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Easy Coq au Vin

Classic Coq au Vin can be a bit of a pain with the day before prep and the straining and all that. Here is my simplified version for one pot cooking in about an hour and a half. I think it’s one of the best Coq Au Vin recipes I’ve made! Enjoy!

Easy coq au vin
Angela's Easy Coq au Vin

* 1 small chicken cut up or 2 breasts, 2 thighs and 2 legs
* flour for dredging chicken
* 4 strips of bacon
* 2 T olive oil (more or less)
* 1 onion, frenched (How to French cut onions.)
* 2 med shallots sliced
* 6 carrots, cut into 1 inch pieces
* 15 (1 small carton) button mushrooms (I like Cremini)
* 24 pearl onions (about 1 cup, I use frozen, these are optional)
* 4 stalks celery, cut into 1 inch pieces
* 5 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
* Salt & Pepper to taste
* .75 of a 750ml bottle red wine, approx 2.5cups (whatever you like to drink is fine)
* 1 cup chicken broth (more or less to taste)
* 2 Tbl tomato paste
* 21 Tbl brown sugar
* 3 sprigs of thyme or 1 teaspoon of dried
* 1 tsp herbes de provence
* 3 bay leaf
* 1/2 c Italian parsley, roughly chopped

Remove skin if you wish, rinse and pat dry the chicken. Make your flour dredge – don’t forget to season with salt and pepper.

Add olive oil to coat bottom of dutch oven and put heat on med. Fry up the bacon slowly to render the fat. Remove bacon, set aside and retain bacon fat. Snack on bacon. Dredge the chicken and brown in fat/oil mixture, skin side down to create a crispy skin. (YUM!) The chicken will not be cooked, just browned in about 15 mins. Monitor your heat and don’t burn it! Remove golden brown chicken and hold. (I suggest a pan with sides to catch the delicious juices!) Hold the dredge flour as well.

Over medium flame, cook carrots, onions, shallots, celery and shrooms until fragrant. Add garlic last so as not to scorch. The veg does not need to be cooked through – since this is a braise, they will cook with the chicken. Add in about 1 Tbl of the dredge flour, stir in and cook for a minute or so. This is to thicken your sauce. If the pan becomes too dry, add a splash of stock.

Turn up the heat to med high and add in the aromatics (thyme, herbs, bay leaves), tomato paste and brown sugar and sautée until tomato paste is broken down. Add wine and broth and scrape up the flavour bits from the bottom of the pan. You should have a thick sauce. Taste for seasoning. Place chicken skin side up (if you left the skin on and it’s crispy) and try not to immerse the skin so it will stay slightly crispy. Bring to boil then reduce to slow simmer and put the lid on the dutch oven. Let simmer covered for about 10 mins, then partially open the cover to allow steam to escape and the sauce to reduce. Check your seasoning. Cook for another 30-45 mins on low. If the sauce is too thin, you can make a cornstarch slurry with 1T cornstarch dissolved in chicken stock and add in. Or you can simply continue to cook uncovered to reduce the sauce. I’d try to reduce first, if that doesn’t work, then do the slurry and don’t forget to bring to a boil to cook it. If it’s too thick, add more stock.

Serve in a big bowl dressed with a dash of red wine vinegar and fresh parsley. Add crusty bread and red wine for a wonderful classic French meal.

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Party, DnD, New stuff

The party was smashing! Just enough ppl to have great convos, not so many as to crowd the place. Perfect! Thanks to all who journeyed from Far Far Away to join us! I was very pleased by the amount of food put away. You know us Southerners, clean plates = happiness. :)

We attended Decatur Drink n Draw at Mellow Mushroom last night. Very fun! It was good to catch up with Miracole and Chris before they disappear for 5 months doing a gig. I love MM pizza! We had the Greek one and it was TASTY!

There’s always stuff knocking around in our heads for Weasel merch and such. The current ideas are, in no particular order:
– Larry the Llama (Alpaca, actually) shirts
– Weasel Pair shirts
– some sort of Weasel character Shrinky Dinks. Keychains? Earrings? Suggestions welcome!
– comic strip templates. People ask Nick about this all the time, so we’ve decided to sell them in hard copy form as well as a pdf download on the site. We’ll sell them at Cons, too.
– new pins! Not sure of which characters yet, but probably 3 more

Also, we are going to roll out two new comic sites before Heroes Con (June 3-5). We are rolling out Drama Llamas, Inc and Awkward Ninja Squad. The Intermission Comics folks will have their own space eventually as well. :)

As for my personal projects, I’ve made a ton more earrings for my Etsy shop, which I need to photograph and get up. I’ve also procured some magic marker brush pens so I can make colourful art on my jewelry boxes. These are not as good as the Japanese brush pen, of course, but fine for small stuff and in colour!! I practiced my calligraphy and art at the DnD last night. I also got some Lazertran decal paper to make coasters. I’m going to use my flower photography to make decals for tiles. Should be a fun project.

Heroes will be cool this year. Just us at the table, doing our respective artsy things. I’m going to have the jewelry displayed as well as the boxes. If the boxes get interest, I may get assorted sizes and sell those. I plan to have some coasters ready to go as well. I may give the hand painted flowers a go once more, but I tell you, I just can’t get the pure lines that I want out of Photoshop. There’s always too much grayscale. We’ll see about that one. Or I may just print them full color onto watercolor paper and sell them that way. Ooo, which gives me another idea for the shrinky dinks! I could print the flowers and make earrings out of those! :)

The stupid storms kept me up practically all night, so I’m a bit out of it today. I’ll probably collapse later. Nick overslept and when he finally got to work, most of the power was out there. They must’ve gotten it back up since he’s not been back here for extension cords.

Welp, that’s the state of Mrs Weasel. Hope ya’ll have a great day!

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Ah Spring! [update]

Buh, everything in the house covered in pollen. It’s a choice I have to make every year: open windows with pollen or turn on the a/c. And every year I choose open windows. Everything is yellow. GAHROCE! But the weather is SO LOVELY!! Eh, well, it’s too late to change now! There’ll be a LOT of wiping down once the tree orgy is over. :)

I’ve slept very well the last two nights. I think the insomnia was from the Vile Organ having yet another cycle. Gods, GIVE UP ALREADY. I’ve got an Rx for one round of birth control, but I fear taking it. As great as my gyno is, sometimes her “sure fire” solutions turn out badly. Like the progesterone she tried to use to get my cycles straightened out. OY. Baaaaad idea.

Oh, we got listed with Graphic.ly!! [RIP, no longer exists.] The first collection *should* be available for free. They have it listed at $1.99 right now, but they should be changing it. Then they’ll be either $1.49 or $1.99 for subsequent issues. You can also read Think Weasel! with Kapow!, an RSS reader app. [Nope.] We are also going to get on the new Comics Vox site [Nope.] and I plan to go for Comixology as well [we did, but it’s now a totally different thing, so, NOPE.]. We will sell the small collections on these sites, still have the web strip free and we’ll sell the large collections at Cons. That’s the plan for now. We might also put the large collections on the Think Weasel! site along with sketch cards. Hmm, I think I just found my project for today! We need to get that shop set up! [You can still read all the TW comics at thinkweasel.com and you can buy stuff at our storenvy shop. Otherwise we’re out of the comics biz. Now we do vintage arcades: Player One Arcade Services. -Angela, Jan 2018]

I’m also making earrings and bracelets like mad for the Trunk Show I’m doing next week. NOT any longer. Since there’s already a jewelry vendor, I can’t do it. Meh. So go BUY something from my Etsy shop, would ya? I got LOTS of stock! LOL

Which reminds me that our 7th Anniversary is next Friday (Yes, April Fool’s day for those just joining our show already in progress!). We’ve booked The Iberian Pig for dinner as usual. We love that place but can’t afford it for general dining out. Their house cocktail is a bacon infused whisky old fashioned. MAN is it AMAZING! They even chunk the ice off a block like you’re supposed to for cocktails. YUM! We highly recommend the Pig for slightly pricier dining. The chef is amazing – and very nice!

I guess I’ll go perform my act of futility for the day (walk 1.5mi on the Rack). Like the monks pulling dandelions, I must do this act to remind myself that sometimes you’ve got to do something “just because”. Heh. Happy Thursday, everyone!

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Welcome to InMotion Hosting!

[Our stay with InMotion lasted about a year. They, too, expanded too fast and their services became CRAP. I wouldn’t recommend them. We moved to WiredTree.com and I wouldn’t recommend them, either, unless you are a BIG NERD. Their service is truly up 99.99% of the time, but their user interfaces suck. None of their control panels are integrated and they are very difficult to use, so they are not for n00bs. Good hosting is HARD to find. Meh.]

The transitions of all the sites has been smooth thanks to my own BOFH (Bastard Operator From Hell)! Nick has worked tirelessly all weekend exporting databases and moving files. He’s down to the last two sites now. WOOHOO! Indigodragon.net is the last one to go since all the other domains were under it in that stupid setup that the previous host used. No more. Now all the domains are individual sites and everything is installed clean. And everything is working, too, imagine that.

The Gallery problem I was having is also cleared up now that the database is untangled from my blog database and the permissions were fixed. Funny how the ITX people just couldn’t seem to figure it out.

They also couldn’t figure out that thinkweasel.com, nickmizgala.net AND taqueriaelvecino.com were hacked, which is why they were squirrelly. Hmm, might have been those FOLDERS FULL OF HACKED FILES ON THE ROOT LEVEL OF THE ACCOUNT!! Just damn. The support system up there has collapsed upon itself. It’s a shame, too, I really like the owners. But they’ve let their employees slack off and it shows. Badly.

But now we are on our own virtual server with guaranteed resources and we’re already seeing the difference. This site has been slow for a couple of weeks (of course the ITX ppl had no idea what to do about it) and now it loads as it should. Yay!

Enjoy the speedy new hosting service. I know we will! :)

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Out With the Old

Yep, we’re done. After a couple of weeks of nagging WP problems that were basically unaddressed by our previous host’s support team that culminated in my Gallery being completely blown up and Think Weasel! being down in the middle of the day, we decided to move to inmotionhosting.com yesterday.

They get 5 star ratings all over the intertubes – especially for customer service. I can confirm that from the HOUR that they spent w/ me yesterday going over the various solutions and answering my myriad questions. For the same money I’m spending at ITX ($50/mo), I can have a VPS (virtual private server) that guarantees my resource allocations (RAM, disk space, processor) and keeps me away from other users on the server. For comparison, there could be 100 users on a shared server with “business class” hosting, but there will only be 10 users on a shared VPS server because all the resources are guaranteed. What all this means is no more slow site loads, no more database slowdowns and no more bullshit email issues, either.

The chat for InMotion was answered within SECONDS – a shock when I’m used to 5 min waits and/or no answer at all. [It may be better now with our previous host, this is just what happened AT THIS TIME, right before we left. Please call or chat them yourself if you are considering hosting with them. I’m just one user. They have thousands who are happy.]

I’ve been with my previous host for over a decade. I was with them when it was just Adam and Paul answering the phones. Over the years their growth strained their support to the limit and consequently it became less effective.

The upshot is that my Gallery is busted, so don’t bother trying to see any pix and this site will be down for a bit when I move it to the new server. So don’t freak out when you get a 404 or whatnot this weekend.

Everything should be up and running by Tuesday at the latest.