A week of winter dishes from The Vintage Chef

Chicken forestière

Unlike loads of my other favoured stews, this one doesn’t take hours on the stove or in the oven. I can’t pretend it’s a ten minute start-to-finish dish, but it is one you can start after work and comfortably finish in time for dinner – and after the initial time investment, you can leave it to do its thing.

Recipes differ as to the cut of chicken you use: I’ve used fillets here which are not normally my favourite cut, but here it helps the quick cooking process, and means that you don’t have to faff around with bones when eating. The ‘forestière’ in the dish title means ‘of the forest’ and is really a reference to the mushrooms in the sauce. I’ve gone for a double mushroom hit here: sliced mushrooms, fried off so that they retain their shape and flavour when added to the sauce, and dried porcini mushrooms rehydrated, which give a fantastic depth and a dark, bosky aroma.

The combination of the slightly caramelised onions, the soaked porcini mushrooms, and the booze (I’ve used brandy here, but just use a slosh of whatever you have: sherry, madeira and marsala are all good) do a lot of the flavour-building leg-work that is normally provided by a slow-cook – and the addition of cream gives a glossy thickness to the sauce which will instantly coat the back of a spoon. Follow the recipe here.

Flemish beer and beef stew

I have a particular soft spot for carbonnade à la Flamande – I think because really it is a Flemish version of the beef and brown ale stew I grew up on in Newcastle. Carbonnade à la Flamande is a beef and onion stew that comes from Belgium. It is made with dark belgian beer (ideally Trappist) and is slowly cooked until dark and sticky, with a rich gravy that was made for dunking bread into or swooping chips through.