Chicken with Mustard | Completing “My Paris Kitchen”

The chicken with Mustard is the last recipe from David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen. Meanwhile, I can proudly say: I’ve finished cooking through the book from cover to cover. Hurray! Our friends at Cook-the-Book-Fridays (CtBF) administer this online cooking project, starting in early 2016. Your efforts are greatly appreciated.

The chicken mustard is simple to do. Individual chicken pieces are pan-seared and braised. The ingredients are the everyday staple of bacon, onion, mustard, white wine and herbs. This can easily be a weeknight goto family dish.

Most impressive of all is how David comes up with another wonderful chicken dish to add to a long list of memorable chicken dishes in the book. Among them, braised chicken with figs and lady chicken lady come to mind. Of course, we tackled coq au vin in the beginning (February 2017). I can’t forget how the sauce in coq au vin is thickened by, among all things, David’s favorite ingredient: chocolate.

In the last few days, I’ve even caught up with the fennel, radish, orange and crab salad and French fries, which I’d missed. They are under separate postings on this blog. Please take a look there too.

Now I can say, with a high degree of confidence, that I’ve made almost all of approximately 90 dishes from My Paris Kitchen. Other than a handful I skipped, I’ve posted over 80 recipes under five categories outlined in the book: appetizer, first course (entreé), main course, side and dessert. They are all there!

Am I surprised that I’ve made it to the finish line after three and a half years? Not really. Well, the credit goes to our fellow homecooks at CtBF. Along the way, they’ve inspired me to keep going weeks after weeks, and becoming a better cook. It’s great to be able to compare notes and lean on each other.

In the end, we’ve outdone ourselves with some truly amazing and iconic dishes. And who can forget the epic ones, like the bûche de Noël that takes days to complete. We couldn’t have done it without the exquisite and challenging collection of recipes in the book — step-by-step and recipe by recipe.

After cooking through the entire book, I can conclude from experiences that My Paris Kitchen is more than a cookbook about food from the City of Lights. Notably, David sheds light on the ethnic diversity of food culture in and beyond Paris.

Where can you find recipes in a single cookbook that encompasses dichotomy such as these? Baba ganoush and pissaladieére. Shakshuka and baked Provencal vegetables or tian. Carrot cake and tarte Tropézienne. It boggles the mind!

I’m just warming up to the exciting and wide-aperture of food culture in big cities like Paris. There is so much to explore! Thank you, David, for showing us the way.