Boeuf Bourguignon à Chez Musser

I mentioned on Facebook how divine my house smelled last night while I was cooking Beouf Bourguignon and got some recipe requests. I looked online for a recipe similar to my version of the classic French beef stew, but they were all so much more complicated than necessary, so I am feeling bound to type up mine. This peasant dish, raised to haute cuisine by Antoine Carême, then brought to American home cooks 40 years ago by Julia Child is now experiencing a resurgence of interest thanks to last year's film Julie and Julia. (I can't help but wonder why the upstart's name is first in the title?)

The recipe, as described in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, appears complicated, but really, this is home food and none of the techniques involved are beyond the scope of a home cook. Preparing the meat and sauce is simplicity. You get the onions and mushrooms ready while the meat is cooking. I do find peeling the two dozen pearl onions tedious and if I don't have them on hand or don't want to deal with them, I just saute a sliced onion along with the carrots and add them to the meat. That said, the browned whole pearl onions bring a welcome contrasting sweetness to the dish that is worth the effort, so do try it that way at least once. Sadly, no one in my family but me likes mushrooms, so I have to cordon mine in a corner of the sauteuse pan I use for braising, then scoop them into a little serving bowl for myself before putting the rest of the meat and sauce in another serving bowl.

You may notice there is no bacon, fat back, lardons, or any other form of smokey pork fat goodness in my recipe. I'm all for it much of the time and we even go so far as to cure and smoke our own bacon, but I feel the act of soaking, which Julia recommends to remove the saltiness, just negates the whole purpose of using a cured fat. When I've just used bacon fat, I have found the dish gets too salty and the smokiness doesn't add to the dish. So, I use tallow, which is rendered beef fat. If you don't have any tallow, clarified butter or ghee would work. You can DIY, of course. Or, you can completely ignore me and go for the pork fat. C'est la vie.

I also find flouring the meat unnecessary and knowing that so many are trying to avoid gluten and grains, I can assure you that you are missing nothing. I quit doing that ages ago, when I started using the sauteuse pan, which, because of its large surface area, readily thickens the sauce without the addition of flour. If you are using at Dutch oven and find that your sauce isn't thick enough in the end, you can always thicken with a beurre manie or potato starch if you eschew gluten (to avoid lumps, first whisk a few tablespoons of the cooking liquid with a couple teaspoons of starch, then add the mixture to the sauce).

I served last night's beouf bourguignon with homemade crème fraîche. O. M. G. Really, just plan a day or so ahead and do it. Your taste buds, if they could, would bow down and say, "Bless you!" Sour cream, quark, or even yogurt would be fine. I believe Julia says to serve this with boiled potatoes, though it is also quite good with roasted or mashed potatoes, buttered egg noodles...oh anything to catch that sauce! And don't forget a side of halved Brussels sprouts, boiled for a few minutes, then browned in bacon fat. Nom-nom-nom, says the lady who doesn't like Brussels sprouts.

Someone asked if using grass-fed beef made a difference in the cooking time. I simply cook this until the meat is tender, not according to any specific time. Do keep an eye on things during what you expect to be the last hour or so, especially if you use a sauteuse, rather than a Dutch oven. The sauce can go from perfectly thick to not-so-perfectly dry rather quickly if you are not paying attention. I simply add more broth or even the rinse water from the jar of tomato sauce if more liquid is needed toward the end.

3 pounds lean stewing beef, cut into 2-inch cubes
Salt and pepper
2-4 tablespoons tallow
1 carrot, diced
2 cloves mashed garlic
2 cups red wine, young and full-bodied (Pinot Noir or Burgundy is usually recommended, though I often use an inexpensive Bordeaux)
2 to 3 cups beef stock
1 pint tomato sauce
leaves from 4 sprigs fresh thyme
1 bay leaf
18 to 24 pearl onions
1 pound cremini mushrooms, quartered
4 tablespoons butter, divided

Preheat oven to 325F. Sprinkle salt and pepper all over the cubed meat. Melt tallow over medium high heat in a large saute pan or sauteuse. Add seasoned meat to the pan in a single layer, browning in batches if your pan is not large enough to accomodate all the meat at once without crowding. Remove the browned meat to a bowl. Saute the carrots in the pan for several minutes, until they are browned. Add the garlic and saute for 60 seconds. Put the browned carrots and garlic with the meat, return the pan to the heat and immediately add the wine. Using a flat wooden spatula, deglaze the pan, scraping the browned bits off the bottom of the pan. Add the stock, tomato sauce, thyme leaves, bay leaf, meat, and carrots to the pan. Bring to a simmer on the stove. Cover the pan and cook in the oven for 3 to 4 hours, or until you can easily pull the meat apart with a fork. Add the onions and mushrooms and cook for another 2o minutes. If you feel the sauce is not thick enough, remove the meat and vegetables from the sauce. Put the cooking pan on a medium-high burner, then thicken with a potato starch or beurre manie (typically, one uses flour to thicken at the start of cooking and a root starch for thickening at the end of cooking, but in a pinch, the flour-butter mix works). Return meat and vegetables to the pan and gently stir, coating everything in sauce.

In the meantime, prepare the onions and mushrooms. To peel the onions, boil them for 1 minute, then drain. Cut off the ends, the slip off the skins. Melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a saute pan over medium high heat. Brown the onions in the pan for 10 minutes, remove and set aside. Return saute pan back to burner. Melt the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter and saute the mushrooms for about 8-10 minutes. If you, like me, must keep the mushrooms out of the finished dish, as they begin to brown sprinkle salt on the mushrooms and add a splash of red wine to the saute pan and cook for 1 more minute. Feel free to add some more butter, too. You deserve it. Set the mushrooms aside with the onions.

When the meat is tender, gently stir in the onions and mushrooms, then serve. Bon Appétit!

Taking Stock, Making Stock

Happy New Year! After months of preserving followed by weeks of holiday baking, travel, and celebrations, I am relieved to spend some time in January quietly taking stock of the previous year and making plans for the new. I've been thinking in particular of the new food-related skills I acquired in 2009 and the people who helped me learn something new, either in person or through their books and blogs. Here is my list of Kitchen-Inspiration Books, Blogs, and People of 2009.

• Helen Witty and her book Fancy Pantry taught me to make gravlax for our New Year's Day open house and inspired me all year, from spring's Ginger-Rhubarb Chutney and summer's Countrystyle Chile Sauce to Cranberry Cordial in the fall and now, Candied Kumquats!
• Joining The Nourished Kitchen's Pantry Challenge in December 2008 pushed me to keep better records of how much I spend on food, showing me how much I save by cooking only with what I have on hand and giving focus to my 2009 food preservation efforts.
• Michael Ruhlman. Oh, let me count the ways he has inspired me. My husband and I learned to cure bacon and ham from his Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing. I keep Ratio: The Simple Codes behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking on the top of my cookbook stack as it provides a springboard for experiments in everything from muffins to pickles. His blog fires me up. He is as passionate as I am about empowering everyday people in their kitchens, though he's far more articulate and has his wife Donna taking extraordinary, mouth-watering food photos!
• Two other writers that really get my gears turning, Hank Shaw at Hunter, Angler, Gardener, Cook and Langdon Cook at Fat of the Land. Thanks to them, I've become more confident cooking with wild foods this year.
• Tips from Diane Morgan's Online Cooking School and Deb Perelman's Smitten Kitchen (plus what I already knew and practiced from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking) helped me make even better pastry with less effort.
• Eugenia Bone's Well-Preserved: Recipes and Techniques for Putting Up Small Batches of Seasonal Foods taught me to pressure can tuna without fear and we here at Chez Musser love the results.
• I can't count how many times I've wanted a simple recipe for something, gone to Simply Recipes, and found just what I needed. Recently, I began to think Elise must be psychic, such as when I went looking for a good roasted Brussels sprouts recipe to find she posted about Roasted Brussels Sprouts the very same day.
• I have to admit, fusion food is not normally my thing and I even feel a little intimidated when I visit White on Rice Couple. This couple—meat-and-potatoes Oregon rancher boy meets bold and fiery Vietnamese girl—have such a bright, beautiful, SoCal thing going on. I can't help but feel my frumpy, sodden PNW self does not belong there, but they make me feel welcome despite my sensible shoes and I've been learning so much about flavor from them. I especially ♥ their Tomato with Ginger "Ah...you so Asian!" Jam and Ultimate Umami Burgers.
• My friends Sierra and Teri at Grain-Free Foodies have shown me delicious ways to cook and bake without wheat and other grains. They make "going without" look and taste so good!
• And finally, my friend Melisa of Magpie Eats, who taught me cook my new favorite comfort dish, uppma with cranberry chutney. In listening to her rhapsodize about her favorite foods, I've gained a greater appreciation of bold seasonings and unexpected flavor combinations. Oh, and her sweet tomato chutney? I drool a bit just thinking about it.

In December, Melisa gave me a copy of Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking and in reading it I became aware of how much great food writing I have missed out on with my focus on cooking technique. This year, I want to read more Colwin, plus some of the other grand dames of food lit: Elizabeth David, MFK Fisher, Judith Jones, and Ruth Reichl. I'm looking forward to exploring the more sentimental side of cooking. I also want to continue explore grain-free cooking, dive more deeply into Indian cookery, and keep dipping my toes into those fusion food waters.

What about you? What did you learn about food and cooking in 2009? Who inspired you? What do you want to learn in 2010?

My Winter 2010 Schedule is up. Highlights include Winter Canning this Saturday; Chocolate Loves Fruit January 30; Stocks, Soups, and Stews February 19; and One Chicken, Many Meals February 20. If my schedule doesn't fit yours, contact me to arrange for a private lesson or a class at your home, office, school, etc. I can customize classes to meet your needs and location.

Leftovers by Design: Ham

I am spending more time than usual in my kitchen nowadays, as much as 10 hours a week just canning, freezing, curing, and drying food destined for storage. Despite being in the kitchen so much, I don't have a lot time or energy to cook meals, so I do what I can to prepare large batches of basics that I can reuse in meals for days to come. This week, that's meant baking a 6 lb portion of ham, several squash, and a couple sweet potatoes plus a couple bunches of chard sauteed in bacon fat for Sunday dinner. Here's how I'll get at least three more meals out of the leftovers:

• Leftover chard and some of the ham will go into Monday's no-crust quiche.
  
• The ham bone went into a pot with some water, celery ends, and chicken broth leftover from that afternoon's canning to become make broth for of a slow cooker ham and bean soup that I'll start on Tuesday morning. Monday, I soaked a double batch of white beans, so I can make a big batch of soup and pressure-can half of it (it would freeze well, too) or cook half the beans in water and use them for a bean and marinated bell pepper salad (I haven't decided which I'll do yet).
  
• The leftover squash and some more ham go into a stovetop mac-and-cheese on Wednesday.

All of those meals will in turn make good leftovers themselves for lunch the next day. In fact, we find that quiche, soup, and most casseroles improve overnight. None of these secondary meals takes more than 20 minutes of prep time, leaving me with more time to make pints and pints of pickled peppers and make a batch of Wimpy's Delight (the web site should credit Helen Witty, as the recipe is copied word-for-word from her book The Fancy Pantry).

Fall Supper

Sometimes it takes a bit of desperation to try a food that you have convinced yourself that you don't like. For me, it was cooked bell peppers. Until almost four years ago, I couldn't stand them--even the smell of them cooking made me gag. Then, after our son Luc was born, my friend Katie brought over a dish that changed all that for me. Her recipe for Chicken Paprika came from The Big Book of Casseroles by Maryana Vollstedt, a Eugene cookbook author. Since that comforting postpartum supper, the dish has become a favorite of ours and one I look forward to making this time of year, when the local bell peppers finally, finally ripen before succombing to frost and rain. (What I finally realized is that it's cooked unripened peppers I can't stand.)

Here's my adaptation of her recipe. I made it last with a 7 pound chicken and simply doubled everything.

Chicken Paprika with Red Bell Pepper
Serves 4-6

1/4 cup flour
1 teaspoon salt
3 teaspoons paprika, divided
1 chicken (3 to 3-1/2 pounds), cut into serving pieces (reserve back and neck for making stock)
4 tablespoons oil or fat appropriate for frying: sunflower oil, ghee, lard, schmaltz
1 medium onion, sliced
2 medium red bell peppers, cut into 1-2" squares
ground pepper to taste
1-1/2 cups chicken stock
1 cup sour cream, creme fraiche, or quark

Preheat oven to 350F. Combine flour, salt, and 1 teaspoon paprika in a wide, shallow bowl. Toss chicken pieces in mixture to coat and reserve excess flour. In a Dutch oven or other heavy-bottomed pan, melt oil or fat over medium high-heat. Brown chicken, 5 to 10 minutes per side. Remove to a plate. Reduce temperature to medium. Add onions and pepper and saute until tender, about 5 minutes. Add remaining paprika, pepper, and remaining flour and stir until the flour coats the vegetables. Add stock and stir until thickened. Return chicken to pan, cover and bake until chicken is no longer pink in the center, about 50 minutes. Blend in sour cream and bake, uncovered, 10 minutes longer. Serve with spaetzle, rice, or egg noodles.

Sweet corn fresh right from the cob has always been a summer favorite of mine, but I just tried Michael Ruhlman's recipe for Baked Butter Corn for the first time recently and loved how it makes the most of the starchier corn of fall. This is such an easy way to prepare corn, I now it will become a regular part of my fall cooking repertoire. I may try it with frozen sweet corn in the winter, too.

My son loves fruit sauces...apple sauce, pear sauce, peach sauce...as a baby he lurved stewed dried apricots mashed into a sauce. When I had a bunch of pears to process last week, I originally planned to follow this recipe for Pear Butter, but Luc so liked what we had by the end of Step 2 that I just stopped and canned it up. Later, if I decide I still want some pear butter, I can always open up a quart or two of sauce and cook it down. Or, I can keep doing what I did this morning and making pear sauce muffins.

Spiced Pear Sauce Muffins
Makes 24 mini muffins or 12 full size muffins

3/4 cups whole wheat pastry flour
3/4 cups white pastry flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon ground mace
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
1 cup Rapadura or packed brown sugar
1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, melted
1 cup unsweetened pear sauce
1 cup pecans or walnuts (3 1/2 ounces), coarsely chopped

Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 400°F. Grease muffin pan.

Stir together flour, baking powder, baking soda, spices, and salt in a bowl. Whisk together eggs and sugar in a large bowl until combined well, then add butter, a little at a time, whisking until mixture is creamy. Stir in pear sauce then fold in flour mixture until flour is just moistened. Stir in nuts and divide batter among muffin cups. Bake mini-muffins for 15 minutes, full-size muffins for 20 minutes. Cool on rack. Keeps for a day in an airtight container or freeze for a month.

Montavilla Food Co-op?

On Monday October 19th from 7-9 pm at the Montavilla Food Co-op Working Group will meet at at the Montavilla Methodish Church, 232 SE 80th Avenue, to discuss starting up a co-op in the neighborhood. They have already hooked up with some Olympia folks who help people start co-ops and Lori Burge the development person at Peoples Food Co-op will be there to give her input. They want to have a storefront co-op and that they figure it will take about three years to pull that together, so in the meantime they will have a buying club. If you're interested in helping with this effort but can't make the meeting, join the group's email list.

Pumpkin Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

My mom used to make these pumpkin chocolate chip cookies when I was a kid and when I had a hankering for them years later, she sent me a scanned copy of the Libby* ad she clipped decades ago that included the recipe. A little heavy on the refined flour and sugar for my tastes these days, I set to making some of my usual changes: substituted whole wheat flour for some of the white, Rapadura for the refined sugars, and coconut oil for half the butter (the last change I make primarily for flavor). I don't remember if the original recipe included oats or not. Today, we were out of rolled oats and I used barley flakes instead, which worked just fine. Dried cranberries and chopped roasted hazelnuts make tasty additions. That's my boy, "sneaking" a dollop of cookie dough. Freshly canned tomato juice on the right.

1 cup white pastry flour
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
pinch ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup coconut oil
2 cups Rapadura (or 1 cup brown sugar and 1 cup white sugar)
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups cooked and pureed pumpkin or 1 15-ounce can pumpkin puree
2 cups chocolate chips (I prefer bittersweet)

Preheat oven to 375F. Sift together flours, baking soda, spices, and salt, then mix in oats and set aside. Cream butter, coconut oil, and sugar in a large mixer bowl until fluffy. Add egg, vanilla, and pumpkin and mix until well incorporated. Add dry ingredients to pumpkin mixture with mixer set on low, then add chocolate chips. Drop spoonfuls of dough onto parchment or Silpat-lined baking sheet. Bake for 15 minutes. Remove from oven and allow to cool on baking sheet for a couple minutes before transferring to cooling rack.

* Libby is owned by Nestle and does not make an organic canned pumpkin. I have been super pleased with the Farmer's Market brand of canned organic pumpkin puree.

Ode to the Tomato

After last year's dismal tomato harvest, I went all out this year to ensure that we would have lots of tomatoes and I'm so pleased to find my efforts paying off now. I started plants from seed indoors late last winter, growing them up under lights in our basement. In April, I moved them outside, snugged up next to the house under an eave to harden off. By the time I planted them into the garden under hoop houses in mid-May, they were robust, thick-stemmed beauties. My son discovered our first ripe tomato on July 9th--a full month earlier than we've had ripe tomatoes here in previous years. And now?


August 18th tomato harvest...more to come.

That's about 30 pounds I picked Tuesday morning. The yellow ones are my favorite slicing tomato, Persimmon, which I've grown for nine years. They will be part of my entry into Michael Ruhlman's BLT From Scratch Challenge, but they're so good I am perfectly happy with plain tomato sandwiches for lunch most days. The small round ones are Stupice, an early variety that I haven't grow for a while because they don't have tremendous flavor. I found though, that they're great for drying and roasting, both techniques that intensify flavor. The elongated tomatoes are San Marzano, the classic Neopolitan plum tomato, a meaty, nearly seedless variety, with a fantastically pure tomato flavor, sweet yet astringent. Summer on the tongue. Those will go into sauce I'll be making in small batches in my slow cooker, following my friend Melisa's lead, and on top of a margherita pizza or two. This is my first year growing them and I'm amazed with their productivity, their vines covered with these heavy gems.

My obsession with growing tomatoes is thanks to the special relationship and role they've played in my development as a lover of real food. As a girl, I watched my parents grow seedlings in our suburban greenhouse, which I helped them market at the garden club sale every spring. Later in the summer, my brother and I would pull a wagon full of tomatoes and cucumbers around the neighborhood, knocking on doors offering them for sale for ten cents a piece. What we didn't sell, my mom turned into sauce, which would bubble and sputter on the stove for days before she canned enough jars to provide us with spaghetti sauce for a year. I can remember waking up many a morning during tomato season to the appetite-stimulating aroma of tomatoes, garlic, and onions that had been simmering away all night on the stove and making myself a slice of bread with tomato sauce for breakfast.

At the same time, sliced tomatoes made a daily appearance on the dinner table, sprinkled with a pinch of salt and pepper. This was long before I'd ever heard of a caprese salad and I was then and am now perfectly content to eat fresh tomatoes this way. They were one of the few vegetables I really liked growing up and one winter, when I was about seven or eight years old, I spied some "fresh" tomatoes at the grocery store and asked my mom to buy some. I thought she would be pleased that I was asking her to buy a vegetable, but she said no, explaining that the only fresh tomatoes worth eating are the ones we grew ourselves or bought at a farm stand, that tomatoes from the grocery store taste like "soggy pink cardboard" because they are bred to withstand being trucked long distances, not for flavor. That was an important early lesson in real food, which gave me an appreciation for how fortunate I was to have a family that knew how to grow and find things like good tomatoes. I also learned how deceiving looks can be in the grocery store and was inspired to learn more about the differences between foods bred and grown for flavor and food grown for other reasons.

When I was in my 20s, my father began canning tomato juice, and I spent many hours helping run tomatoes through his hand-cranked juicer. The mindless repetitive nature of the work made for the perfect backdrop to lengthy conversations on all manner of topics. For me, juicing tomatoes with my dad as a college student was a time of reconnecting with the man I'd lost touch with as a teen.

With so many fond memories associated with this jewel of the home garden, it perhaps should come as no surprise that later in life, a flat of tomato seedlings would bring me back from the brink during a bout of severe depression and help me resurrect my true self, that had been buried underneath years of unbearable sadness.

Today, growing and canning tomatoes still gives me an excuse to call my mom and dad with questions and reminds me of spending cold spring mornings in the warmth of our tomato-scented greenhouse and hot summer afternoons harvesting tomatoes with my brother. Tomatoes have given me so much over the years, I am grateful for this wonderful plant, with its unmistakable scent that sticks to my fingers whenever I prune or harvest, and its marvelously versatile, delicious fruit. So, I hope you'll forgive me for bragging about my tomato harvest and understand that for me, that overflowing basket represents far more than a few jars of sauce.

This is my Real Food Wednesday post. Be sure to find out what other Real Food bloggers are saying today.