Chicken Ragout

Recipes are coming in for the Christmas Present Cookbook. This one is from my mom, it's one of my favorite homey meals. It's so good, it has even been known to convert a vegetarian or two. My mom tells you to serve it over mashed potatoes, but I'll tell you what: I like it even better served over rice. I don't really remember eating it with potatoes when we were little, I remember eating it with rice, but I wonder if that is because I threw some picky-eater kind of fit about not liking potatoes - which would explain why I like it better with rice.

Also, can you spot the secret clue that tells you my mom lives in San Francisco?

From my mother's [that'd be my grandmother's] repertoire of Canuk cooking. Pronounced Raw Goo, not Rag Out. It does kinda look like goo if things don't go well. But it'll still taste pretty good.

Ingredients:

1 chicken - stewing hen if you can find one, but a fryer is fine
1 medium onion
2 or 3 stalks of celery with the leaves still on
a few bay leaves
1 teaspoon or so of whole allspice
½ cup flour
salt & pepper
4 or 5 good sized potatoes to mash (that's my mother [my grandmother] talking - your guess is as good as mine as to what is good sized in a potato).

Rinse the chicken and remove fat from the cavity.
Place the chicken in a 4 quart sauce pan and cover with water (4 or 5 cups). You can also add the giblets, but NOT THE LIVER.
Add the celery, cut in 2" or so segments and the onion which you have finely chopped, the bay leaves, whole allspice and 1-2 teaspoons of salt.
Cover and bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce heat to a simmer. Since you have the lid on while you're bringing it to a boil, it might boil over. This is country cooking, don't worry about it.
Let simmer for an hour.
In the meantime, brown the flour in a cast iron frying pan. You do this by heating the pan on medium high heat and then adding the flour, stirring and scraping continually witpancakecake turner as it browns. It'll take a while to get it a nice toasty color and keep scraping it off the bottom of the pan as you go or you'll have some nasty burned-tasting stuff that will ruin your goo.

After the chicken has had it's hour in the pot, lift it out to cool while you make the goo and add it to the stock. Take out the celery too. It'll be limp and tasteless and will have lost it's cheery celery color and no one's going to want to eat it.

Now you make the goo. I like to use a 1 cup glass measuring cup to mix it. Ladle some stock (which is still simmering) into the measuring cup and add 1/3 of the toasted flour. Whisk until it's free of lumps, then add it to the stock in the pot and stir. Continue until all the goo is in the pot. Alternately, you can just dump the flour in, but you get lumps that are hella hard to get out. And doing it in three parts lets you stop at two if the stock has thickened by then. Now boil the stock to reduce it. This whole process will take about 20 minutes.

In the meantime, skin and bone the chicken, lifting the meat off the bones in good sized chunks. You'll return it to the pot just before you serve it. Put it back in while the stock is reducing and you'll have finely shredded chicken glop instead of ragout. If you're not in favor of burning your fingers when you bone, you can put the cooling chicken in the refrigerator while you make the goo. And sometimes I leave the bone in the thigh and drumstick if I have bone lovers coming to dinner.

Boil and mash the potatoes while the adding the goo/reducing the stock thing is going on.

You're almost there. All you need to do is taste the gravy and add salt and pepper to taste, turn the heat down to simmer, add the chicken and stir gently and you're done!

Serve the ragout over mashed potatoes, or boil some new potatoes and serve them whole for folks to lightly mash on their plates.

One final note: I toss in a couple of half chicken breasts to cook with the whole chicken to make the ragout meatier. Not authentic, but it cuts down on the fighting over the white meat at the table.

Enjoy!