Coq Au CheerVin (Fancy Bojangles’)
by Erik of Fancy Fast Food (with assistance from Jessica Bellamy and Lilit Marcus, using items from a fast food chain suggested by Bon Appétit’s Andrew Knowlton)
If you’re a hungry carnivore spending any amount of time in the Carolinas, you will undoubtedly be stuffing your face with signature dishes like Carolina pulled pork or deliciously greasy fried chicken. And while you may enjoy an ice cold Carolina Pale Ale with your meal, the most cheerful way to wash it all down is with a nice glass of Carolina-born Cheerwine. For all you Yankees who aren’t privy to this sweet southern concoction, Cheerwine is a sweet and bubbly cherry soda unlike any other, with a deep burgundy color resembling a fine Pinot Noir. Cheerwine is a popular soft drink in the south that is more “cheer” than “wine” (and more “cherry” than “cheer”), but we’re going to pretend it’s that Pinot — it looks like that when you pour it into fancy stemware anyway.
What better way to pair a Carolina dish with Carolina Cheerwine than to fuse them together in a mock recipe for Coq Au Vin — that French dish where chicken is braised in red wine? And so, we present the Fancy Fast Food recipe for “Coq Au CheerVin” (pronounced kohk oh sheer vaehn’ if you want to sound all Frenchy):
Ingredients (from NC-based fried chicken chain Bojangles’):
- 1 two-piece Fried Chicken Dinner (leg & thigh) with:
- 1 Biscuit
- 1 side of Cole Slaw
- 1 side of Dirty Rice
- 1 side of Green Beans
- 1 large Cheerwine
- packets of salt, pepper, and hot sauce
First, let’s get the pretend-Pinot-Noir Cheerwine simmering; pour the liquid in a saucepan — saving some to pair with your meal afterwards — and bring it to a boil. In lieu of the unavailable ingredients for a proper coq au vin (mushrooms, onions, lardons), we are going to spice our stew with our packets of salt, pepper, and hot sauce.
Next, slice the biscuit in two, and bake it in a pre-heated oven at 400º until it becomes hard and crusty, like your grandpa who’s still mad at General Sherman. Let it cool before pulverizing it down into bread crumbs with a blender or food processor. We will use this to coat our chicken pieces as well as add a little thickness to the stew since it is entirely made of starch and fat.
Skin the two pieces of chicken, and then bread them with the breadcrumbs in a big mixing bowl. Once they are coated, drop them into the saucepan and let them stew for a while, until the meat absorbs all of the red cheery and cherry goodness.
In the meantime, rinse the cole slaw and add it to the dirty rice so you can stop referring to it as “dirty,” and start calling it rice pilaf. Arrange the cut green beans on a plate back into the form of the whole string beans they came from, and only refer to them as haricots verts from now on.
Finally, plate your fancy dish: add the Coq Au CheerVin chicken pieces to the pilaf and haricots verts, along with some sauce. And remember to pour some of the remaining CheerVin in a wine glass… Clink! Finally something a little classy to serve during that next Carolina/Duke game!
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