A Little Birdie Told Me...

Tonight, my quails are defrosted and ready to go, so it's time to make Quail with a Spiced Honey Dressing, from Gordon Ramsay's In The Heat of the Kitchen. We're going to use an interesting poached-grilled technique in this recipe, which I've never tried before! The quails will be served on a bed of sauteed potatoes and arugula leaves. I'm looking forward to this!

First thing to do is our mise en place:

The quails are trussed with toothpicks through their legs, to secure them for cooking...ya know, so they don't flail around in there! :) Now, my first step is to get 4 cups of chicken broth boiling with a few thyme sprigs thrown in. I seem to have used all of my fresh thyme, so I threw in some dried stuff instead...it's not ideal, but it works in this case.

It'd look prettier if I had those fresh thyme sprigs!

While I was waiting for the broth to boil, I put some sliced potatoes in a cast iron pan, with some olive oil as well as some salt and pepper. It takes some time to saute potatoes until browned so it's best to start them right away. This recipe doesn't take very long, so putting the potatoes on was one of my first priorities.

Once the broth was boiling, I added the trussed quails to the pot. You only want to cook them for a couple of minutes once the broth is simmering again. After that couple of minutes was up, I pulled them out of the pot with some tongs and patted them dry with some paper towels.

Now that the poaching part of the process is done, it's time to grill them! I put some cooking spray all over a grill pan and placed it on the heat to get warm. While it was heating up, I stuffed each quail with a rosemary sprig and some strips of sliced lime zest. I seasoned each quail with salt and pepper and brushed them with some olive oil.

Now, that's a compromising position!

Meanwhile, I've whisked together a sauce of honey, soy sauce, coarse grain mustard, dijon mustard (I replaced the Dijon mustard with a delicious Champagne Shallot Mustard from Stonewall Kitchen) and roasted sesame oil. I placed the stuffed, poached quails in the grill pan and proceeded to turn them quite often for the next 10 minutes (I think I could have done with a minute or two less, to be honest).

Once the quails were done grilling, I transferred them to a dish. I poured my sauce over and tossed them in the dressing until they were nicely coated. At this point, I let them marinate for about 5 minutes.

After that 5 minutes was up, I plated the potatoes and sprinkled some arugula leaves on top. They started to wilt with the heat of the potatoes, and I used a pair of tongs to place the quails on top. I then drizzled some of the extra sauce on top! Check that out!

All in all, that's about 20 minute of hands-on cooking time. Not bad for a weeknight meal!