Fancy Pants

I have this ridiculous cookbook that is a vanity publication from Relais & Châteaux, highlighting all the wonderful things that come out of their North American-based celebrity chefs’ kitchens. Chefs with last names like Keller, Vongerichten, and Boulud. Each glossy spread includes multiple recipes–for example, a 3-step pork brine, a sauce, lentils, and cauliflower 2 ways. You know, you’re typical Tuesday night dinner. It’s a really enormous, beautiful, & useless book. Or so I thought until I was looking for something to do with these short ribs I bought from Lewis Waite Farm a few months ago. They’d been taking up space in my freezer for too long, so I decided that the menu for dinner the other night was going to include some beef. 

The plan was not to make anything especially fancy, but my cookbooks tend to lean vegetarian, so I pulled this massive thing off my shelf and, naturally (given current trends in high-end restaurants), discovered multiple options. And one, even, from the Rancho Valencia in Rancho Santa Fe, California, that looked like my little galley kitchen could handle it. So I ran to the greenmarket, picked up a few missing ingredients, and got to work. 

First, an acorn squash, split, seeded, and roasted:

And then pureed with butter, cream, brown sugar, and star anise. 

Then a pile of shallots, peeled and simmered in red wine, with a sachet (or teabag) of black peppercorns, a bay leaf, and thyme.

Peeling shallots is definitely a job for your kitchen bitch. Or sous chef. 

But then we get to move onto the meat. After seasoning it with salt and letting it sit in the fridge overnight, it gets browned on both sides in a hot pan. 

Cook some onions, carrots, and celery over medium-high heat until they are more or less caramelized. 

Add tomato paste, crushed garlic cloves, black pepper, cinnamon, star anise, and bay leaf. 

Then in go some thyme, parsley, and red wine, followed by the ribs. Cover with water and veal demiglace (or stock, if you’re me), bring to a boil, and then simmer in the oven for about 3 hours. 

The very specific plating instructions involve something called a siphon, which requires an N2O charge. Alternately, spoon a little of the squash puree onto a plate, place a rib on top. Place a few shallots around the outside, and pour some of the wine reduction on top. 

There’s also something called a cocoa bordelaise (not pictured), with which you “nape” (?) the meat, but this was kind of a disaster for me, possibly because of the stock/demiglace switch. Hence the lack of picture.

On the whole, though, this was a big success. Even S., a notoriously finicky eater, asked for seconds. 

In Which Beef Makes a Rare Appearance

Regular readers (or anyone who’s eaten at my apartment) will know that I do not cook very much meat at home. But I found a new stash of recipes online recently, at a site called OrganicToBe, and was intrigued by their recipe for Grass-Fed Beef Short Ribs With Organic Beets.

Now, frankly, any recipe that explicitly calls for grass-fed meat or organic ingredients strikes me as being just as silly as a recipe that calls for a particular brand of tomato sauce. To my mind, it is simply understood that a home cook will always use the highest quality ingredients available to her. If she has access to organic ingredients and can afford them, then great. (And if she has homemade tomato sauce stashed away somewhere, that is always preferable to a jar of something storebought.) But that said, a good recipe is a good recipe, no matter how evangelical (or judgmental) its author. And evangelism in the cause of organic food is something I can get behind. Or at least not stand in the way of.

One of the benefits of not cooking with meat very often is that it makes it much easier to justify spending more money on the high quality stuff when I do (not that I find it difficult to justify spending all my money on food). So I stopped at one meat stand or another at the greenmarket and picked up some grass-fed short ribs. And other than that, I don’t think I needed to buy anything. I ditched the celery, replaced with leeks, because honestly, celery? That is one dislike I inherited from my mom and have not outgrown. What I must do sometime is buy a head of it (is that what you call a lot of celery stalks together? I don’t even know–a bunch?) and dice it and stick it in the freezer, because every once in a while, I need a single lonely stalk for some soup or stew, and I am just not ever going to buy a whole head to use so little, and then watch–and smell–the rest of it as it wastes away in the crisper. </rant> Point being, although celery and leeks have little in common besides color and a general shape, I decided a leek would be lovely in this recipe, and I had some on hand.

First, you season the meat with garam masala, salt, and pepper, and roast it in a very hot oven for 45 minutes, turning occasionally, until it’s browned.

While that’s cooking, chop up the veggies you intend to use–some shallots or onion, some garlic, some carrots, and that leek (or, you know, celery).

You will also need some herbs–parsley, thyme, and bay, a traditional bouquet garni. If you have a teabag to stuff them into, that makes it much easier to fish them out at the end. (Just tying them together with some kitchen twine works, too.)

While all this vegetable chopping and herb bundling is happening, the meat is doing its thing.

At which point you turn down the temperature to 375F and add in all those veggies and herbs, plus a cup of diced tomatoes (fresh is great, but so is canned), a couple of cups of some kind of broth (I used chicken because I always have it on hand, though beef would obviously be good, too, or vegetable), and about a half cup of red wine. Stir in some salt & pepper, plus more ground cloves than you think is really advisable, and stick it back in the oven. In retrospect, I think covering the dish would probably be wise here.

Let that cook for a while, anyway, around 90 minutes. Pour yourself a glass of wine from the bottle you opened. Take a nap, maybe, or catch up on Mad Men. Then scrub and trim a pound of beets and cut them into wedges.

Toss them in with the meat, stir it up, and let it cook another hour, until the beets are tender and the meat is basically falling off the bone. The original recipe says that at this point, you remove the beef and the beets, and then puree the rest of the veggies into a sauce, but that seems like one step too many for me. I liked the texture of having the bits of carrot, and still some pieces of tomato that hadn’t liquified completely. So you can do what you like, but for me, chunky was good.

Beef Short Ribs with Beets
Adapted from OrganicToBe
Makes 3-4 servings

2 lbs beef short ribs
1 Tbsp + 1 tsp garam masala
3 garlic cloves
3 shallots
3 carrots
1 leek

1/2 c full-bodied red wine
2 c vegetable, beef, or chicken broth
1 c diced tomatoes
2 sprigs thyme
2 sprigs parsley
1 bay leaf
1 tsp ground cloves
salt
fresh ground pepper
1 lb beets

Preheat the oven to 450F.

Sprinkle the garam masala all over the meat, along with some salt and pepper. Place in a dutch oven (uncovered) and roast for 45 minutes, turning occasionally, until the meat is browned on all sides. While it’s cooking, chop up the garlic, shallots, carrots, and leeks into smallish pieces. Also, tie up the herbs with some twine, or stuff them into a tea bag.

Remove the meat from the oven and reduce the heat to 375F. Add the chopped vegetables, wine, broth, tomatoes (with juice), herbs, cloves, and a good amount of salt and pepper. Roast for 1 1/2 hours, covered, basting periodically.

While that’s cooking, wash and trim the beets, and cut them into wedges. Add them to the pot, and stir it all up. Cook for another hour or so, until the beets and meat are tender.

Remove and discard the bay leaves and any sprigs in the sauce before serving.