I'm Cookin'

One of my favorite Christmas gifts this year is my Les Halles cookbook by Anthony Bourdain!  I have jumped right into creating masterful dishes.  French cooking is unlike anything in the world, and that is why I am going there in May! Woooo! 

Ahh, Boeuf bourguignon, the classic French dish that has swooned many people through out the world.  This dish was soooo good, the meat so tender.  Anything made with wine, and a red Burgundy especially is guaranteed to be good.

So what is in this classic dish you ask?  I hope that you are not hungry right now, if you are grab a snack, because it will just make you even hungrier, even drool.

Paleron of beef
Salt and pepper (no your never gonna get it... no not this time.... remember that song.. awesome) (EDIT:  2/2, I stand corrected, the song above was En Vogue not Salt n Pepper, Thanks Chelsea :) )
Olive oil
Onions
Red Burgundy
Carrots
Garlic clove
Bouquet garni
Flat parsley

Hungry?? Grab a Snickers.  So basically you add all of this stuff in pot and let it cook for 2-3 hours until the meat is just juicy and tender.  The only tricky part to cooking this dish is browning the meat, you have to make sure your oil is hot enough (right before it starts to smoke), secondly you need to get your simmer right so the sauce reduces and is concentrated when ready to eat.  Also, because you are only using a cup of Burgundy you will have a lot to drink!  Another awesome plus!

I can't explain how good this dish was!  The meet so tender, so juicy, so yum.  It's perfect for a cold to warm day.  Writing this is making me soooooooo hungry!

After this dish I decided to make another classic French dish, pot-au-feu!  Just reading this recipe made me want to cry from the joy of the types of meat were in this bad boy.  Vegetarians please do not proceed pass this sentence.  Dishes like this make me wonder how anyone can be a vegetarian.

The ingredients:
Paleron of beef
Oxtail
Short ribs
Veal shank (bone in so you an suck the marrow)
Cloves
Onions
Leeks
Celery root
Carrots
Potatoes
Cabbage
Bouquet garni
Salt and pepper
Cornichons (for garnish)
Gros sel (for garnish)
Hot prepared mustard (for garnish)

This is another stew like dish, basically simmering meet with all of the goodness above for 3 hours.  The hardest part to the recipe was the "slow simmer" which was constantly hard to hit all night.  We also realized that we didn't have a big enough pot to do it all in one so we split the recipe and just used two.  There was soooo much food in this thing that we had the ability to experiment a little with left over juices.  The meat itself was amazing, slowly simmered meat cannot be touched by an oven.  This meat was so tender and juicy, it just fell off the bone.  It was meat candy!  

Veggies!

Lots of MEAT

ooooooo yeah

My mezz (Mise en Place)

Get that simmer!

Done goodies

MORE MEAT

Marrow n Bones

The main meal was awesome!  Then my brother (yes I'll give credit where credits due) had the idea of taking the left over juices and some of the veggies and throwing them into the blender to make a soup!!  Brilliant!  It was better than most soups I've had in restaurants!  We added a little gros sel (French grey sea salt) and whammy we had a soup!

Now the soup was very good, but we had tons of juice left so why not reduce the crap out of it and concentrate the flavors (basically making a demi-glace I think).  So after another two hours we had a concentrated soup that we again added with veggies to turn into a soup.  And it was so flavorful... did I just learn the tricks of restaurants.... yessss, I think.  I kind of like this cooking thing!

Reducin'

Look at the lines, you can see where it started!

So now we had another soup, tons of left over demi-glace which I froze for later recipes.  The following night we had some left over short rib because we bought too much, so we made a bbq sauce from scratch and had some ribs!

Soup heating up

Cookin', look at them ribs!

Bon appetit