A new month has been running for a while now, so the time had come that we would organize a new global dinner within our modest student lifestyle. Each month we are treating ourselves to an amazing (at least we believe it is) dinner including a starter, main course and a dessert in the end.
This month we devoted ourselves to our beautiful neighbouring country France for a day (the wish was not particularly related to the recent occurences in France's capital).
Second stop: La France
The French cuisine is multi-faceted; we stumbled across recipes for Bouillabaisse (fish soup), escargots (snails, slightly hard to find at a traditional German food market..), the all-beloved but simple Croque Monsieur/Madame (a delicious sandwich, found frequently in the authentic bistros everywhere around France) and so many more interesting ideas.
This is what we finally decided on cooking for our French dinner:
The courses
Starter - Carrot, apple and spring onion salad with goat cheese
Main - Chicken in white wine sauce
Dessert - French Clafoutis
What could we do with all this?
After I had taken these photographs, a huge marathon of chopping veggies began.
In addition to this we had to separate our freshly bought organic chicken (from a farmer's market, of course), which turned out to be easier than it had seemed at the start. I recommend watching Jamie Oliver's video on how to cut a chicken properly.
We kicked off the preparation of our menu by roasting the chicken in a pan as well as setting up our wine with the shallots and the garlic to make the base for our white wine sauce.
Whilst the sauce was cooking my partner in crime grated a few carrots and apples and a small piece of goat cheese for our French salad (thank you to my dear friend Ka for giving us advice on what to make for our first course). Finally we added spring onions, lemon juice and some olive oil - and that was it!
Of course when preparing a French dinner, baguette should never be excluded...
As the sauce had reached its final stage, we added the chicken and let it simmer for half an hour so the chicken would become tender - time is key when it comes to many kinds of meat!
For our dessert we made a Clafoutis, which I had mentioned on my blog once already. If you like you can check out the recipe here.
However we changed it up a bit (actually made it more traditional than in my older post) and used cherries instead of raspberries.
In the end we were very proud on what we had cooked with the precious ingredients and we loved every bite of our French dinner!
Maybe we should stop here again while we are keeping up the tour..