I’m on something of a braising roll lately.  And since I’m not that keen on eating the things you really should braise – tough fatty cuts of beef, lamb, or pork – I end up wanting to braise chicken.

(Which Josh H. tells me is really stupid to do, since chicken is a tender meat and doesn’t need much braising unless you’re cooking a 40-year-old rooster or some such.  He’s right of course, but the urge to braise goes on.)

A few years ago I got a picture book called “The Best of ‘Fine Cooking’ 101 Tips”.  Debbie wanted to throw it out when we purged books this winter.  She sneered at it: “Most of those things I already know.”  But the point was that I didn’t know them, I love tips, guidelines, and, most generally, advice, so I rescued the book from the purge box, put it in the bathroom, and have been leafing over it for some months with pleasure and instruction.

Well, it has a recipe for “Braised Chicken Legs with White Wine, Bacon, Cipolline Onions, and Mushrooms” (shown below, from their website), and I resolved to make it this weekend while Debbie was away wrapping up family affairs in California.

Some minor-league problems.  No cipolline onions (which I looked up on the web, e.g. here), although the main thing about them seemed to be “flat and sweet”.  I got some white “boiling onions” instead, because the supermarket I hit on the way home didn’t even have sweet onions.

I was worried there wouldn’t be any cremini mushrooms either, but those they had.

Other than that, it went really smoothly and tasted pretty good.