Cookbook Profile: Bistro Chicken

Bistro Chicken
100 Easy Yet Elegant Recipes with French Flair

by Mary Ellen Evans/p>

Bistro Chicken
It is no secret that chicken is the meat of choice for most families when it comes to getting dinner on the table in a hurry. Readily available, healthy, and inexpensive, the convenience and practicality of serving chicken for dinner fuels its popularity at supermarkets everywhere. However, chicken can get boring, fast. Now, in Bistro Chicken: 100 Easy and Elegant Recipes with French Flair, author Mary Ellen Evans combines her deep knowledge of French culture with her love for bistro cuisine in a cookbook that provides home cooks everywhere with a new approach to America's most popular protein.

"This book features honest food," Evans writes, "without the pretension of the more elaborate, labor-intensive haute cuisine of a three-star restaurant, while upholding the French passion for the best possible results." A student of French culture at the Sorbonne, and French cuisine at La Varenne, Evans has been a frequent visitor to France since the age of sixteen. For the recipes in Bistro Chicken, she has scoured the French cities and countryside for the most traditional and innovative ways to prepare the perfect 'poulet'—leaving behind nights of boring chicken dinners for elegant evenings of French sophistication.

With recipes for Cornish hens, chicken parts, delicious roasts, and everything in between-including the egg-Evans provides readers with a welcome new repertoire. Some of the fantastic French-inspired dishes include: Country-Style Chicken Terrine, Cream of Chicken Soup, Boneless Chicken Breasts Stuffed with Camembert, Norman Chicken, Stuffed Capon with Swiss Chard and Mushrooms, Provencal Tian with Chicken, Chicken Pot Pie with Puff Pastry, Chicken with Ale, Low-Fat Chicken Fricassee with Ginger, Chicken Waterzooi, and many, many more.

Not just a bible of wonderful chicken recipes, Bistro Chicken also provides readers with French "trucs" or helpful tips for everything from preparing each recipe to useful information about a particular ingredient or cooking method-making it an essential addition to any home cook's collection. Bistro Chicken divulges the secret not only to making the perfect roast chicken, but also the keys to perfect sautéing, grilling, simmering, and stewing any poultry dish. Lynne Rossetto Kasper, host of Minnesota Public Radio's The Splendid Table, says of Bistro Chicken: "As a woman married to a man who wants chicken seven nights a week, I am forever grateful to Mary Evans. These are dynamite recipes for worknights, for big occasions, and for when our imaginations run dry. This one is a winner. It goes on the shelf next to the stove."

In Bistro Chicken, the speediness, ease, and flexibility of bistro cooking is perfectly married to the convenience of cooking poultry-giving readers original and delicious ways to bring chicken to a whole new level of sophistication and style. With Bistro Chicken as a guide, the delicious and warmly satisfying tastes of French Bistro cuisine can now be recreated at home with minimal effort-but with maximum results.

About the Author

A former cooking-school director, Mary Ellen Evans is a freelance food writer. Drawing on studies of French culture at the Sorbonne and cuisine at La Varenne, she leads gastronomic tours of France, a frequent destination for her since she was sixteen. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and has a home in Provence.

Buy the Book!

Bistro Chicken
100 Easy Yet Elegant Recipes with French Flair
by Mary Ellen Evans
Broadway Books
Paperback, $17.95
ISBN: 0-7679-1378-7
Information provided by the publisher.