Chicken with Bacon, Leeks and Cider, & how I met Gordon Ramsay, and found him polite

A luxurious dish with a silken sauce.

This is the one of the recipes I demonstrated at the Good Food and Wine Show last week.  I was pleased to receive an invitation to cook at the show, but gnawed my nails to the quick when I learned, rather late in the day, that 24 people from the audience would be cooking along with me in the Woolworths Real Food Theatre.  The dishes I'd chosen to demonstrate were too fiddly for a cook-along, so I abandoned them and instead selected three favourite recipes I knew could easily be done and dusted in 45 minutes.

As the main attraction, I settled on this easy crowd-pleaser, a recipe I developed for my cookbook Scrumptious: Food For Family and Friends. 

Before give you the recipe, I must tell you how star-struck I felt to meet Gordon Ramsay at the show, after watching his hugely entertaining demo, to which I was invited (by his sponsor, Checkers) as part of a media contingent.

I mention this because I complained bitterly on this blog three years ago when the 'VIP' ticket my husband bought me as a birthday present turned out to be a proper turkey.  It wasn't a good experience, and left such a sour taste that for several years I couldn't face going back.

So when I finally met the man, after a short wait in an over-excited book-signing queue, I was determined to get in my ten cents' worth. While he signed my copy of his new book Gordon Ramsay's Ultimate Cookery Course, I told him I was a food blogger, and his famous furrowed brow creased like an accordion. But I followed that up smartly by telling him I'd recently had my first cookbook published, and was thunderstruck when he leaned forward across the counter to grasp my hand in both of his, warmly congratulating me, as if I had recently won a Nobel Prize. Seizing the opportunity, I slapped a dog-eared copy of his autobiography Humble Pie on the counter and asked him if he'd be so kind as to write a message to my sons across the cover.  "Neither of my teenage sons was interested in cooking until they read this," I told him. "But now they are very interested. Can you please write something rude on the cover for them?"

He looked pleased, and asked, "What do you want me to write?"

"You f..king donkeys!" I replied, knowing my sons would be genuinely thrilled to be called such a thing (a famous line from certain Ramsay reality shows).

"I can't write that!" he said, clearly appalled by my suggestion. "Not for teenagers, I can't!"

"Oh, go on," I urged him.  "They will love it!"

With a bashful look - I can't think of any other word to describe his expression -  he scrawled a message across the book cover, but he censored his beloved F-word with an ellipsis.

This impressed me.

Anyway, moving on to my recipe. I love this luxurious coq-au-vin-style dish and make it quite often for friends when I'm looking for a comforting recipe with a complex flavour, but don't have time to fiddle around with a lot of chopping or stock-boiling or slow cooking. You can made this dish in half the time by chucking everything together in a pan and hoping for the best, but I've designed the recipe so that it creates its own deep-flavoured stock and sauce as it cooks, drawing wonderful earthy flavours from the bacon, mushrooms, leeks and chicken.

Any dry cider will do for this recipe, but you will get a superior result from a carefully brewed craft cider. I've used, on various occasions, two excellent South African ciders -  Everson's and Terre Madre - and was interested to note the subtle differences in the final result.

There is not a speck of flour in this recipe, yet the sauce reduces quite quickly to just the right state of silken thickness. You can't achieve this in a small, crowded pot, however, because there isn't enough surface area for the sauce to reduce in a hurry.  Make it in a large, shallow pan, such as an electric frying pan, or a paella pan if you have one.

If you can find fresh tarragon, use it by all means, but I find that good quality dried tarragon is just as pungent.  You can find good-quality freeze-dried tarragon at Woolies and in better supermarkets.

If you don't use alcohol in your cooking, use a not-too-sweet apple juice (such as Appletiser) instead of cider.

Recipe from Scrumptious: Food for Family and Friends (Random House Struik)

Chicken with Bacon, Leeks and Cider

two free-range chickens, or chicken pieces of your choice
3 large leeks
3 Tbsp (45 ml) butter
1 Tbsp (15 ml) olive oil
250 g back bacon
3 cloves garlic, peeled and finely chopped
500 g tiny button mushrooms
3 cups (750 ml) dry cider
2½ tsp dried tarragon
a 10-cm  sprig of fresh thyme
1½ (375 ml) cups cream
salt and pepper
4 Tbsp (60 ml) finely chopped curly parsley

Remove any visible fat from the chickens and cut them into 16 portions (or ask your butcher to do this for you). Cut a lengthways slice halfway through the leeks and rinse, fanning out the leaves, under cold water. Finely slice the leeks (you’ll use the white and pale green parts only). Heat the butter and olive oil in a very large, shallow pan, add the leeks and bacon and fry over a medium heat for 4-5 minutes, without allowing the leeks to brown. Add the garlic and fry gently for another minute. Remove the leeks, bacon and garlic using a slotted spoon and set aside on a plate. Be sure to remove every trace of leek and garlic, as these will blacken during the next step and make the sauce bitter.

Brown the chicken pieces on both sides, over a high heat, and in batches, for 3-4 minutes, or until the skin is crisp and golden (add a little more butter or oil to the pan if necessary). Set aside on a plate. Drain off all but 1 tablespoon of the fat, add the mushrooms and fry over a high heat for 2-3 minutes, or until they begin to turn golden. Pour in the cider and bubble briskly for 3 minutes, stirring and scraping to dislodge the sediment on the bottom of the pan. Return the chicken (skin side up), leeks and bacon to the pan and add the tarragon, thyme sprig and a big pinch of salt. Reduce heat and bubble, uncovered for 25-35 minutes, or until the chicken is cooked right through. Turn the chicken pieces over three or four times while they cook. Remove the thyme sprig, stir in the cream, season to taste with salt and pepper and cook gently for a few more minutes, or until the sauce has slightly reduced and thickened.

Scatter with parsley and serve hot with mashed or crushed potatoes and a green salad or vegetables.

Serves 6-7. 

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Good Food & Wine Show: the good, the bad, and the Gordon

I never miss a Gordon Ramsay show on TV if I can possibly help it, so there was no way I was going to miss the opportunity to see the world's most famous chef in action at Cape Town's Good Food and Wine Show. At R750 (about $100), the 'VIP' tickets were staggeringly expensive, but my husband surprised me by presenting me with one as my early birthday present.

Ever since I read Ramsay's fascinating autobiography, Humble Pie, a few years ago, I have greatly admired him, and have followed his career with interest. Yes, I know he swears like a sailor and can be unspeakably rude to colleagues, minions and foes, but I dig Gordon anyway. Not only because he's knee-wateringly sexy (let's get that one out of the way, shall we?) but also because he's tenacious, talented, kind-hearted, hard-working and -  most important of all -  utterly fearless.

Fearlessness is a quality I desperately admire in people who have it. I'm not a fearful person (fearlessness is not the opposite of fearful) but I would love to have total conviction, and an unswerving faith, in my own abilities. 'Only with absolute fearlessness can we slay the dragons of mediocrity that invade our gardens,' design icon George Lois once said, and that is a sentiment that rings very true for me. I would also love to have big enough balls to tell annoying people to fuck right off (I am getting better at this, the older I become).

It's Ramsay's loathing of mediocrity that is his greatest asset, and I have no doubt that this is why he has become, in the culinary world at least, a global super-star.  Both my teenage sons (who usually read only encyclopaedic fantasy epics) raced through Humble Pie and regularly watch his shows with relish and a lot of guffawing. I heartily endorse their admiration of Ramsay because I would like them, both kind-hearted and clever boys, to be fearless in their adult lives.

So, that's why I wanted to see the man in action.  And his show this morning was great: he was funny, warm and polite.  But, my goodness, he had to work hard to get a belly laugh out of a rather subdued Cape Town audience.  Half his rude jokes went right over their heads, and when he asked how the audience liked the T-shirt he was wearing (our national soccer team's official jersey) he raised - disgracefully - only a feeble cheer from a mostly pale-skinned housewifely audience.

I wasn't blown away by Ramsay's humdrum choice of demo dishes - a potato-and-haddock soup, sticky chicken and tarte tatin - and would have loved to have seen him demonstrate something more edgy and challenging, and something we haven't seen made on TV a hundred times.  But this was a minor disappointment, compared to what came next.

When the show ended, we VIP-ticket-holders were told to stay in our seats, while the rest of the audience - the cheap seats - filed out.  Oh, goody, I thought.  Now for the expensive part of our tickets!  What would this be?  Another short demo? A Q&A session?  Perhaps - gasp - a free stream of expletives?  But it turned out that we were held back in class only to receive our  'free', pre-signed copies of Ramsay's book Easy.  By the time we got outside, the queue for book-signing queue was 150 deep.  At this point, I wandered away to sample a few goodies at the nearby stalls.  When I rejoined the queue, some time later, I stood patiently in line and eventually found myself in a band of infuriated VIP ticket holders who'd been told they couldn't meet Ramsay, or have their books personalised, because they were 'too far behind' in the queue.  The security guards were heckled, feet were stamped, fists were shook and I enthusiastically joined the fracas, because I wanted to ask Ramsay to sign my copy of Humble Pie. Eventually some organiser or manager pitched up, reluctantly peeled her cell phone away from her ear, and snottily told the people who'd parted with R750 to 'calm down'.  Standing next to a sign saying 'VIP Book Signings' she said, without a trace of irony, 'You got what you paid for'.

The long and the short of it?  If you'd bought a cheap seat (and let this be a lesson to me my husband) you got the long end of the stick, and a face-to-face meeting with His Ramsayness. If you were rattling your jewellery in the prime seats, you got a poke in the eye.

But what of the rest of the show?  I don't mean to sound like a grumbler, but I am always disappointed by big food events like these, because of the dearth of really interesting, innovative food producers. I see that my sentiments are shared by my fellow blogger, Sam of Drizzle and Dip, who posted this about the event.

I'm not interested in stalls peddling knives, gimmicky vegetable turners and expensive casserole dishes, and I cannot understand why bath salts, soaps and crappy powdered stocks are featured at a good food show.  There is always a surfeit of stalls selling olives, olive oil, tapenade, chilli sauces and pickles, and never enough emphasis on small producers of excellent artisanal cheeses, sausages, breads and the like.

Having said that, there were a few stalls that really stood out for me, and I came back with two bags laden with some outstanding local produce.

Though I'm not mad about bottled sauces, I have to applaud Pesto Princess for their delicious, knock-your-socks-off pastes and pestos.  One of the best products in this show, in my opinion, is Pesto Princess's gorgeous fresh Chimichurri, a zingy Argentinian paste of coriander, parsley, chilli, garlic and lemon.  Their fresh chermoula and berebere pastes are as fresh, sparky and delicious, I bet, as anything you'll taste in Morocco or Ethiopia.   In second place is an exceptional, award-winning hand-made camembert by La Petite France. With its velvety skin, melting texture and exquisite creaminess and flavour, this is a cheese worth lying under a train for.  I also bought a side of a most beautiful and delicate smoked trout from Harty's of Somerset West, and several packs of excellent home-made sausages -  Toulouse, Swedish, Chourico and a devilish 'Diablo' -  from Rudi's of Gordon's Bay. And I was delighted to see tasty, tender pork neck on sale at the Ranch Meat Centres stall. I've been hunting for a good supplier of pork neck since I moved to Cape Town, spurred by the fact that recipes for pork neck are by far and away the most visited pages on this site.

I wish I could give you details for all these producers, but most of them are so small that they don't have websites.  The official website for this show doesn't list suppliers' details (the dragons of mediocrity have invaded that garden) but I did collect some cards, and will happily send you email contact details for these suppliers if you want them.  (I'm not going to post them here, for fear of their email addresses being harvested and spammed). My email address is hobray at gmail dot com.

PS I did request an interview with Ramsay, but all the slots were taken.  The invitation to the media briefing, promised to me by the reigning pee-ar, never arrived.  Those pesky dragons again.

POSTSCRIPT: I see that visitors who paid big money to attend the Gordon Ramsay event at his Maze restaurant were also upset.  Read the organisers' response, and comments from readers. Print Friendly