Looking out the window, Manhattan is gone–the whole rest of the world is gone, covered in a blanket of snow clouds and fog, and we’re floating on a little island, here in Brooklyn.
Today was a quiet day, mixed between working and taking care of myself. Spent the morning grading while watching Battlestar Galactica, a combination more pleasant than efficient. Spent the afternoon cooking, making a beef stew that’s still cooking. We cook pretty often, but usually weeknight-style cooking, toss a spice rub on some chicken breasts and whip up a spicy garlic sauce for some sauteed broccoli, that kind of thing. The beef stew is a little more time-consuming, the kind of cooking I save for long afternoons like this one. Meditative cooking.
I have three sources for the recipe. It’s a blend of Mark Bittman’s basic beef stew and my ex-boyfriend’s mother’s recipe, which I think originally sourced from Sunset Magazine anyway. I also kept the guide to stews that Cooks Illustrated ran a year or so ago, which isn’t a recipe so much as a guide to techniques and equipment. I prefer the ingredient ratio in Dr. Miller’s recipe–way more carrots and parsnips than Bittman calls for, relative to the amount of beef–but take the cooking process from Bittman, which is mostly validated by Cooks Illustrated. This is one of those things I find fascinating, the trends in cooking processes. Who ever thought of brining turkeys ten or fifteen years ago? That kind of thing. I’m taking the more modern process, I guess.
It starts with the beef, as I suppose beef stew usually does. Chuck roast, trimmed of fat and cut into cubes, and I was struck as I cut it by how beautiful it seemed. I usually don’t like dealing with meat when cooking, but FreshDirect sent us some nice chuck, very little fat and a gorgeous deep-ruby color. Three-and-a-half or four pounds, cut into inch cubes, more or less, and then tossed with some salt and pepper and put back in the refrigerator under plastic wrap while I prep the aromatics. (Aromatics! I first saw this term, applied to a category of cooking ingredients, in my favorite Chinese cookbook, bought just after college. It makes so much sense.) Three big onions, diced, a few cloves of garlic, a few stalks of celery. I don’t know if celery properly belongs with the aromatics, but I didn’t want to put it with the vegetables, and I’m resigned to having to include it.
Aromatics prepped, the beef comes out of the refrigerator, and browned. Dr. Miller’s recipe says to toss the beef with flour and spices before browning, but CI says that coating the beef in flour, while traditional, is actually a problem, because it masks uneven browning. Bittman says you can skip browning altogether, but I like it–I feel like browned beef can get more tender on the inside without falling apart. The beef gets browned in three batches, each batch removed to a plate to wait once it’s cooked, and then the onion mix goes into the leftover beef fat and sauteed. And this is where the technique or process question comes into play–Dr. Miller’s recipe says to just drop everything into the pot at this point, onion and vegetables and broth, all together with the browned beef, and cook the whole mess together for three hours. I think this is typical, or traditional, stewing behavior. But CI says to saute the aromatics separately, in order to better develop their flavors, and Bittman says the same. So the onions and garlic and celery go into the pot alone and cook for ten minutes or so, until softened. Then I add a few tablespoons of flour, at Bittman’s advice, and the onion mix froths up while I stir. Pop back in the beef, add three cups of wine–red wine is common to both recipes, and at CI’s suggestion I’ve gone with a Cote du Rhone, eleven dollars at the shop on the first floor. Three cups into the stew means there’s just one glass left in the bottle, so I take that glass for myself.
Stir (with the sturdy maple-wood spoon, part of a set I bought for my first kitchen in Oakland), bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat to low. The pot needs to sit, undisturbed and simmering, for about forty minutes, so I set to chopping the vegetables. The radio is on, first “Fresh Air” and then “All Things Considered,” both of them celebrating today’s holiday and preparing for tomorrow’s. Congressman John Lewis, on “Fresh Air”, has an amazing story to tell, and by the time he starts talking about how he sees marriage equality as just another branch of the fight against discrimination he’s been fighting his whole life, I find that I’m grinning as I work. All the stories of people travelling to Washington, too, make me happy. Matt and I were there Friday night (long story) and it looks like a town gearing up for both a big party and a lot of hard work. I peel and chop my vegetables, four or five potatoes, four or five parsnips, a big handful of carrots. By the time I’m done, there’s still another twenty minutes before they can go in the stew, so I sit down with my glass of wine and a mystery novel, and I watch the snow fall for a while longer.
Posted Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 3:37 pm. Filed under: Uncategorized.
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