Tarragon Chicken - The Gourmet Slow Cooker - Recipe #1

Slow cookers are strange beasts. Many recipes using them simply involve throwing a bunch of stuff in, switching them on, heading off to work and returning to a warm meal. Sadly, in Toasty's experience, warm is about the only positive adjective that can be applied to most of these dishes. Other adjectives he finds coming to mind are "mushy" "overcooked" and "bland".

A second breed of recipes use slow cookers essentially to replace oven casseroles in classic dishes. Generally these recipes end up tasting great, but involve significant prep such as browning meat, frying onions and celery etc. They often also involve shorter cooking times, so that they don't work well during a workday.

Anyway, "The Gournet Slow Cooker" falls squarely into the second camp. It has recipes organised by country for France, the UK, Greece, India, Italy etc, with about half a dozen recipes for each. The ingredient lists are reasonable in size and many dishes look interesting.

Based on repeated references to the dish in positive reviews of the book, and also because Mr. T is a gastronomic Francophile, Toasty chose the tarragon chicken recipe as the first thing to cook from this book. Additionally, due to a new horror of factory farming, Toasty bought a free range organic chicken and cut it into portions for the recipe. Picture large sharp knife hacking at big wet bird with tendency to skitter about the cutting surface. Mottled grey dog was VERY interested in the possibility of chicken parts falling on the floor anywhere near her muzzle.

Being thrifty, Toasty froze the gibblets and offcuts (backbone etc) to make chicken stock at a later date. We shall see what comes of that.

The final dish was a hit, with a rich and savoury sauce and very tender chicken, which was served over noodles and accompanied by oven roasted asparagus. However, the tarragon taste was a little muted for Toasty's taste. This is likely due to the amount of cream in the recipe, as cream tends to dull flavours. Similarly, Toasty thought the dish needed a little acid to to balance the sauce better, so perhaps a savignon blanc or muscadet would work better in the recipe than the chardonnay that was actually used.


Tarragon Chicken

3/4 cup plus 2 tbsp all-purpose flour

1 tsp salt

1 chicken, cut into serving pieces and skinned

2 tbps unsalted butter

2 tbsp olive oil

1 yellow onion, finely chopped

1cup dry white wine

1 cup chicken stock

6 sprigs tarragon

1 cup heavy cream

Put 3/4 cup flour in a sealable bag and coat a couple of chicken pieces at a time by shaking them around in there.

Fry the chicken in the oil and butter over a medium high heat until golden on all sides. Place in the slow cooker.

Add the onion and 2 tbsp flour to the pan. Saute for ~ 10 minutes until lightly browned. Slowly add the wine, scraping up the gooey bits stuck to the pan.

Add the stock and cook, with stirring for 10-15 minutes, until the sauce is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.

Put 2 sprigs of tarragon in with the chicken and pour the onion/sauce over.

Cover and cook on low for 5-6 hrs until the chicken is just falling off the bone.

Pour in cream and cook a further 10-15 minutes.

Remove the tarragon sprigs.

Coarsely chop the remaining tarragon leaves and add to the slow cooker.

Serve immediately.

Herbed Pork Tenderloin - The Sonoma Diet - Recipe #1

A while ago, Toasty went through a phase of trying to find low calorie recipes that tasted really good, both to reduce his own saturated fat intake and to help his partner, the lovely Mr. T., to lose some weight.

Anyway, this is one low calorie dish that we have prepared before, and quite liked, from "The Sonoma Diet". Most of the recipes in that book look great (well there aren't any pictures but they SOUND great), and Toasty and Mr. T. have enjoyed several that we have tried, sometimes even the same ones! However, in Toasty's opinion, the recipes suffer from having far too many ingredients, making them very expensive and tending to muddy the taste. Here we had the herbed tenderloin along with braised red cabbage and baked potato and while Toasty enjoyed the pork, he is not as fond of it as he used to be as he felt there were too many flavours (to paraphrase the Austrian Emperor in "Amadeus"). On the other hand Toasty did fiddle with the recipe a little, making a more substantial pan gravy by adding red wine to the roasting pan at the end, and reducing down. Toasty also used dried rosemary and marjoram. The enigmatic Mr. T. loved this one.


Herbed Pork Tenderloin





2 12 oz pork tenderloins

salt and pepper

2 tbsp balsamic vinegar

2 tbsp dry sherry

1 tbsp cracked black pepper

3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

1 tbsp soy sauce

2 3-inch sprigs fresh rosemary

2 3-inch sprigs fresh marjoram

2 3-inch sprigs fresh thyme

2 garlic cloves, minced


Season meat with salt and pepper and place in sealable plastic bag. Then, put together the marinade, consisting of the cracked pepper, soy sauce, vinegar, sherry, herbs, garlic and 1 tbsp of the olive oil. Pour into the bag with the pork and marinate in the fridge for 2-4 hrs with occasional turning.

Drain the meat and reserve the marinade. Heat the remaining 2 tbsp of oil in a frying pan and brown the meat.

Put the tenderloins in a shallow roasting dish and pour over the marinade. Roast, uncovered at 425 F for 15 minutes. Spoon the pan juices over the meat and contiue roasting until internal temperature reaches 155 F. Cover with foil and let stand for 15 minutes before carving.

Makes 8 servings.