- [Narrator] Protein-rich and sustainably raised, American Lamb is a versatile ingredient in any dish.

For recipes, nutrition information, and to learn more about our commitment to sustainability, visit AmericanLamb.com.

- Acropolis Realty Group, providing real estate services across the industry, including commercial development, residential sales, and residential and commercial leasing.

Learn more at acropolisrealtygroup.com.

- [Narrator] Gateway to the Finger Lakes Region, Syracuse is centrally located in New York State.

Syracuse has a variety of outdoor parks, year-round activities, dining options, and seasonal festivals.

More information at VisitSyracuse.com.

-Spatchcock Funk is in the house our house and your house too.

You know where the party's at, wherever you're at.

We're gonna teach you how to throw the best parties, the best dinners, the best get-togethers.

All you need is the people you love and we'll take care of the rest.

"Spatchcock Funk", dope food, strong drinks, great stories.

(soft ambient music) The "Spatchcock Funk" clique is all about supporting and learning about other cultures, and there's no better place to do it than in the kitchen and on the dining room table.

One of the best ways to immerse yourself is to treat yourself, dawg.

If you rock a hoodie or French cuss, you gotta roll up them sleeves and get them hands good and dirty.

And tonight we're bringing dirty jokes and fine dining into your place for a little dinner party, baby.

If you wanna be a great cook, learning some great French recipes and techniques can elevate every part of your game.

It's actually a big part of so many food cultures, from Vietnam to Cajun Creole, man, even Cookie Monster loves him some macarons.

So here's the trick: French cooking isn't supposed to be difficult.

Some folks just wanna make it feel that way.

It's all about going slow as you learn the techniques, true in the kitchen and in the bedroom.

We're bringing in some of our close friends, wine, and cocktails for an intimate dinner.

Bon appétit, y'all, this is the French-made.

(soft ambient music) Made, M-A-D-E. ♪ It's Saturday night ♪ Makin' some moves ♪ Keepin' the groove ♪ And I wanna spend some time with you ♪ ♪ Saturday night (soft ambient music continues) At a great dinner party, we serve wine and we drink a lot of wine too.

But we also have a great craft cocktail with it.

And this from France is the Mauresque.

And if you're picturing yourself idyllically on the French Riviera with that super little fox next to you having a drink, this is the one, refreshing different.

What we start with is a shaker.

We're gonna add in a couple sprigs of fresh dill.

Then we throw in 3/4 of an ounce of freshly squeezed lemon juice, a 1/3 of an ounce of egg white.

We're gonna muddle that a little bit, just get some flavors going.

Then an ounce and a half of gin.

(soft ambient music continues) Then we're gonna put in a quarter of an ounce of pastis, which is like an anisette-licorice-type flavor, which is really delicious.

Next half an ounce of Orgeat which is an almond liqueur.

And we muddle again.

We're gonna add a bunch of ice to it.

(ice clattering) Chill this thing out, shake it.

(shaker rattling) Then we got a Copa glass that looks wet, because it is, we just strain this beauty.

(soft ambient music continues) And the egg whites give this really nice little foam, and you've got this nice pale green to it.

So we garnish that with another sprig of dill, now we've got the Mauresque.

Smells fresh, refreshing, looks super cool.

Ah, tastes fantastic.

Great warmup for a great night, great food, most importantly, great people, here's to you.

(soft ambient music continues) (light smooth music) Escargot, my-cargo, 160 swiftly, one of our favorite dishes, escargot, baby.

Easy to make at home, man.

You get in restaurants, it's pretty fancy, but it's really, really quite simple, and it's even better to eat.

Our version, beautiful and luxurious.

It relies though on snails.

And snails, we get in a can.

So a lot of research we've done, and restaurant owners we've talked to actually use snails out of a can.

Easier than fish 'em outta the whole thing.

So we've got our snails, about a dozen of 'em from a can.

(can pops) And we're just gonna set that aside.

And also, when we serve this, when we're making a French dinner like this, we're gonna have a baguette, crunchy, crispy bread, chewy in the inside.

We made some beautiful butter here too.

Just French butter, which is a higher fat content, also called European butter, Ireland, everybody does it.

Higher fat content, we spun it up, a little bit of honey, a little bit of garlic powder, little parsley, ready to go.

This is something to nibble on and nosh on while you're kind of prepping your food, while you're cutting up the stuff and getting ready to go.

Melting a little bit of butter in the pan.

And because, you know, we wanna make things healthy too while we're getting luxurious, we're putting some veggies in here.

We got about a pound of baby spinach, the stems cut off, and we're just gonna keep soaking them in this butter until they wilt up.

Then we're gonna set 'em aside.

We're gonna take that, remove it, we're gonna let it cool off.

And then we're gonna take some paper towels and squeeze the moisture out.

Meanwhile, in our pan, over medium heat, baby, this is where we're gonna start to cook up some goodness.

More butter, because butter is where it's at.

Then we're gonna throw in some crushed walnuts.

We're gonna put in some anchovy paste.

This gets us an umami flavor in there.

Then we've also got a bunch of orange rind zest.

We're gonna get that mixed in.

Now, the snails, we got a dozen of 'em in there.

So we're gonna cook this for about two minutes.

Now we're gonna add in some heavy cream, about a half cup, good amount of salt.

Then, some freshly ground nutmeg, some freshly ground black pepper.

This can go for another two minutes or so, stir it up.

We're gonna get our spinach out, like I said, with a paper towel.

Get it all in there, and then squeeze as much of the moisture out of it as you can.

Then, toss the spinach in.

Turn our heat to low, and we're almost ready to plate this thing.

So turn your broiler on in your oven.

Our next step is getting it all cheesy, melty-gooey.

So we have an escargot dish.

If you don't have one, you can just use a regular ramekin, you can use a casserole dish and just lay 'em out flat.

But we take it, spray it with cooking spray.

First thing we're gonna do is in each one of these little divots, we're gonna pop in one of these big fat snails.

Then take some of your spinachy, creamy, walnutty goodness, and drape it around the pan.

You're gonna get some of that green color in there.

Now, shredded Gruyère cheese.

Gruyère, French, done in caves.

This goes in the broiler three, four minutes until it starts getting golden, bubbly brown.

Out of the broiler, melty, cheesy, beautiful goodness.

Before we serve it, hit it with a little bit of parsley.

Little teeny fork, 'cause I love teeny forks, just like I like my bikinis.

Get one of these guys.

Mmm, fantastic and bright.

Give that little orange zest.

The baguette too, we serve it with that for the butter, yeah, but also, after you had the snail, you also get all this walnutty, creamy goodness on your little baguette bite.

Man, put that in the bag, y'all, mm-hm.

(soft ambient music) When it comes to a dinner party or a relationship, the details matter.

Take care of little things and the big things take care of themselves.

(upbeat jazz music) - So our dinner party has to be memorable.

I don't throw very many dinner parties.

My dinner parties, me and April are trying to eat while the girls are screaming at us or asking us for stuff.

So what are we gonna do to make this one memorable?

- Well, here's my thought, right?

So I've got this great steak knife collection that I've taken from different restaurants- - Stolen.

- Beg, borrowed, maybe, stolen- - Fair enough.

- From different places around the country.

- So I have a pint glass just like that.

- Oh, yeah?

- It's a beer I like, a cool you (indistinct) - Yeah!

- Those like cool, like old rugged ones.

- Yeah, yeah.

- So I was in DC, and we're sitting at the bar and I kept drinking on, I kept ordering another one.

I'm like, he's gonna take this one.

"No, no, no," and I kept having it in my hands so he wouldn't take it.

- Yeah.

- And finally, I was like, "Hey man, "I've been looking for this all over, can I have it?"

And he's like, "Yeah, whatever."

Like, they had like a ton of 'em.

- Yeah.

- So I'm sitting there, I'm like, "Oh, cool!"

So I'm holding it, I'm like looking around, like waiting for the moment to strike.

- Looking for cameras.

- Yeah, and he's like, and he finally came up and was like, "Just take it already "or I'm gonna take it back."

'Cause he's like, "I'm giving it to you "and you're not taking it, why?"

- I had an experience like that too, at a restaurant that I loved had this awesome steak knife, like it bows out on the end.

And the server- - (indistinct) Restaurant.

- Yeah, and the server, we were staying in the hotel in the same building.

The server, she can see me eyeing this thing.

I'm cutting threads off my shirt with it, like, I'm cutting butter with it.

So at one point she's like, "Hey, I see you noticed our knives, they're nice."

And I was like, okay, she's not gonna let me borrow this one.

So when the check comes, right, I get the check and I open it up, and with the check actually was the knife itself.

- She hid a knife in the check?

- Brand new one.

- Maybe she was trying to, you know, screw with you.

- Stab me with it, yeah.

But, you know- - So she gave it to you, that was nice.

- She gave it to me, yeah, and now I have it.

- What are you doing, you gonna borrow that one?

- I'm borrowing this one too.

- No.

You're not gonna give the waitress a chance to- - You know what?

- To gift it to you?

- When I come back, I'll give her another chance to ask for it back.

- Oh, that's nice of you.

- I think so too.

- Yeah, okay.

(light music) - The pièce de résistance, coq au vin, rooster in wine.

Back in the day, this originally was like a middle-class thing way, way back in France, that the rich kind of adopted, made their own luxurious thing.

So we're taking it back to its roots.

And it's based on two of our favorite inspirations of all time, Anthony Bourdain, and another PBS person, Julia Child.

So it's a combination of their recipes.

We start with red wine, and it's a marinade basically.

So some people use white, (cork pops) but we are going with a Côtes du Rhne, a good dark, Burgundy-style wine.

Anything that's gonna be really nice and rich and bold is what we want.

After that, we put in a quarter cup of cognac.

Then we've got a little bit of tomato paste and this is Julia's trick.

This creates a little velvety thickness and adds some acidity to what we're doing.

So we're gonna just whisk that together, put in a bunch of black whole peppercorns.

Keep stirring it, a few cloves.

Now the other thing that we like to add into this is from Bourdain, and this is called a bouquet garni.

And what it does is it infuses different flavors to create more of a robustness as it marinates and then later as it kind of braises.

So bouquet garni is just some fancy, fancy term for taking some herbs and using it into something that's gonna infuse flavor.

So we got a whole bay leaf, a sprig of parsley we're gonna bend up and slap in here, couple sprigs of thyme.

Then we wrap it in cheese cloth, take some butcher twine, and tie it up, and then you're just gonna throw that in there too.

Then we're gonna add in a whole white onion that's been diced, a rib of celery, rib for our tasting pleasure, and then a dozen or so baby carrots.

So we've got chicken thighs, eight chicken thighs.

We're gonna make sure we fully submerge them into this beautiful marinade.

And we're gonna put it in the fridge overnight.

Got our dutch oven, we've got some olive oil in here, couple big tabs of butter.

We're gonna heat that up til it's really, really hot, like almost smoking.

Meanwhile, we strained all of our solids out of our wine and kept the bouquet garni in there 'cause we're gonna cook these veggies with our chicken.

But first, we patted dry the chicken, and check this out.

The chicken has turned purple.

And then we know overnight it's got all that beautiful wine-flavored goodness.

So we patted it dry with a paper towel, then hit it with salt and pepper.

And two at a time, we're gonna brown each side until the skin gets a little bit crispy.

(pan sizzling) (light music) Yeah, we got all this chicken grease and butter.

So what we're gonna do is put some more butter in it.

Like Julia said, butter makes everything better.

So we're gonna melt this butter, then all of our strained veggies, minus the bouquet, all the strained veggies, the carrots, celery, onions, we're gonna put it in here and cook 'em for about 10 minutes until they get soft.

We're gonna add in some flour and we're gonna coat all the veggies with the flour.

And once it's evenly coated, we're gonna put in on the rest of our liquids, taking in all our reserved wine and that bouquet garni.

Then we're gonna add in our chicken back into this and then cook it over medium low for an hour and 15 minutes on the back burner.

Only thing we keep on the back burner: chicken.

Now, another French technique we love, bacon lardons.

Cut it into about an inch by 1/4-inch squares, little rectangles, and it does a few things.

It allows you to render more bacon fat for cooking purposes, and then also, these beautiful little tender chewy pieces.

So we're gonna heat that up into our pan and get all that fat out of there, then just remove 'em and rest on the paper towel.

We're gonna save the bacon 'cause we're gonna use it in the sauce.

So now, we got about a half pound, maybe a little more depending on how much you like it, of button white mushrooms that I cut the stems off.

So now we're gonna soak those up in this bacony grease and cook those so they're kind of soft, and then we're gonna set those aside too.

Got about a dozen or so pearl onions.

We're gonna put back into that pan couple tablespoons of butter, pinch of sugar, a couple pinches of salt.

Then we're gonna cover it with enough water to just cover the tops of the onions.

Then we're gonna heat it until the butter melts and we're gonna cover it with a piece of foil and keep checking on it until the water cooks off.

Now our water's been cooked off just where we want it.

We're gonna add in a little bit more butter, 'cause butter, baby.

And we're gonna cook the butter out and just make sure the onions are cooked through and they're gonna be really close.

So let's do that and then we're gonna remove those too.

But leave the pan on the stove.

Took our onions out, take a spatula, one cup of that good wine you were using and you're gonna heat this up and keep scraping the bottom.

This is another French technique.

That's called fond at the bottom, the little brown burnt bits.

Keep scraping those up and you're gonna keep heating it and stirring it until it's thick enough, a little bit to coat the back of the spoon.

It won't take too long.

And now the other cook down wine, we're gonna take, and we're gonna pour it into this pot with all the stuff we got in it, all the veggies.

And we're gonna make sure we remove the bouquet and just toss it out, it's done its work.

From there, we're gonna add in a little bit more butter and we're gonna add in our bacon and we're gonna add in our pearl onions, our button mushrooms.

If you need to thicken it and you feel like it's not thickening at the time you want it to, you can make a cornstarch slurry, which we did, equal parts cornstarch and water.

If you cook it for a long time, you might not need to do that, but we're gonna do it here just to show you.

And stir it in, keep stirring until it's thick.

And then our sauce is done.

Now, the reason why I wanted to make coq au vin a number of years ago when I got into it is my wife was traveling.

She went to a restaurant and she had it there and she was going on and on about how amazing this dish was.

And I thought to myself, I've gotta find a way to make her talk about me like that.

And that's how I got into this thing.

Our gravy sauce here, just love it so much.

We're gonna drape it over, get some of the vegetables on top of there, hit it with some green onions.

Coq au vin, coq au vin, I don't speak it, like I said, I can cook it.

Mmm, the mushrooms, pearl onions.

Come on, mm-hm.

(light music) (soft ambient music) Crème de la crme.

This is the dessert course, baby.

And it is nothing but sweet, beautiful goodness.

Burnt sugar, crème brûlée, baby.

Burnt cream, actually, is what it's called.

That's the French version of it.

And we're not sure how this thing was invented.

We've heard different stories.

My guess is someone made a mistake the next day, overcooked something, burned it, and created this really beautiful dish.

And we're gonna create that dish here, it's easy to make.

You can get fancy with it.

Some people will sprinkle it with lavender.

We're not doing that.

We actually took our heavy cream, took four cups of it and in a blender, mixed in peanut butter powder and marshmallow cream.

And now it's gonna be basically a fluffernutter-style crème brûlée and it's gonna be fantastic.

But we let it sit for a couple of hours to get all the bubbles out of it.

So now we've got this thick, great cream.

Crème brûlée, just like Ferris told the camera, it is so choice.

Everyone should have one.

And it's easy to make.

And for a dinner party, it's easy to make the day before.

All you gotta do is fire up the blowtorch the next day and burn it up, and we'll do that later.

The basis though is a custard.

So really the ingredients are sugar, cream, eggs.

So we've got egg yolks, we've got seven in here.

We're gonna take eight egg yolks total.

And here's a way to separate egg yolks.

Crack your egg in half and then just pour back and forth the yolk itself until it gets all of the egg whites out of there.

And we might save the egg white for a cocktail tomorrow, maybe.

Put it in, got your egg yolks, 1/4 cup of sugar, and you're just gonna beat it up until it's evenly mixed.

And this is gonna be the base of the custard that we're gonna heat up in a little bit.

Got our marshmallow cream, peanut butter, heavy cream mixture.

We're gonna heat that over medium heat and we're gonna watch it and stir, and make sure that we get bubbles on the side, but don't boil it.

Meanwhile, we got over here, just like me, a little teapot, short and stout.

We're gonna keep heating it up.

That's gonna come into play later.

So now we're just gonna stir this till we see some bubbles form on the side.

We're gonna add in quarter cup of sugar or so, but you can't get too much sugar in this thing.

A little bit of salt too, balance out the sweetness.

Keep stirring that again until it's mixed.

So we're gonna keep that down to low.

Then we're gonna start tempering.

This is the French technique that we love.

Here is those egg yolks and sugar that are all set up.

And when we temper things, it's like tempering steel.

So we're gonna take about a cup or so of this warm liquid.

So we're gonna temper it by a slow stream into the egg yolk, like that, and whisk it furiously as you go.

This keeps the eggs from scrambling and cooking and helps really create this really velvety texture to it.

We are then going to take our whisk again and we're gonna add that egg yolk mixture, another stream into our pot.

And we're gonna add in some vanilla.

We're gonna take a sieve, we're just gonna strain our liquid over that and it'll remove maybe any solids.

You might not get any solids, that'd be good, but you're probably gonna have a couple.

And we got a little bit in here.

And here comes the trickiest part for me because I'm clumsy.

Take our ladle, and you want to go about 3/4 of the way up, maybe.

While you're doing that, preheat your oven to 320.

But after this, it's smooth sailing and just blowtorch time.

So we got our teapot, and this is just gonna help us not get any water into the dishes themselves.

And fill up with water about halfway up the ramekins.

Then all we do now is slide this in the oven for an hour and then let it cool for an hour and then put it in the fridge overnight.

You can do three hours at minimum.

We like to put in the fridge overnight.

Ooh, man, crème brûlée.

If you don't have a blowtorch, I highly recommend you get one.

Like Julia Child said, baby, she said it, "Every woman should have a blowtorch."

Everyone should have a blowtorch.

But if you don't, you can use your broiler just for a minute or two, it'll crisp right up.

Here's the big fun part.

Our crème brûlée has been out over, it's been in the fridge overnight, so it's creamy.

We're gonna take a bunch of sugar and sprinkle it liberally along the top.

Fire up the blowtorch, and then you're gonna keep going back and forth until you start to see brown bubbles and create, liquefy it, and we're gonna really get this thing going.

This is the burn part of the burned cream.

I go until I get brown little specks evenly across it and then I'm feeling real good about it.

Let that chill, cool off for a second.

Yeah, see what's cracking?

We crack that little shield.

You get that awesome caramelized sugar, custard.

Mmm.

(soft ambient music) Peanut butter, marshmallow cream.

This is a dessert for a great intimate dinner, y'all, French-made.

(soft ambient music) (bright hip hop music) (bright hip hop music continues) So, uh, what can I play for you ladies?

- Wait, you don't really know how to play the piano, do you?

- Not even a stitch.

- Oh, (laughing) - Of course he doesn't.

But you know- - Yeah.

- Nobody pretends to do things more than Matt does, right?

Like- - Are saying- - Fake it till you make it, right?

- Yep.

(laughing) - Are you saying you fake it?

- Okay, no, but it is perfect example though, is when we went to New York, it was about a year ago, we went down for Christmas- - Yeah.

- You might remember, and I had a work trip, and so we decided let's make like a whole weekend out of it.

We did the shopping, we went to see the tree.

- Broadway.

- Exactly.

- It was very romantic.

- It was very romantic.

- You must have eaten in some good restaurants.

- We ate at awesome restaurants.

We did like a Michelin Star one night.

We went to this French restaurant that I'd been to before.

It's called La Grande Boucherie.

- La Grand Boucherie!

(ladies laughing) That's how you say it.

- Which of course he decides every single time he says it, it sounds like he's like starting a revolution, you know?

- Like Jean Valjean.

- Yeah, precisely, just like Jean Valjean.

- Yeah.

- And the entire time we're at the restaurant, so we're ordering great wine and food and I'm eating like coq au vin, we're having beef bourguignon, and our server was so great because he kept, you know, explaining to us how to pronounce things, so Matt, like- - I had a glass of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

- Right.

(laughs) - Never heard of that one before.

- No, no- - It was delicious.

- You can decipher - It doesn't matter exactly how you say it.

So every time we ordered something, and so we would order a bottle of wine, and so our server was like, "This is how you pronounce it, it's Châteauneuf-du-Pape."

And Matt's like, "Chateau-blee-de-bloo."

Like, it was hysterical.

- But- - That he kept- - By the end of the night though, I had it figured out, right?

And I wanted to kind of make some magic happen.

- Sure.

- You know, having this great romantic trip.

So I was like, "Hey, how do you do that thing "from the show, the song?"

He's like, "Oh, yeah, like, you know, "Will you sleep with me tonight?"

I'm like, "Yeah," so I got it, I was like, "Ve-ve-chez-vick-me-mick-moo."

(ladies laughing) - Uh, close.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Vous-vous couche, vous-vous (laughs) - See, no one knows how to say it.

- Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir.

- Voulez-vous 'chez-kecks' moi.

(ladies laughing) - Even now, it was as successful as it was that night.

- Well, you know what, here's to successes, so, 'voulee-voulay-shecks' moi ce soir.

(glasses clink) - Ce soir.

- Ce soir.

- Ce soir.

- Vibing and chilling with your friends can really get your mind right, y'all.

Some great cocktails, a killer playlist, some vino and great food, man, it loosens things up.

But the people are what matters most, so check it.

We're fully invested in learning and teaching new things.

But we're also invested in our people.

Cooking, eating, drinking, but just being together, man, that's what reinforces it.

So spend that quality time, get yourself learnt-up on the people you roll with and about yourself too.

Learn about those you love, and learn about the things you love.

Ask questions, try something new, be curious and- - Hey, I'm curious when you're gonna make me another drink.

- Time to let loose.

So uncork some bottles and uncork some good times.

♪ Welcome to Paris (light upbeat electronic music) ♪ Bienvenue dans mon monde (light upbeat electronic music continues) ♪ Bienvenue dans mon monde - [Narrator] Protein-rich and sustainably raised, American Lamb is a versatile ingredient in any dish.

For recipes, nutrition information, and to learn more about our commitment to sustainability, visit AmericanLamb.com.

- Acropolis Realty Group, providing real estate services across the industry, including commercial development, residential sales, and residential and commercial leasing.

Learn more at acropolisrealtygroup.com.

- [Narrator] Gateway to the Finger Lakes Region, Syracuse is centrally located in New York State.

Syracuse has a variety of outdoor parks, year-round activities, dining options, and seasonal festivals.

More information at VisitSyracuse.com.