Lamb Stew

There's nothing really novel about lamb stew. At heart, it's quite a humble dish of lamb, vegetables, and gravy. But there is a vast difference between how professionals and home cooks approach this dish. And a vast difference in the finished dish as a result.

Carefully Constructed Lamb Stew

At home, one often cooks all the stew ingredients together, meat and vegetables until done and then thickens (or highly reduces) the cooking liquid. The vegetables will likely go all at once into the pot once the meat is cooked to avoid overcooking them.

On the other hand, at a high-end restaurant, each ingredient will be pre-cooked just to the point of doneness, combined with a meticulously-made gravy when the dish is ordered, and reheated before service. In this way, each of the constituent ingredients is cooked perfectly with nothing overcooked.

Here's a sketch of how I made this batch of lamb stew which is pretty much identical to how we would have made it at the restaurant, if we could have sold something as pedestrian as stew. Fine dining customers, especially those for whom such a meal is an unusual splurge, usually want to order something "luxurious" that they can brag about to their friends: steak, lobster, foie gras, etc.

This tendency makes it really hard to sell something such as a stew, which you must do if you are running a nose-to-tail restaurant like ours that was based on whole animal butchery. Selling the non-glamorous parts of the animal at such a restaurant involves a precise combination of wording on the menu and pricing ("menu engineering"), but that is a topic that would require an entire chapter in a foodservice textbook. It is a topic in which I am highly versed but which is way beyond the scope of this, or any, blogpost. If you're a chef reading this and need help, I do consult.

Step 1: Make a Great Stock

To make the stock, I had been saving scraps of meat and bones over the last few days. This stock was made from lamb trimmings, steak trimmings, the backbones from spatchcocking game hens, the bones leftover from the roast game hens, and a few chunks of pork neckbones.

To start, toss the bones and some aromatic vegetables (carrots, celery, onions in chunks) with oil and roast in a hot oven (400-450), turning as necessary, until the bones and vegetables are really well browned. 

Stock Bones Before Roasting

Well-Caramelized Bones After Roasting

Once the bones were roasted (about 45 minutes with four turns at about 400F), I removed them to the stock pot, covered them with water, and then poured very hot water onto the sheet tray and scraped up all the brown bits (what we call in chef-ese the fond or "bottom" in French). I then poured the water and brown bits into the stock pot so as not to lose any flavor.

If I were making a super-fancy stock, I would pour lamb stock over the bones instead of water, which would be called a double-stock. I often make chicken soup by cooking raw chicken in chicken stock, yielding a double stock just to get a more intense chicken flavor, our poultry in the US largely being bland.

Once the bones and liquid are in the stock pot, I added other flavorings such as leek leaves, onion peels, parsley stems, a sprig of rosemary, and a couple sprigs of thyme. These items add depth of flavor; the onion peels also add brown color and they were used as a dye in olden days. I often collect these bits in a bag in the freezer to add to my stocks.

Step 2: Prepare Each Ingredient Separately

Once the stock had cooked slowly for about 4-5 hours, I removed it from the heat, strained out the solids, and returned the stock to the stockpot. While the stock was coming back to a light boil, I cut into bite-sized cubes the remainder of a lamb shoulder that I had roasted to medium rare.

I then cut a couple yellow potatoes and a couple large carrots into the same size pieces as the lamb and poached first the potatoes and then the carrots in the stock until they were done. Then I put a bag of frozen pearl onions into the stock to cook. I am not ashamed to admit that I use frozen pearl onions; the labor and cost savings in using them is immense.

At the restaurant, we would have focused on using baby vegetables rather than cut ones, just to up the wow factor of the dish. I would have asked my growers to harvest tiny carrots and new potatoes and my crew and I would have probably stood around and peeled small shallots in place of the pearl onions.

It's likely we might have used baby hakurei turnips and tiny chanterelle mushrooms as well, in the appropriate seasons. All these ingredients and all this work would yield what we call in chef-ese a very soigné ("carefully prepared" in French) dish, but man, that's too much expense and labor for home cooking!

Mid-Stream in Cooking Each Ingredient Separately

Step 3: Finish the Gravy and Reheat the Stew

Once all the vegetables were cooked in the stock (and thereby lent their flavors to the stock), I then continued to reduce the original gallon and a half (six quarts, roughly 5.5 liters) down to the final volume of gravy that I wanted, concentrating the flavors. I then seasoned the stock with salt and white pepper to taste. You really don't want to season a stock before it is reduced because you'll end up concentrating the seasoning and will end up with an oversalted stock.

A professional hint that I have passed on to many, many young cooks: if your highly reduced stock tastes flat, add a drop or two of vinegar (I like sherry vinegar for this) and see how that helps. Highly reduced stocks are likely to be flat and bland because of the highly concentrated amount of gelatin that they contain. Acid will bring new life to such a stock.

Once I seasoned my stock to my taste, I made a batch of beurre manié, roughly equal parts flour and room temperature butter kneaded into a paste. Kneading the flour and the butter creates a great sauce thickener that you can whisk into a stock, eliminating any worry of lumps in your sauce.

I added small lumps of beurre manié to my simmering sauce, whisking it in, until the gravy was as thick as I wanted. A decent rule of thumb is that one tablespoon of flour and one tablespoon of butter will thicken one cup of liquid to a heavy cream consistency.

A lot of chefs will skip the beurre manié altogether, opting to sauce their meat and vegetables with a glace or demi-glace, both highly concentrated and very thick stocks. I find these sauces to be too thick and too sticky for my liking, but that's just me. YMMV: your mileage may vary.

All that is left is to combine the stew ingredients with the gravy and reheat. You can do this in any fashion; this time, I put everything into a casserole and reheated it in the oven. At the restaurant, we would have assembled an individual portion up on the range top and then put the hot stew in an oven-proof serving dish into a very hot oven for five minutes or so before calling for a runner to take it to the dining room. [More than likely, we would have covered it with a sheet of puff pastry and baked it until the pastry was golden and risen.]

Lamb Stew, Ready to Serve

These are a few hints on how a professional chef might approach a humble stew with an eye to elevating it slightly. There's nothing difficult about this method, but it does involve a significant amount of time to do. If you have time to do this, it will elevate your stew game. If not, at least you may better appreciate all the pains to which chefs go to assemble even the most humble of dishes for you.

Porcini Onions for Steak

Ann loves steak. Ed does not love it. What to do?

When I say that I do not love steak, it does not mean that I do not like the flavor of it, that I have some moral objection to it, or that I will not eat it. To the contrary: I like the flavor of steak; I am OK that we raise these animals for food; and, I certainly will eat steak, but I prefer pork or lamb or duck.

Strip Steaks with Porcini Onions and Beurre Rouge

My not loving steak has to do with a few things, I believe, if I am to dig down in my mind. First, as a retired professional chef, I have cooked many thousands and thousands of steaks. Perhaps familiarity breeds contempt. Perhaps also, it annoyed me that so many people ordered steak rather than the more creative dishes on the menu. Ultimately, we stopped serving steak altogether at the restaurant, moving more to a seven-course tasting format that had no room for honking slabs of beef.

Also, braising is my favorite style of cooking. There is something incredible that happens when you cook a tough protein slowly for hours and hours that elevates that protein to food nirvana status. I love the fork tender nature of long-cooked beef and for me, that texture wins out each time over steak.

More importantly though, I think, is that my palate loves flavor and big, bold flavor at that. And while I appreciate the umami-laden flavor of a finely raised, aged, and cooked steak, there are a gazillion other foods that would appeal more to my palate.

Finally, I grew up without money. Beef in general and steak in particular were luxuries that never graced our table. Historically, the fiscally conservative part of me had always found that steak was priced out of my budget. It was more important to save money for my kid's college education than it was to eat steak.

But fast forward to the present day in which I do the grocery shopping for our house. My doing the shopping really started during COVID when Ann was confined to the house for fear of infection and has continued ever since. Prior to that, I was running a restaurant and Ann did the food shopping. I was never home during meal times, however.

Truth also be told, Ann does not like my style of shopping which is to make an exact list of what I want in the order that it appears on the store's shelves, to get in the store and make a beeline from one needed ingredient to the next, and to get out as efficiently as possible. I am certain that this stems from the restaurant days when I had almost zero time to make weekly forays to buy certain things at retail that were not available from our farmers and foragers or not convenient to order from distributors.

In contrast, it seems to me that shopping for Ann is more closely akin to entertainment. It seems to amuse her to bounce all over the store looking at everything quite apparently at random. Given that I find little joy in the chore of shopping, we chafe at each other's shopping style. But I digress.

Because I do the shopping and the bulk of the weekly menu planning, beef really isn't ever on my shopping radar, which has caused Ann to become increasingly more vocal about the lack of beef in our diet. I believe that she would eat steak several nights a week if she had her druthers.

Knowing that I am not the sole arbiter of our diet, I have been making a conscious effort of late to bring home beef from the store at least a couple times a month. To wit, I made ossobuco last week and this week, I brought home some decent looking strip steaks.

We were sitting on the sofa, both knowing that steak was on the night's menu and sipping a rare bottle of Cab (generally, too heavy for us and we prefer lighter grapes such as Nebbiolo, Pinot Noir, and Sangiovese). Suddenly, Ann mentioned somewhat wistfully and seemingly out of nowhere, "I'd really love some mushrooms with the onions for the steak."

We had already discussed onions for the steak and I was going to quasi-caramelize some to have with the beef. Mushrooms were a new wrinkle and one that I was almost unprepared for.

I do not like and cannot really abide the ubiquitous common mushrooms in both their color forms: white mushrooms (champignons de Paris) and the brown portobello/cremini form. My dislike is mostly textural; unless these mushrooms are seared really hard, I find them off-puttingly rubbery. And there is also the flavor that I cannot tolerate; even the smell of these mushrooms makes me gag a bit.

Interestingly and paradoxically enough, I do really like a lot of wild mushrooms as well as cultivated shiitake. Kings among the wild mushrooms for me are porcini, which I mainly love in their dried state as drying really concentrates and improves their flavor. So, I always keep a canister of wickedly expensive dried porcini in the pantry.

To sate Ann's desire for mushrooms, I grabbed the remaining handful of porcini from the pantry and put them to rehydrate in a bowl of water. And to keep dinner simple, I decided to chop those porcini and add them and their rehydrating liquid to a couple of sliced yellow onions that had been sweating and nearing caramelization on the range for the past hour.

The outcome, once the porcini liquid was reduced to nothing, was an incredible mushroom and onion umami bomb for our steaks. Now having discovered this, I want to keep it in my culinary arsenal and that means keeping it top of mind, hence this post.

Over the years, we had done many onion-based condiments for steak at the restaurant, all much more complex than simple mix of porcini and onions. For example, we used to cook down an incredible onion and bacon jam with stout. I loved it as a condiment on its own, but something always nagged at me about the smoky bacon flavor with steak. I love bacon on my cheeseburger, but I always found that the bacony jam clashed a bit with our fantastic steaks. I think I have silenced that little nagging inner voice (chefs are highly self-critical) forever with this simple mushroom and onion condiment.

Labor Day 2022

Labor Day means less to me now than when I was actively working, even though I never really had the chance to celebrate it when I was working. At the restaurant, Monday was a workday for me and at the winery, Labor Day was a decent retail sales day, so no day off for me. But now, it is a chance to celebrate the end of summer. Ann and I both thought that we should do something a little out of the ordinary. Out of the ordinary means meat, which doesn't figure frequently in our diet.

And what better way to celebrate Labor Day than by hitting the grill? Silly me, I forgot we were out of propane, but that comes in a few sentences. We both love great sausages on the grill and recently we have found Bangers and Brews, a local eatery that makes (and retails!) great dogs. Up until now, we have been disappointed in the local sausages. A few trips to Bangers and Brews has solidified for us that their andouille is one of our favorites and so last week, we visited, had a choripan and an andouille, and bought a pound of andouille to bring home with us.

Andouille, Smoked and Spicy

We both love peppers and onions on our sausages, so I picked up extra onions and poblanos at the grocery store, poblano being the only mild green pepper I use (aside from a random Anaheim). I really do not care for the assertive flavor of green bell peppers. When I went to hit the grill on the afternoon of Labor Day, I realized that we were out of propane. Like duh, the empty propane tank is in the house sitting by the back door!

Poblanos and Yellow Onions

So plan B: hit the stove. We decided to eat late afternoon because we had plans to hear a band that evening, doors open at six. We were watching a movie on TV, Casablanca maybe?, and while watching that, I started the onions and peppers cooking. It takes a half an hour or so to get them meltingly tender. Meanwhile, I put the andouille in a dry pan over low heat and let them take their time in browning and getting warm and crispy.

Because our dogs were bunless and we wanted to eat them on the sofa while watching the movie, I sliced them, put the slices in a bowl, topped them with a big pile of peppers and onions, and then slathered on a gracious plenty of chimichurri from a batch I made last week to eat on carne asada.

Andouille, Onions and Peppers, Chimichurri

Recipe: Chimichurri

Folks, chimichurri is not a constant thing that can be captured in a one-size-fits-all recipe. It is a loose sauce that everyone wings based on an inexact formula and everyone's version is no doubt slightly different. I am sure people measure ingredients, but I've never seen it. Following is an idea of how I made mine this time. In looking back at my recipe from 2008 on the restaurant blog, I see that even I am not consistent in how I make it. Whatever! It's all good!

1 bunch cilantro, stemmed and finely chopped

1 bunch parsley, stemmed and finely chopped

4 cloves garlic, finely minced

1 large shallot, finely minced

1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

1 teaspoon Greek (not Mexican) oregano

1/2 teaspoon Kosher salt

1/4 cup red wine vinegar

3/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

Mix all ingredients well. Taste for acid and oil balance. I like my sauce fairly tart, but tartness depends on the acidity in the vinegar and all vinegar is different. Here, I have specified one part vinegar to three parts oil. I generally make it closer to 1:2 or sometimes 1:1. If your chimi is too tart, add more oil. Too oily, add more vinegar. Taste for seasoning and add more salt, spice, and oregano as you desire.

Some people like a more fluid sauce, some people like more solids. This version is more solid heavy. If you want closer to a vinaigrette, double the amount of liquids in the sauce. It's easy! Go nuts!

Labor Day Concert

On Monday afternoons, our recent habit is to go to Silver Moon Brewing to partake of half-price beers on locals day. But we skipped it on Labor Day in favor of going later in the day to see a band. They have an outdoor concert space that they call the Moon Room and they book small acts to play there from time to time. It really is a fun place to watch decent bands.

For Labor Day, Silver Moon had booked a group from the Bay Area called Proud Mary, a four woman group self-billed as the gayest CCR tribute band. Even if our kids have never heard of CCR, who in our age bracket doesn't love CCR?

Proud Mary on Stage

Gonzo Girl!

A Horse Great Dane

We had a wonderful time and the band really was a lot of fun and pretty talented too. Moreover, we met a lot of people who aren't the usual crowd that we see on Monday, including a couple of guys who just moved to Bend from New Mexico just seven days prior. We made plans later in the week to show them a couple of our favorite breweries and food trucks. But most of all, we enjoyed the huge and young brindled Great Dane pictured above. He towered above the table at which we were seated and every now and then, I would get a big old slobbery muzzle in my face. We really miss our two dogs Grace and Charlie who we have lost in the past year.

Pork Tenderloin Medallions on Sweet Potato Hash

Yesterday was a blah, chilly, mainly cloudy, slightly rainy day and a very good day to be inside. These are the kinds of days when I need to get in the kitchen and cook to relieve the sense of having been a slug for the day. In short, it was a good day to make something a little more involved for dinner.

Pork Tenderloin Medallions on Sweet Potato Hash

My restaurant was highly seasonal with menus changing each day depending on the ingredients our farmers, fisherman, and foragers had found for us. Because of this, our winter and early spring menus were of necessity creative to make good use of the storage vegetables on which we depended.

One of those storage vegetables that we always had in vast quantities was sweet potatoes. Out of necessity, we came up with a sweet potato hash to accompany a wide variety of proteins, and I decided to reprise a version of that hash at home last night. This hash is diced sweet potatoes, onions, and dried cherries, flavored with a touch of garlic and then flambéed with Bourbon.

Start with Raw Sweet Potatoes and Onions

To start the hash, cook the raw sweet potatoes and onions until the sides are a bit browned and the sweet potatoes are just tender. At the restaurant, we might have started with cubes of slab bacon before adding the veggies or we might have added cubed pork belly after the veggies were cooked. For a vegan dish, we would have proceeded just as I did last evening. We might have even added Cajun-spiced pecans to the hash once it was done. This idea is just that, an idea from which to launch your imagination.

Flaming the Hash with Bourbon

Once the vegetables were cooked, I added a bit of minced garlic and a handful of dried cherries. Once the garlic started smelling really good, I added a shot of Bourbon and tilted the pan towards the flame to light it. The hash is quite savory from the onions and garlic, yet it gets a touch of sweetness from the sweet potatoes and cherries and a hint of oaky vanilla from the Bourbon. This sweet profile really resonates with pork and duck, and even gamier meats such as elk, caribou/reindeer, or venison.

Pork Tenderloin Medallions

Pork tenderloin is inexpensive and so super simple to cook that it should be a go-to protein in your refrigerator. It takes seconds to remove the little piece of silverskin from the head end and mere seconds more to cut it into say one-inch segments. Turn the segments on end and flatten them gently with your palm and after a good dose of salt, they're ready for the pan in which they will cook very quickly, perhaps two minutes on one side and another minute on the flip side.

To finish the plating, I wilted some spinach and placed it between the hash and the pork on the plate. A drizzle of honey and a sprinkle of smoked salt finished the dish. At the restaurant, we might have topped the pork with a few fern fiddleheads, a pat of toasted pecan compound butter, or even a drizzle of chipotle honey, the spice working well with the sweetness of the dish.

This is one of those super simple dishes that you can use to impress people. They never need to know how easy it is to make. And it makes a great springboard for your imagination to morph it into many other kinds of dishes.

Boeuf Bourguignon

Ann has been asking me recently to make dishes for her that she has never had before. It's great for me in that I don't have to come up with an idea about what to make for dinner and I get to revisit some dishes that I haven't cooked in a while, a while extending to decades in some cases.

A couple weeks back, she asked me to make her the classic boeuf bourguignon, braised beef with bacon, mushrooms, and onions. It's a dish I know well, but not a dish that I have cooked very often (or eaten in restaurants) because it is quintessential French home cooking and not something that one eats out at restaurant.

At my own restaurant, we couldn't sell beef bourguignon because customers considered it too familiar and not soigné enough for a high-end fine dining restaurant. So we often made rabbit bourguignon rather than beef. Even so, we couldn't serve the rabbit bourguignon as the braise that it was. We had pull the meat off the bones and use that as a sauce for pasta, a filling for puff pastry or ravioli, or some other creative take on the dish. 

That's a long-winded way of saying that I love beef bourguignon and haven't cooked it all that much (and not at all in recent decades) because I couldn't sell it. And an even longer way of saying that I was very much looking forward to making it for Ann.

Boeuf Bourguignon avec Spätzle

Boeuf bourguignon is a classic slow-cooked braise of beef, a method of cooking meat that breaks down tough and less expensive cuts. That said, the point of braising beef is not so much for the resulting unctuously tender meat, but for the thick, glossy sauce. The long, slow cooking in a moderate oven breaks down the collagen in the meat and gristle, thickening the sauce, and at the same time giving it both a delightful mouthfeel and a velvety sheen. It is that sauce that makes braises so delicious and comforting.

In France, boeuf bourguignon is not served by itself, but with a starch designed to trap and intermingle with the silky sauce. Most commonly, it is served with potatoes of some fashion, often mashed, at times steamed or boiled, or prepared in other ways. Rather than potatoes, I prefer a more Alsatian approach and so I decided to serve my boeuf bourguignon on spätzle, which come to find out, Ann had not had before either.

You see the dish above, chunks of beef and pearl onions sitting atop spätzle, all napped with an unctuous sauce laden with porcini mushrooms, bacon, onions, and carrots. My only regret about making this dish now in the middle of winter is that I had no baby carrots with which to garnish the dish. For a primer on prepping pearl onions, see this post. For making spätzle, see here.

While the movie Julie & Julia did a lot in this country to popularize Julia Child's specific version of boeuf bourguignon, there are other versions out there, and I have developed my own method over the past 40 years that I'll outline below.

Browning Beef Chuck in Bacon Grease

Step one in almost any braise is to brown the meat well on all sides. In this case, I am browning a pound and a third of really nice looking beef chuck (shoulder) in bacon grease left from rendering bacon lardons. I chose this particular chuck because it is really well marbled.

Traditionally in France, the dish incorporates lardons, little bits of pork belly akin to bacon. It is often found plain and less commonly salted or smoked as is American bacon. Consequently, American bacon is often parboiled to help rid it of smoke, but I use a lightly smoked bacon and I don't mind the tiny bit of smoke that it introduces to the dish. It is hardly noticeable in the heady mix of flavors from the beef, mushrooms, and copious red wine in the dish.

I started by cooking in my cocotte three large thick slices of bacon, cut into lardons, to try out some grease in which to sear the cubes of beef. It took a good 15 minutes or more to brown the beef. You want to take your time when searing the beef, because this is what starts to develop really great flavor. Also at my house, browning more slowly on medium flame keeps the damned smoke detector from going off.

Brown the Beef Well on all Sides

You Want this Buildup ("Fond") on the Pan Bottom

Mise en Place

On the cutting board above, you see most of the other ingredients that are going into the braise: porcini mushrooms that are rehydrating, rendered bacon lardons, pearl onions, tomato paste, two carrots, and an onion. Once the porcini rehydrated, I chopped them into bite-sized pieces and saved the mushroom stock for the braise.

Deglazing with Aromatics

Once the beef is browned, remove it from the pan. You'll see a dark buildup on the bottom of the pan, which we call the fond, literally "bottom" in French. This is the point at which you add your aromatic vegetables to the pan. In this case, you can see that I have diced an onion and two carrots, the traditional vegetables for boeuf bourguignon. These go into the cocotte along with a few sprigs of parsley, a bay leaf, a little thyme, a tablespoon or so of thyme, three minced cloves of garlic, a tablespoon or so of tomato paste, and a bay leaf.

The steam generated from searing the vegetables should loosen the fond, all the good bits on the bottom of the pan. Scrape well to help loosen these flavor builders. Once the vegetables are cooked to the point where the onions are translucent, sprinkle a couple of tablespoons of flour on the vegetables and cook another couple of minutes, stirring well and frequently. This flour will help give the sauce its unctuousness.

At this point, I added the bacon lardons, the chopped porcini, and the porcini broth (making sure not to include any sand or dirt from the bottom of the bowl). Next, in went the better part of a bottle of red wine, local Petit Verdot if you must know, enough to come about 2/3 of the way up the sides of the beef cubes. When braising, you don't want to totally submerge the meat; that would be more technically a stew than a braise.

It is traditional to use Pinot Noir in this braise, but as I'll get into at the bottom of this post, my palate says that beef wants a more substantial wine than Pinot Noir. And I happen to have some inexpensive local Petit Verdot that will fill the bill admirably. I'll save the expensive Pinot to drink at some other time. I would never cook with a great wine. At the end of the day, you'll end up with a dish that tastes identical to that cooked with a passable wine and will have wasted an opportunity to drink a great wine.

Ready for the Oven

Out of the Oven at Three Hours

After adding the porcini stock and the wine, bring the braise up to a boil, cover it, and put it in a moderate (350F) oven. After 90 minutes, I pulled it out to check the liquid level which had evaporated to just about the level that you see in the photo above, about halfway, just where I wanted the finished dish to be. But I wanted to cook it about another 90 minutes to really bring out the best in the beef, so I added water to the cocotte to bring it back to the original level.

After another 90 minutes, I pulled the cocotte out of the oven. The beef cubes, as you see in the photo above, were really caramelized on the top. I flipped them over so that the tops could rehydrate just a bit as they cooled.

Browning the Pearl Onions

At dinner time, I put a bunch of prepped pearl onions in a skillet with a teaspoon of butter and cooked them slowly for 8 minutes, rotating them every couple of minutes. It is traditional when cooking pearl onions to add a touch of sugar to caramelize them, but adding sweetness is not my thing. If I had baby carrots, I would have done the same thing with them as with the onions.

In another pan, I reheated the spätzle with another tiny bit of butter, stirring now and again to prevent as much sticking as possible. While the onions and spätzle were cooking, I rewarmed the beef cubes in the sauce, then removed the beef and held it warm while thinning and seasoning the sauce to my liking.

All that was left was to put the beef cubes and onions on top of a mound of spätzle, then nap it all with the sauce. It was incredible eating!

It's Not Burgundy, But....

For wine with our boeuf bourguignon, Ann requested an older Bordeaux. The traditional wine for boeuf bourguignon is Burgundy, but we live in the Burgundy of the United States and we drink the local Pinot Noir all the time. Burgundy is therefore pretty much our day-to-day wine. I know: poor us! I also believe that in general, beef pairs just a little better with Bordeaux grapes than it does with Pinot Noir.

So I selected a bottle of Léoville Barton from 1990, one of the very best vintages of the last century. This is a bottle that was part of a case that I got on release in 1993 or 1994 for $240, less than the price of a bottle today! This wine never ceases to amaze me. Even though it was probably bottled sometime in 1992, it appears to be a much younger wine. Visually, it looks to be about 10 years old.

On the nose, the aromas of cassis and black fruits are still vivid, but they have a really pretty and funky (in the best sense of the word) background of secondary bottle bouquet, that unmistakable aroma that we all look for in an aged wine. On the palate, it is still going very strong, leading with black Cabernet Sauvignon fruit combined with still vibrant acidity. Further along in the palate, the older wine flavors of tobacco and leather come in, framed with extremely pleasant fine-grained tannins. It is by all measures a gorgeous wine.

This is a wine that, as good as it is today, is still improving. At thirty years old, it tastes like a wine of a mere ten years. I would love to be able to taste this wine in another thirty years. Given that another thirty years is not guaranteed, I think I will drink the last of it long before then. I don't want to leave this gorgeous wine behind.

It was great to revisit one of the classic dishes of French home cooking. Although I am well schooled in classic French cuisine, I don't cook it all that often and so this was good fun. More than that, I was really happy to introduce Annie to both boeuf bourguignon and spätzle, two dishes that she never had the chance to eat, growing up in a full Italian family. And that Léoville Barton really made the experience for us!

Kitchen Basics: Prepping Pearl Onions

Although pearl onions are not common in home cooking, we used a lot of them at the restaurant. They are perfectly sized for great restaurant presentations in which you can leave them whole for aesthetic reasons.

To do this requires that you peel them and if you don't know a simple trick, they can be a bear to peel. There's a reason why a lot of produce houses have custom cut divisions that supply already peeled pearl onions in large quantities. They can be labor intensive.

Slice off the Root End

Boil for Two Minutes

Squeeze from the Stem End

Slice off the root end of each little onion. Put the onions in boiling water for two minutes. Remove and cool them to the point where you can handle them. Squeeze from the stem end and the onion will pop right out of its skin. You may need or want to trim the stem end a bit.

Snowy Day Soup

Two days ago we were going to have turkey-vegetable soup, but being in a bit of a celebratory mood, I changed my mind and decided to make pappardelle con ragù, saving the soup for yesterday. And I'm so glad I did. It started snowing mid-morning and did not let up until after dark. If ever there were a list of days for a bowl of warm and comforting soup, a snowy day would be close to the top of the list.

A Perfect Soup Day

As transplanted easterners, we were delighted to see the snow. Snow here on the valley floor is rare. Sure, the tens and tens of feet of snowpack in the Cascades and in the Coast Range is impressive, but on a year-in-year-out basis, we don't get snow down here at only 150 feet of elevation. In fact, on most days this January, I have been wearing short pants during our daily walks. This mild Mediterranean climate lets us grow figs and olives with near impunity and causes our rosemary to explode into large shrubs. But it causes some of us who grew up with snow to miss the winter season, especially the bright red cardinals silhouetted against the snow.

Turkey Vegetable Soup

Why is soup so comforting? I think it is instinctive in humans to make soup for warmth and comfort. Why else do we turn to soup naturally when we are unwell? I don't think the higher part of our brain is actually involved; it is my private hypothesis that humans have been making soup for eons and at some primal level, know instinctively that it is simultaneously warming, nourishing, comforting, and hydrating, all things we desire when we feel ill or in need of comfort.

Theories aside, I try to make soup frequently in the winter. This winter, my go-to soup is turkey-vegetable. I bought a case of turkey necks from the grocery store just after the holidays when the meat manager was delighted to move them out of his freezer and into my cart.

Making soup is a two-day process. The first day, I roast the turkey necks (and in this case, the detritus from a chicken carcass) to golden brown, then deglaze the roasting pan, and simmer all the roasted meats and bones for a few hours to extract all the goodness. Into the fridge the stockpot goes to set up so that I can remove all the fat from the top the next day.

Then I rewarm everything, pull the meat and bones out, pick all the meat, and add the meat and vegetables back to the stock. The soup cooks for 15-20 minutes just before we want to eat so that the vegetables retain their texture.

This soup contains tomatoes, onions, leeks, carrots, celery, kale, black-eyed peas, stelline pasta, rehydrated porcini mushrooms, and a swirl of pesto at the end.

Spaghetti Squash and Black Bean Tostadas

Spaghetti Squash and Black Bean Tostadas

The last time that I made spaghetti squash with black beans and baked it into a casserole, Ann commented that she'd really like the dish if I were to make it as a tostada topping. You can find the recipe for the topping at the link above. Last evening, I baked a spaghetti squash and made the tostadas that she asked for.

Making Tostadas

Although I see bags of tostadas flying off the shelves at the local supermarket, I don't see the point of buying them, if you have time to make them yourself. All it takes is a bag of corn tortillas, two sheet trays, an oven, and about 45 minutes. Although I lay out the process below, there is a step-by-step photo shoot of how to do it here.

To make tostadas, I lay 8 corn tortillas on a sheet tray, 3 along each side and two in the center. Then I top the sheet tray with another such that the tortillas are trapped between the two sheet trays. This will keep the tostada shells relatively flat.

The tortillas go into a moderate (350F) oven for fifteen minutes, at which point I pull them out of the oven and take the top sheet tray off. This lets the water vapor escape. Then I flip the tortillas over. At this point, you will see that they have shrunk to the point where all eight fit on the sheet tray with almost no overlap.

Re-covering the tortillas, I put them back into the oven for another 15 minutes and repeat the same process for a final 15 minutes. At this point, the tortillas should be dry and crisp. Pull them out and leave them uncovered until you are ready to eat. The hot tortillas will continue to evaporate any last bits of water in them as they cool.

You should eat the tostadas right away, but if you cannot, once they have cooled to room temperature, you can store them for a very long period in a tightly covered container. Humidity is their enemy so keep them cool and dry.

New Year's Black-Eyed Peas

It's an old tradition, at least in the South, that we eat black-eyed peas for good luck in the new year. I don't know what in the hell happened in 2020: I assure you that I ate my black-eyed peas. This year, I wanted to do a dish reminiscent of my time in New Orleans, a creole take on a black-eyed pea stew.

Creole Black-Eyed Peas

Ready to Cook

The dish is simply made. I decided to start with two pounds of dried black-eyed peas because I wanted leftovers for lunches. After draining and rinsing the soaked peas, I put them in the slow cooker with a chunk of smoked turkey neck, large can of diced tomatoes and juice, a lot of minced garlic (an entire bulb, minced), and a bunch of "trinity." My trinity comprised two poblanos, a bunch of green onions, a huge yellow onion, and three stalks of celery, all diced. I filled the slow cooker with water and put it on high for seven hours (and it was done in about 6:45).

Later in the day, I mixed up a batch of my Cajun spice mix, which I call Magic Dust. I would have put it in from the get go, but I was out. My spice mix contains thyme, salt, black pepper, white pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, cayenne pepper, basil, oregano, smoked paprika, mustard, and bay leaves. I grind the basil, oregano, mustard, thyme, and bay to order. My ratios have been determined by trial and error over forty years. I don't currently have any onion powder, so I went heavy on the granulated garlic. I added three heaping spoonsful of spice mix to the stew.

Once the beans were tender, I mashed a bunch of them against the side of the slow cooker with the back of a wooden spoon. This helps thicken the stew, otherwise, you end up with a sort of thin black-eyed pea soup, not what I was aiming at.

Although this stew contains a chunk of smoked turkey for flavor, it would make a fantastic vegetarian stew by omitting the meat. My Cajun spice mix has enough smoked paprika in it to give a smoky flavor without the smoked meat.

Soupe à l'Oignon

When discussing our holidays back around Thanksgiving, Ann requested that I make her French onion soup, known as soupe à l'oignon in France, for Christmas Eve. I had already had this soup in mind, but not necessarily for Christmas Eve, because we have a 50-pound sack of onions in the pantry to use before they go bad. I don't think that she realized that to make a great batch of this soup is a fair amount of work.

It's a favorite soup of mine that never fails to remind me of all the times that my mother and I made it. When I was a boy, she would put me to work peeling and chopping the onions after which I would take turns keeping an eye on the caramelizing onions, helping to keep them from sticking and burning to the bottom of the pan.

Soupe à l'Oignon with Gratinéed Crouton

Although I have made onion soup in a single day, I decided to spread it into a three-day process, if for no other reason that to have the refrigerator to aid in removing the fat from the soup.

Day 1: Ready to Roast Beef Soup Bones

Day 1: Roasted Beef Soup Bones

Day 1: Beef Cheek Meat Ready to Braise

French onion soup wants to be made with a great braising cut of beef. My favorites for braising are, in order: cheek meat, shin meat, and chuck. The cheeks are the most wonderful cut on the animal and we used to serve a lot at the restaurant. Customers would never order them by the name "cheeks" so I adopted a bit of subterfuge in calling them nuggets. We would braise them until tender, refrigerate them to solidify them, then roll them in panko.

At service, we would fry them until the panko was golden and top them with a sauce made from the braising liquid. They appeared on the menu as "crispy beef nuggets" and would sell out pretty instantly. So good were they that regulars, having tasted them once, would not make the mistake of passing them up the next time that they appeared on the menu.

I was thrilled to be able to find cheek meat in my grocery for my Christmas Eve onion soup.

Day 1: Deglazing Browned Beef Cheeks with Pinot Noir

On Day 1, I roasted about five pounds of beef soup bones (split knuckles) and at the same time, braised four pounds of beef cheek meat in Pinot Noir. I transferred the soup bones (less the rendered fat) and the braised cheek meat to a big soup pot and covered everything in water. The soup pot went into the fridge overnight. The water let all the fat rise above the bones and meat so that the following day, I could remove the solidified fat before starting in on the stock.

Day 2 saw me add some thyme branches to the defatted stock and put the stockpot on the stove to cook down for several hours. I removed and discarded the soup bones and thyme, then pulled out the cheek meat. After the cheek meat cooled, I shredded it and pulled out and discarded any remaining fat. The shredded meat went back into the stock and the stock pot went back in the refrigerator, once again for the liquid fat to solidify on top.

Day 3: Fifteen Pounds of Onions to Peel

Day 3: Sliced Onions Ready to Caramelize

Day 3: Caramelized Onions with a Little Flour

Day 3 saw me defat the stock once again and then start in on the onions. You can see that fifteen pounds of onions mounded up and over the top of my pot, then cooked down to about a quarter of a pot full. The caramelization process took several hours. I inverted a skillet over the pot at first to help steam the onions. Quickly, the pot filled about two thirds full of water.

At this point, I uncovered the pot and let it cook on fairly high heat to evaporate the water, stirring every few minutes. Gradually, the onions went from white to cream to yellow to lightly brown to golden brown. The more caramelized the onions became, the more often I had to stir.

Once the onions became fully caramelized and very dry, I stirred in three heaping spoonsful of flour and let that cook for a couple of minutes. Then I deglazed the pan with a quarter bottle of Champagne before adding the onions to the pot of hot beef stock.

The soup cooked for an additional ninety minutes before I seasoned and served it.

Christmas Eve: 2010 Pinot Noir to Celebrate

Onion soup is naturally sweet from all the concentrated sugars in the onions. All this sugar wants a fairly acidic wine to help cut through the richness. Champagne is a great pairing, but then, we live in a world-class Pinot Noir region, so it was Pinot Noir for us. This 10-year old wine has mellowed enough to work with the mellow long-cooked flavors of the soup, while still having a lot of acid to scour our tongues and make each spoon of soup a pleasure.

While there is nothing difficult about making onion soup, it is somewhat labor intensive. But for a special occasion for a special girl, it was totally worth the effort.

Vegetable Tacos

Vegetable tacos are something that I started making seriously this summer during grilling season and because they are so delicious, have become a regular quick dinner chez nous. Since I first posted about them back in October, I have formulated a strategy for making them that I will outline below, using vegetables that I prepared stovetop.

Vegetable Tacos

As I have been experimenting with dozens of veggie tacos, I have fallen into a procedure which involves mixing cooked ingredients with raw ingredients just before serving. This yields a warm, but super fresh taco.

Preparing the Raw Ingredients

In a large bowl, I mix the raw ingredients: green onion, cilantro, tomatoes, cotija, and finely minced chipotle. In season, I would likely include raw corn in this mix.

Searing the Cooked Ingredients

For the cooked ingredients, which I grill in good weather, the mix varies depending on what I have on hand. This pan contains onions, poblanos, yellow squash, and asparagus. Almost anything goes in veggie tacos and I have used eggplant, zucchini, and green beans this past summer. To mimic the intense cooking on the grill, sear the veggies hard if you are using a pan.

When the veggies are done, mix them immediately with the raw ingredients and season to taste with salt and spice. Serve with slices of lime on warm corn tortillas.

Although veggie tacos don't sound all that great, I assure you that they are delicious and addictive.

Shakshuka

It's cold, gray, and dreary here in Oregon during the shortest days of the year and only about 2 and a half months into our 8-month rainy season, there's no relief in sight. This drab weather has put me in the mood for warm, comforting, bright, and sunny food so I have planned to make shakshuka for dinner.

Shakshuka, a dish of eggs poached or baked directly in a tomato-based sauce, is common to North Africa and the Mediterranean. It's probably most commonly known as an Israeli breakfast dish, but the dish feels African to me, and I believe that it came to Israel when Jews from North Africa emigrated to Israel.

But who really knows. It is quite likely that eggs baked in tomatoes developed simultaneously in a lot of places, eggs and tomatoes both being inexpensive and common foods. Certainly the dish is also common on the northern side of the Med (think uova in purgatorio from Italy and oeufs à la provençale in France) and who among us in America has not feasted on huevos rancheros at our local Mexican restaurant?

No matter the dish's provenance, it is what I wanted to chase the dreary skies away and bring me back to summer for a few minutes.

Shakshuka: Baked Eggs

With shakshuka in mind, last week at the grocery store, I bought bright and cheerful yellow, orange, and red peppers, the best reminders of summer that I could find.

Garlic, Onions, Poblanos, and Colored Bell Peppers

Although the vegetables for shakshuka are traditionally chopped, I prefer to slice mine to give the resulting dish more texture.

Peppers and Onions Starting to Cook

In a deep sautoir, I heated enough olive oil to cover the bottom of the pan and then added all the sliced onions and peppers. Stirring frequently, I cooked the vegetables until they started to go limp. At this point, I added minced garlic, a little bit of cumin (not more than a teaspoon and a half for this large pan), and my secret spice, the barest hint of cinnamon. A touch of crushed red pepper flakes complete my spicing.

In a departure from many versions of shakshuka, mine is not a spicy dish in either of the senses: neither piquant from pepper nor containing a lot of spices. I've not found cinnamon to be a typical spice in other people's shakshuka, but for me, the barest pinch of ground cinnamon adds that mysterious hint of je ne sais quoi. It is at once subtly exotic, but wholly unrecognizable as cinnamon.

After Adding Tomatoes and Juice

To this large pan, after the vegetables became limp, I added a couple of large (28-ounce) cans of diced tomatoes in juice and I let it cook down for a good 45 minutes, wanting all the flavors to meld into a deliciously chunky sauce.

Eggs Ready to Cook

Once the sauce is thick and ready to eat, I season it and moderate the flame so that it just simmers. I make small wells in the sauce with a spoon and crack an egg into each hole. At this point, I will either place the pan into a moderate oven and bake uncovered or I will leave the pan on the stove top and cover it with a sheet tray. In both cases, I will serve the eggs with a copious amount of sauce once the egg whites have set.