Coquelets sur Canapes

For my birthday Dan bought me some Julia Child cookbooks. So last night we decided to cook Coquelets sur Canapes, which is Game Hens with chicken liver Canapes and Mushrooms.
First we had to clarify the butter, which means melting it until is separates and then you skim of the foam and shift out just the clear liquid not the white liquid at the bottom. We used the clear liquid to saute bread slices on each side. They came out crisp and brown. We then boiled bacon for ten minutes. We grounded the bacon with the chicken livers, and port wine and spread it on top the bread.
Next we sauteed mushrooms with shallots, butter and port wine and then set them aside. I rubbed the cavity of the game hens with shallots, butter, garlic, and tarragon. Dried the outside and wrapped them with the rest of the boiled bacon. They went in the roasting pan with oil and butter then into the oven. The recipe said we had to baste the hens every five to seven minutes and they cooked for about 45 minutes. This took some time. When they were done. I took tablespoons of the broth and cooked it with more shallots and port wine and chicken stock and made a reduction.
We then toasted the bread and liver in the oven for a minute and heated the mushroom saute. The bread goes on a plate with the hens on top, mushrooms around and reduction sauce on top. Now its ready to serve.
What I learned was that I needed alot of butter, smaller hens, and alot of port wine, but they were very good and since our game hens were larger we had plenty of left overs.
The chicken was very good, but I have decided I am not a big fan of chicken livers pate.

cooking

I cooked a new dish the other night. It was really easy in fact the most difficult part was getting the recipe as I cooked. My monitor had broke earlier in the week and so I was using my work laptop to check e-mail etc. I had found a recipe for sun-dried tomatoes with spinach and pasta and saved it to my e-mail. When I decided to cook it I pulled up the recipe on my laptop and put the laptop on the kitchen table since I could not print without my computer. The laptop keep going into save mode or was just across the room from where I was cooking presented a couple of challenges but it all worked out great.
I added Chicken and Mushrooms to the recipe as well. It only took about half hour to cook and most of that was cooking the pasta (the chicken was from leftovers so was already cooked). Dan came down to eat and said it looked picture perfect, he told me I had to take a picture cause it looked like something you see in a magazine.
The best part was that not only did it look good it tasted great as well.
Dan thought it was fancy but I thought it was great for after work since it was easy, quick and tasted great. We both enjoyed the leftovers for lunch the next day.
:)