English alone you might get fricace, frigasie, fricasey, frigacy...), so it's no surprise that there's an Irish variant, which dates back to at least the late 17th century. While these days "fricaseeing" something normally means to sauté the meat and then cook it further in a sauce, originally the term meant to cook sliced meat by boiling or stewing it; then the sauce would be added. The sauce usually involved eggs and cream, along with seasonings or spices meant to sharpen the effect. This is one of the ways the Irish dish is done: though in local usage, frigasses might also be made with a brown or beef-based sauce, and could include other meats -- lamb, veal, rabbit -- and vegetables.

This typical chicken frigasse is adapted from an eighteenth-century recipe from County Cavan. Like most other frigasses of the period, it's garnished with button onions and mushrooms.

Click "read more" for the recipe.

Ireland: Potato Soup with Bacon and Vegetables

MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.05
 
      Title: Potato Soup with Bacon and Vegetables
 Categories: Irish2, Potatoes
      Yield: 6 Servings
 
      6 ts Butter
      2 lb Potatoes, peeled and diced
    1/4    Head celeriac, diced
      2    Medium carrots, diced
  3 3/4 c  Chicken or vegetable stock,
           -or water
      1    Leek, cut lengthways, sliced
      1    Onion, diced
  1 1/4 c  Cream or cream and milk
      1 pn Freshly ground nutmeg
           Salt and pepper to taste
      3 oz Smoked bacon
           Croutons
      1    Scallion / green onion cut
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