Beef Bourguignon, the perfect way to end a weekend

This weekend was an absolutely wonderful and blissful weekend. In food, running, life.  It was Valentine’s Day Weekend which has never meant a thing to me one way or another. Like most holidays, I don’t get swept up in the commercialism and hype. I do my own thing. This weekend was no different, but it is the first time in the history of my life that I have ever received flowers and chocolate on Valentine’s Day, and I have to admit it did make me feel all warm and fuzzy. And then I tasted the chocolates from Recchiuti Confections in the Ferry Building as my last bites for the weekend I am about to describe, which pretty much cemented it as one kick ass weekend.

Beautiful flowers from the Ferry Building Saturday Market

The weekend started with a fabulous Friday night of food. I decided to indulge in a non-gluten free friendly meal and it was decidedly worth the risk. In fact, other than a bit of asthma symptoms on Saturday, I was pretty non-reactive to it. We went to Little Star in the Mission and had a deep dish Classic, which has sausage, mushrooms, onions, bell pepper. I had been seriously craving pizza for a long long time (I haven’t had a slice since November at Delfina) and this definitely satisfied that craving.

This weekend seemed like it was created straight out of my imagination, it contained all of the things that combine to make me insanely happy and content. Saturday kicked off by getting up early and, for the first time in a while, instead of going on a long run, we headed down to the Saturday Farmer’s Market at the Ferry Building to pick up ingredients for our planned Sunday dinner as well as our other weekend meals. I wish I had had my camera. We met Brett and Larissa down there, sipped on some Blue Bottle and wandered around gathering more and more ingredients, as well as snacks with each lap around the market.

Our dinner plan for Valentine’s Day was simple. After watching Julie and Julia last week, we couldn’t help but think about Julia Child’s beef bourguignon and since I had never ever had beef bourguignon, it was an easy pick for a Sunday at home on a special occasion. We grabbed our beef from Prather Ranch Meat Company as well as a half chicken for Saturday. We picked up Batch 21 Cheese and Crescenza cheese from Cow Girl Creamery. We shared a box of potatoes from Roli Roti. I drank an outstanding smoothie from one of the purveyors, we snacked on dates and filled our bags with greens, tiny potatoes, beautiful King Oyster mushrooms, spring garlic, beautiful sprouts and pickled veggies from Happy Girl Kitchen. It was a blast. By 10am though, the market gets crazy busy and we were ready to go. Brett and Larissa headed off to Tomales Bay for the weekend and we headed back to my house with all the goodies. We changed, went for a nice long run on the Miwok 100k course from near Rock Springs to the turn around point of the course at the bottom of Randall trail and back. 24 miles worked up our appetites, we made a quick stop at Whole Foods post run for a few ingredients and ice and we headed back to dive head first into our farmer’s market goodies.

First there was salad to temporary satisfy the ravenous beasts we were quickly becoming. I tossed a beautiful mix of Greens with Sprouts and topped with avocado, sauerkraut and mild pickled peppers from Happy Girl. The huge ramen bowls were empty in less than five minutes. We put our half chicken into the oven and cooked it “brick chicken” style, using my cast iron grill press. While it cooked, ice baths were taken, beer/cider was opened, veggies were chopped. When the chicken was done, we made fajitas with handmade tortillas from Primavera (also from the farmer’s market), bell pepper, jalepenos, onion. We kept the seasoning light and the flavors clean, a bit of avocado, crescenza and lime were all that was needed. Absolutely delicious. The evening was finished off with Coconut Bliss and some gluten free graham crackers which I made on Friday.

We had decided that we wanted to be done running and heading home by 11:30am. We also had planned to run really really hard for a long way, so that meant we didn’t have to get up too early. In fact, we each managed to run 19 miles in just around 2:40 and that is on the climby-est part of the Miwok course. Very nice. We were back at the car and heading back into the City by 10:45, which was a vast difference than Saturday when we hadn’t even left for our run yet! Lunch was a redux of the previous days salad. And I am thinking that I may be making it for myself every day as long as the ingredients are still available to me. My favorite part was the crunch from the “Market mix”, which is a blend of sprouted beans. Wow good.

The beef bourguignon takes a while, so got to work on it pretty quickly. While easy, tasty meals are awesome, there is something really fun and validating about working on small little details and ingredients and spending hours and hours in the kitchen. Sunday afternoons in the kitchen are one of my more favorite thing. It’s fun just to create and then be able to eat the reward at the end.

I have not done much cooking out of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and unlike most recipes, this one we really tried to follow. There would be no reinventing of the wheel on this one, there is a reason that Julia Child’s compendium is in 40-somethingth edition and could become a best seller, again, 49 years after its release. I really liked working through each step, each little detail to create the final product. From individually cooking the bacon, browning the meal, cooking the vegetables before cooking them all together for 3 hours with lots of wine to sauteing the mushrooms in butter (don’t crowd the mushrooms!), it was a blast. It reminds me how complex it can be to make amazing simple food. And it was amazing. The beef bourguignon had so much depth of flavor, you felt like you were watching a perfectly executed symphony, but instead of listening, you were trying your best not to submerge your whole face in the still hot dutch oven. We paired the rich stew with a very simple playmate: boiled potatoes. And they played well together. Meat and potatoes to something like an exponent of 10. Meat and potatoes at their best. It was damn good and when followed by the chocolates mentioned above, pretty much capped off the kind of weekend you remember for a long time and enjoyed completely from end to end.

I have a goal in life. Well, not just one goal but a small goal regarding cooking and recipe creation. I want to make something that impresses the Baker. Sure I can impress my mom, maybe my sister and perhaps a gaggle of friends on occasion, but it is a much harder thing to impress someone who is routinely surrounded by the best food you can get your hands on. Like is one thing, impress is another. I am sure he has liked at least some of the things I have cooked, but been impressed by, blown away by, running home to recreate over and over again? Not quite yet. Someday I will accomplish that. Until then, I am just going to work at it and create dishes and hopefully come up with enough good ones that I can make a cookbook out of them. Ha, right. Dreams are what they are…

On Friday, I was hankering for some lentils. Lentils are something I have not spent any time cooking, but definitely enjoy. When I bought a few bags of lentils at the co-op I was sort of wondering what the heck I was thinking. All I knew was that I wanted Lentils, Bacon and Sweet Potato. The combo sounded delicious. I poured over a bunch of recipes for ideas and technique, but found nothing exactly like what I was looking for. There are plenty of Lentil Bacon Salads, but I wanted something warm and warming.

While this recipe may not have taken down my small goal, it was pretty delicious.

Lentils with Bacon and Sweet Potato

Ingredients:

1.5 cups french lentils
1 large sweet potato, diced
water
1 onion , halved
1 carrot, halved
7 pieces bacon, cut into thin strips
½ tbsp. olive oil
½ cup red onion, diced
½ cup carrot, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
salt
4 tbsp. whole grain mustard
1 ½ tbsp. red wine vinegar

Directions:

Place lentils, halved carrot and onion and sweet potato in a medium pot and cover with 2 inches of water. Bring to a boil, reduce and simmer until the lentils are cooked. Turn off heat, add a dash of salt. Remove carrot and onion.

Meanwhile in a large skillet before turning on the heat, place the bacon and the olive oil in the pan. Raise heat and cook bacon. Add diced carrots and onions and cook for 3-5 minutes, until slightly tender. Add a dash of salt and the garlic.

Drain lentils and add to skillet, tossing to coat (gently). Turn off heat. Add mustard and red wine vinegar. Adjust seasoning.

Christmas Eve Traditions

Christmas Eve dinner for as long as I can remember has always been the same meal for my family. No matter where we are, it doesn’t really feel like Christmas unless we are noshing on prime rib for dinner and my sister’s special sugar cookies. Even though when we get together the question is often posed, “what do we have for Christmas Eve dinner?”, it is not really a question. This year my sister, mom and I were going to be all together unlike last year and even more special, we were going to be celebrating in my sister and my new apartment. Furthermore, I was very excited to not only share Christmas with all the most important people in my life, but also to share our Christmas traditions which also include eating homemade loaves of Stollen on Christmas morning with sausages, eggs, fresh squeezed oj and plenty of coffee and eating “stew-p” which is an everything but the kitchen sink type of soup/stew (hence stew-p).

I ordered a really nice roast from Drew’s Brothers and while I was picking it up nabbed some breakfast sausages, hot italian sausages and chicken (for Christmas day). There were a total of 7 of us for Christmas Eve dinner and I wanted everything to be awesome. I fretted a bit over how to cook the prime rib and didn’t settle on a method until I read this post from Serious Eats. It went through the popular methods and figured out how to have the perfect sear plus perfect pink (medium rare). I was sold and with some trepidation proceeded forward.

Secret recipe Mac and Cheese

The menu included Prime rib, Horseradish Sauce (creme fraiche, dijon and horseradish), Green Beans with Garlic and Butter, Salad with AMAZING homemade dressing (red wine vinegar, olive oil, blue agave, fresh herbs and garlic), my secret recipe Mac and Cheese and fresh bread from The Baker.

I prepared everything in stages, timing out the whole meal and executing it dang near perfectly. Especially impressive since dinner time got pushed back by slightly tardy guests. I was nervous about the meal. I really wanted to provide an amazing dining experience for my guests. Before we dug into the food, we enjoyed a nice spread of crackers, hummus, salsa and plenty of Prosecco.

Empty plates and empty wine glasses? For shame! Dig in people!

With everything ready we sat down at the table, paused for me to take a picture of the table and then dug right in. Once everyone’s plates were full the room fell into a deep, deep silence as everyone savored their food. I hadn’t started digging in to my plate, instead I just watched their reactions and the delight at the tasting of each thing. It was actually pretty funny since they all seemed to look up at once at me and say, “this is really good!”. We drank delicious red wine with dinner and then once we had digested and socialized for a while devoured some of my sister’s Special Sugar Cookies, Peanut Butter Peanut Butter Chip cookies by The Baker and Gluten Free Ginger Molasses cookies by me. It was so much fun enjoying our tradition as a family and sharing it with the people I care about.

Goodbye Year, Hello New Chef in the Family?

Sister sampling her soup.

The other night, my beautiful sister offered to cook for us and boldly go where she doesn’t often go. My sister can cook, she just doesn’t know it yet. She has her staple items that she makes for herself, but a bad experience in the past of being made fun of for something she cooked for someone else has led her to be trepidatious when it comes to cooking for others. I was utterly shocked when she offered to cook for The Baker and I.

And cook she did. A delicious Baked Potato soup with bacon, scallions and cheddar. It had the flavor profile of a good hearty loaded baked potato but was a much lighter meal. She paired it with a salad and we were in business. She did great and I look forward to her next attempt. Who knows maybe one day she’ll be guest posting for me!

While she made soup, I worked on making some gluten free dark chocolate peanut butter and jelly cupcakes for NYE dinner. They are pretty dang tasty. I am stoked to share them. It has been a good year of eating, blogging, writing and living. I look forward to a continuation and growth of that in the new year. Happy New Year everyone!