Soups and stews are the best for chilly evenings, and coq au vin is the perfect French rustic comfort food. It's also a great dish for leftovers. You can easily add some extra chicken and vegetables and have a few easy weekday lunches.

Coq au vin is from Burgundy and is traditionally made with a rooster, but try finding one! (Eatwell Farms often sells rooster at the Ferry Plaza market in San Francisco.) We typically make it with chicken, which is convenient because it doesn't need to cook as long. Ninety percent of the cooking happens in our traditional French Staub coq au vin pot (c/o) to create a rich stew of chicken and mushrooms. It fits an entire chicken and all of the vegetables that go with it. It's easy to brown the chicken, and it's also easy to clean and has an adorable rooster as a handle. Who doesn't love that? We also love that the heavy cast iron holds the heat so well that we don't even have to put it in the oven and heat up the house. In this pot, we just cook it covered on the stovetop.

We don't really follow a recipe, but we've shared our usual process below, along with some shortcuts. We also have a couple of tips learned from trial and error.