Of Friendship and Fricasse

Well, I didn’t feel like stabbing anyone today…so I guess you can say that I had a better day than yesterday!

Hey, have I mentioned that my good friend Jonathan is on a Julia Child cooking kick, and that he’s letting Iwanski and I taste-test the recipes? Yeah, dude, it’s awesome! For the past two weekends, he’s cooked up delectable French recipes from Julia Child’s book Mastering the Art of French Cooking--and apparently he wants to cook another recipe this coming weekend.

So far he’s made Boeuf Bourguignon—which is like a beef stew—but to just call it beef stew is vastly underrating how good this stuff was. Even I—who have never been a fan of beef stew—gobbled it up like it was the last meal I would ever get to eat. Iwanski cowed out on it, too. My favorite part of the meal—besides the yummy mushrooms and pearl onions, which were extremely tasty—was that the beef was so MOIST! And anyone who really knows me knows that my number one qualification for food—especially for meat—is that it has to be MOIST. It could have something to do with the fact that I almost choked to death once on a piece of very dry bread, thus leaving me paranoid about choking for the rest of my life—but anyway…suffice it to say that the Boeuf Bourguignon was a wild success.

Then, this past weekend, Jonathan made Fricasée de Poulet a La’Ancienne (what Jonathan called on his blog “Old-Fashioned Chicken Fricasse with Wine-flavored Cream Sauce, Onions and Mushrooms.”) Cream sauce? Mushrooms? I’m there, dude.

And oh how good it was! Although Iwanski and I ate the Chicken Fricasse a couple of days after Chef Jonathan cooked it—and even though he had warned us that it wasn’t as good as leftovers as it was when it was freshly-cooked—we were not disappointed. The mushrooms were succulent, the cream sauce rich and delicious—and the chicken, of course, was MOIST! Hooray!!!!

I’m telling you, everyone needs to have a friend like Jonathan. Not only is he one of the nicest people I know, he’s also an outstanding cook who’s eager to share the delicious fruits of his labor with his friends.

I can’t wait to see what he prepares next!