burnt bird sauce; or, yet another lavender disaster

Mr. Tart has to go out of town again this week, so I wanted to fix him an especially nice dinner since he'll be eating hotel and conference food for the next few days. As the nearest grocery store had cornish hens on sale, I decided to try out a recipe for lavender and thyme roasted poussins. Those herbs inspired me to plan an entirely French meal, so I also made my favorite salade au chevre chaud, roasted some asparagus,and tried Cooks Illustrated's most recent chocolate mousse recipe.

Here's what I do for the goat cheese salad: top baguette slices with rounds of goat cheese and broil them. Make a vinaigrette with one part flavored vinegar, 1.5 parts olive oil, 1.5 parts canola oil, a finely chopped shallot, and a little dollop of French mustard, plus salt and pepper. Spread out baby greens on a plate (not in a bowl) and be generous with the vinaigrette. Place the still-warm chevre croutons on top of the greens. Eat with knife and fork, cutting the croutons into pieces, swirling them around in the sauce, and spearing some greens for a crunchy, melty, fresh-tasting bite. (I've seen this type of salad done elaborately in France, with all sorts of other veggies thrown in, but I prefer it just with the greens.)

The mousse was delicious--and Mr. Tart approved, doing his Chocolate Mousse Apreciation Dance at the table. I don't know that CI's recipe was significantly better than the one I use normally, though. Theirs has more chocolate, no butter, and brandy instead of vanilla, but it calls for so much whipped cream that it turns out looking vaguely anemic.

The roasted cornish hens, however, caused problems.

Although I gave up being a vegetarian a year after college, I've never gotten to the point where I enjoy handling meat, particularly meat that resembles the animal it came from. Frankly, the little cornish hen carcasses grossed me out, particularly when I had to gently separate the skin from the meat and smear butter underneath it. On the other hand, I enjoyed making the compound butter in my mortar and pestle, crushing fresh thyme (yes, it's surviving this Colorado winter in my garden!), lavender flowers, and lemon zest. It certainly smelled good and really did remind me of Provence.

Not ten minutes after the little sweet-smelling birds went into the oven (at 475 degrees), though, did our smoke detector go off: the lemon juice had slid off the outside of the skins and scorched on the bottom of the baking dish. I swapped it out for a fresh baking dish and continued roasting. After two more bouts of yowling from the smoke detector--and a house full of floral birdy smoke--I turned the oven down to 400. Eventually the melted herb butter and the juices from the meat were thick enough on the bottom of the pan to not burn any more.

Now I had to guess how long to cook it, since I had changed the oven temperature, so I kept stabbing the birds with a meat thermometer until they were safely cooked. The next step required deglazing the pan with Sauternes--we used a Riesling because that's all the white we had--and then reducing this sauce. The sauce, in my opinion, was kinda nasty. I tried doctoring it up--adding a little sugar to counteract the bitterness from the lemon juice and the reduced wine, adding water, adding a slurry of cornstarch to thicken it, adding cream--but but this resulted in an equally nasty sauce (just more of it now, and thicker).

So the meal was not inedible, but it didn't quite transport us to Provence, and certainly wasn't worth spending all afternoon in the kitchen. At least it didn't turn out quite so badly as my previous lavender attempt. We have a pile of dirty pans (not as monumental as Melissa's, granted, but still daunting); but at least there are four chocolate mousses left! I bet Ed will dance for me again tonight.