ArcaMax

Memories of Chez Michel

Back in the early 80s my husband and I were courting. We loved to go to dinner at a beautiful restaurant called Chez Michel that was located on the far west side of Madison, Wisconsin.

The old farmhouse that held Chez Michel was located on the crest of a small hill, shaded with old oak trees. There was a lovely herb garden out front. The inside of the building had been gutted and made into a modern facility. The lovely art deco bar was upstairs and there were a couple of dining rooms on the first floor.

Whenever we ate at Chez Michel we smiled a lot, and not just because we were courting. The food was fabulous. We decided it was so fabulous that when we went to get married we decided to hold our wedding reception there. I had to talk the restaurant into closing down on a Saturday for our reception and that was difficult to do because it was a football Saturday and on football Saturdays restaurants do a huge business. Our wedding reception trumped football Saturday so we were set.

It was a grand occasion all around. We had about 125 people at our reception and that was all that Chez Michel could handle. The farmhouse was small.

As the years passed we got to know the owner Michael. Michael’s real career was as a nuclear-physician at the University of Wisconsin. Michael was a brilliant man but he had grown up in New Zealand, the son of an inn-keeper so having a restaurant to hang around in the evening made him a little less homesick.

Business was not good at one point so he decided to open another small restaurant upstairs. He converted the bar into a teeny Cajun restaurant. The Cajun place became our new favorite. The Cajun Café. We ate there about once a week and that’s a LOT for us.

I was first introduced to the Sazerac there. The Sazerac is basically a Cajun martini made with bourbon. Big YUM. My favorite choice Chicken Mamou. I ate that almost every time.

We loved the little Cajun place (and Chez Michel) so much that when we were talking to Michael one night we decided to volunteer our services to help him build that business. We owned an advertising agency at the time. Michael was game so we set about working on his advertising.

Not long after, business had grown so much the maitre ‘d decided to quit. Quit? Yeah, he sid he didn’t want to work that hard and always planned to move to San Francisco, so he was out of there.

Now Michael had a problem. Two problems even.

Michael needed to find someone to run the restaurant. That would be a challenge. And now the restaurant was profitable. That was a problem.

How you ask? Well, the restaurant had been a tax write-off for Michael. It helped him to offset his huge salary at the University. Now he was going to have to pay taxes on the income from the restaurant too. So he either had to make it a BIG success in order to offset that or sell it.

He and I talked at length about our buying the restaurant. We could have put our offices on the top floor and save room on the first floor for one restaurant. I thought long and hard about it. I even consulted with our accounting firm. In that analysis we decided it would not pay off. The small building was located on a very large lot with a huge parking lot. More cars could park on the lot than the number of people that could fit in the restaurant. So we decided the property taxes were going to be too high and it wasn’t economically feasible to buy the building.

Michael had told me I had first dibs on the building but if I didn’t want it he had someone else who had made him an offer.

I broke the news to Michael that the deal was not going to work for us. I didn’t feel too badly because I knew someone else would come in and run the restaurant and we’d still have our favorite place to go to dinner.

That was, until one shocking day I learned that the other offer had come in from Uno’s.

Yep, my favorite was turned into a pizza place. I was restaurant heartbroken.

Well in order to get over it, I had to start to make my own Chicken Mamou. This recipe works great on The Zola Diet. When you want extra zip and have a hankering for Cajun food, this hits the spot. My version is lighter than the traditional, which is usually made with the dark meat of the chicken. This version works really well.

Chicken Mamou
One of my favorite Cajun meals is chicken mamou. Mamou in Creole is basically grandma. So this is “grandma chicken”. You can make this even more spicy if you want just by adding hot sauce at the table, but there’s plenty of flavor in this version. This dish is traditionally served with very thin spaghetti. You can serve it on top of spinach or mustard greens. The hot meal with soften the greens and give you extra vitamins.

Ingredients:

A quick spray of olive oil

1 large onion, chopped

3 garlic cloves, finely chopped

1-1/2 tsp of Italian seasoning

½ teaspoon red pepper flakes

½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

½ teaspoon white pepper

15 oz of diced tomatoes (no sugar)

1 cup organic beef broth

1 packet of Truvia

1 Tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

3 boneless skinless chicken breasts halves

2 Tablespoons sugarless Cajun seasoning

Directions:

Spray a large sauce pan (or small soup pot) with olive oil. Put in your onion and cook until wilted. Add the garlic, Italian seasoning, pepper flakes, and two peppers. Mix. Add the tomatoes and the beef broth along with the Truvia and Worchestershire sauce. Bring to a boil and turn down to simmer. Cook 15 to 20 minutes to meld the flavors.

While this is cooking take out a sauté pan. Lightly spray your chicken breasts with olive oil spray and coat with Cajun seasoning. Saute on medium until the chicken is browned on both sides and cooked through. Should take about 10 to 12 minutes. Remove the chicken breasts and shred the meat. You can do this easily by using two dining forks. Use one fork to hold the chicken and the other one to pull the chicken apart. This way you can shred it. Leave some chunks if you’d like.

Put the meat into the sauce and cook for 5 minutes more to make sure the chicken is fully heated.

One and a half cups equals one serving.

You can alternatively make this in a crock pot. If you are doing that, cut the raw chicken into 1 to 2-inch chunks. Put the ingredients into the pot up through tomatoes. Then add the chicken and the other ingredients. Stir. Cook on low for seven to eight hours or on high for four to four and a half hours. Just make sure before you eat it that the chicken has no pink left. Check by cutting open one of the big bites to make sure.

Enjoy!
Cheers,
Zola

Send email to Zola at zolacooks@gmail.com.