Cooking with Chef Jo: Christmas Goodies #2

I was a bit late starting this Christmas Goodies posts. I should have started it before Thanksgiving. I'll do better next year with even more party appetizer favorites in my repertoire. I must admit, being a catering specialist in various restaurants over the decades, I literally have a thousand recipes from standard recipes I've made my own by tweaking it here and there. A lot of times I just flat out made up recipes to take advantage of special pricing discounts, or bits and pieces leftover from bigger projects. See, even when working for someone else, I was thinking of ways to reuse, repurpose, and reinvent everything.  This endeared me to my employers and lowered my cost overhead in my own restaurant.

So did any of you guess one of the ingredients of today's goodie? If you said quail, you were right. Now, quail are tiny birds. To be honest, there's not a lot of meat on them other than the breasts. But even the breasts are dark meat so I'm sold on them. There's not a moister, more succulent piece of poultry than dark meat.

Now, I know people who raise quail for their own homestead use who discard the legs because they are too much trouble to harvest. But anything that equals a mouthful should not be wasted. The old waste not, want not mentality is still active in this old girl. Now where we get our locally sourced quail from, thinks the same way. He just keeps the breasts. Well, on butchering days (he'll butcher 25-50 birds at a time), I'll pop over and scarf up his "trash" for literally pennies. The livers, hearts and kidneys make excellent dog treats when dehydrated. The legs, I'll clean them up and use them. Waste not, want not. Sure, they are tiny, and as such, are time consuming to do enough for a meal. It would almost take  20 to make a meal of just quail legs for the two of us. But for carry out appetizers, they are perfect. Remember, appetizers are one to two bites worth. From my recipe box today is...

Grilled Quail Legs Kabobs
20 appetizers (from 10 quails)

What you'll need

20 quail legs
Fresh zest from 1 large lemon
Juice of 1 Lemon
4 TBS butter
4 TBS honey
2 TBS Dijon mustard
salt & pepper to taste

Putting it together

• It's time to make the marinade. In a small saucepan over medium heat, combine butter, lemon juice, honey, and lemon zest. Bring to a boil and remove from the heat. Allow marinade to cool to room temperature.
• Remove the thigh bone from the quail and french the leg. To do this, trim the cartilage where it joins the leg until it's removed. Do the same thing at the ankle joint. With a sharp paring knife, scrap the meat from the bone to 3/4 of the length of the leg. As you can see from the picture, the bone is bare. This technique is called frenching. This is the hardest and most tedious part of this recipe.
• Salt and pepper to taste.
• Bundle up the meat into a ball around the bone end as shown. Hold together with a toothpick,
• Place the frenched legs in a gallon bag and pour the marinade. Squeeze as much air as possible out of  the bag and place bag flat in the refrigerator, turning the bag every so often so all pieces get the benefits of the marinade for a minimum of four hours up until 48 hours.
• Now, the time to get your grill fired up. I prefer charcoal or wood fire over propane. For this, I'll use hickory, cherry or apple wood chips. I'll soak them in water for 6 hours and just throw them on the fire as the quail legs cook.
• While the coals get ready, remove the legs from the marinade and pat them dry. Wrap foil around the exposed bone to keep them from burning.
• Place the legs over the hot coals. Cook for ten minutes covered on each side, brushing on the marinade. The honey (sugar) will get crusty and caramelizes giving the quail legs a rich brown crust.
• This process only takes about thirty minutes to cook these legs well done.
• Remove to a platter and remove the foil.

Serving suggestion- Can be layered around a dipping sauce of honey lemon mustard. The leg bone serves as a handle to grab them with. I guess you could decorate them with tiny chef caps made out of coffee filters, or a small grape or cherry tomato, but I don't bother. Why confuse folks? Especially if Wassail is being served.

Honey Lemon Mustard Dipping Sauce
Makes 1 cup
What you'll need
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup Dijon mustard
3 TBS lemon juice

Mix all ingredients together well and pour into serving bowl. If it's too thick add more lemon juice. If too thin, add mayonnaise.

Now on to a yummy sweet treat for a platter. So many recipes, so little space to choose just one. Hmm, rifling through my recipe file. Something that could be served on a buffet. Something people like. Got it. An old Valentine's day and Christmasy favorite. Remember all those maraschino cherries we made? The ones that were all natural with no dyes or added chemicals. Let's use some of them. I mean we already made them. They're in my pantry.

Chocolate Covered Cherries
48 candies

What we'll need
48 cherries, drained
3 lbs Powdered sugar (low sugar alternative Splenda and cornstarch)
1 lb Dark Semi sweet chocolate, shopped into small pieces
4 oz White chocolate (for drizzling or dipping), chopped into small pieces


That's it. It's that simple, sort of.

Putting it all together

•  Put 3 cups of powdered sugar in a large bowl.
• Add half the cherries. Cover the cherries with the powdered sugar adding more powdered sugar as needed and when adding more cherries to the bowl. You will want the cherries fully coated with powdered sugar. 
• Alternate powdered sugar additions and cherries until all the cherries are well coated by powdered sugar and when left standing for 5 minutes no red bleed through. They are about one and a half times bigger at this point.
• I'm going to teach you how to temper chocolate. It's the kind of covering that is silky smooth and shiny. Don't worry, it's not hard even though it sounds daunting. 
• The key is temperature. Too hot and the chocolate blooms and the finished product looks chalky or seizes up. Too cold and the result won't be a smooth shiny finish. Dark chocolate initially needs to brought up to 120 degrees over a water bath (a bowl over a simmering pot of water). White chocolate is lower at 100 degrees because of the amount of cocoa butter in it. When it reaches that temperature it is removed from the heat source. An instant read thermometer is extremely helpful with tempering chocolate.
• Stir it constantly so the temperature drops evenly to 89 to 90 degrees for dark chocolate and 85 to 89 degrees for white chocolate.
• Be careful when moving the chocolate from the water bath. Any drop of water will seize a whole bowl of melted chocolate.
• You will be moving the chocolate on and off the water bath as you dip to maintain the temperature.
• Now for the fun stuff, dipping your cherries in chocolate!
• I have a marble floor tile I got it from Home Depot years ago for this very purpose. It was in the discounted bin because of a broken corner. I can work around that for a $2 piece of 18"x 18" marble! It can also be frozen for pastry work.
• I spread the tempered chocolate onto this tile to cool down enough (90 degrees) to cover my cherries. But you can easily pour some chocolate in a bowl and use forks or spoons. I coat the powdered sugar covered cherries with the chocolate and place them on a parchment lined baking sheet. I do a thin coating because I'll coat them twice with the tempered chocolate. Don't worry if some of the liquid seeps out after the first coating.
• As a matter of habit, I'll coat all 48 with chocolate and then dip them a second time to seal any cracks. There should be no leakage of red from the candies after the second coat is applied.
• I'll let these chocolate covered cherries sit for 24 hours to allow all the powdered sugar develop into the oozy, sweet liquid that surrounds the cherries, and dribbles down your chin when you bite into one.

You can place  leave them in a covered container on the counter for up to a week. Or, place the container in the

refrigerator for weeks if they last that long. Every time you open the fridge you'll grab one, if you are like me that is. Be aware that once the chocolates go into the refrigerator, they will sweat as they reach room temperature. This will mar the glossy finish.

For a platter, you can just place them all by themselves or you can use them to make Christmas mice. But that's another demonstration and recipe. Or, maybe you can figure it out looking at the picture. I'm honestly sorry this is the last Christmas Goodies post for 2019. Next Wednesday is Christmas!

Y'all have a blessed day!

Chef Jo