Four little piggies were for breakfast. The rest are in the fridge.

Now, once you can get past the fact that these look vaguely obscene, they DO taste pretty good. They’re made with the one gluten-free bread recipe I think is good enough to make again, having made the same recipe a couple of weeks ago. I did something wrong, though, and got the batter too thin, then tried to compensate by adding flour mix, and got it a little too thick, so it’s kinda dry and crumbly. Tastes decent, though, thanks particularly to the addition of about a cup of crumbled and grated cotija cheese.

I’d been contemplating just HOW I was going to create pigs, being that GF breads are not a dough, but a thick batter, before they cook. What I need is something like my grandmother’s old cornstick pan – a cast-iron creation that had indentations which turned out cornsticks with a pattern that looked something like ears of corn. For Little Smokies — my sausage of choice for pigs — I need something that’s maybe 2 inches long, in an oval shape; then I could put in a bit of batter, add the sausage, top with a bit more batter, and that’d work out just about right.

But I don’t have such. So I made do with my mini-muffin pan, and planted a sausage in the middle of each mini-muffin. The batter is thick enough to keep it mostly standing upright. Some of ‘em leaned, and they’re really a little easier to eat that way.

I WILL find the appropriate pan. I will, I will, I will. Somewhere.

I even made a non-gf batch for NS. Biscuit dough, cooked him a half-dozen, put a dozen more uncooked in the freezer.

Full-o-gluten pigs for NS, left; gluten-free crumpets, right.

Had some leftover batter when I finished my 24 mini-muffins, so I made three crumpets in English muffin rings. Used one of those to make this sandwich for lunch:

A most worthwhile sandwich!

This would be a bacon-tomato-mozzarella sandwich. With bacon jam on one half of the crumpet, honey chipotle butter on the other, toasted, with a slab of tomato and a slab of mozzarella. It was a damn fine sandwich until the dawg knocked it onto the floor, at which point I cursed the dawg mightily and stuck her in her crate, brushed the dog hair off the sandwich and finished it.

Used the rest of that tomato to put together a salad of tuna, white beans and balsamic vinegar with diced tomatos, which will serve nicely for two or three lunches next week, just as the piggies will serve for breakfast. Cheap meal week for me! Then, as I had more tomatos than I needed, I peeled them and crushed them and have them on simmering for sauce — Marcella’s recipe, plus garlic and basil. I’ll probably freeze that in a couple of separate batches, and will have it for pizza or to convert over into vodka sauce and try over this gluten-free penne I’ve got.

And finally (well, not finally, because it was the first thing I did after breakfast), there’s a pot roast in the oven. I’ll save photos and description of that until later, and show you a before-and-after. Gonna roast some broccoli and some acorn squash with that, and there are potatos and carrots in it.

Back to the world of gluten-free baking. I’m starting, I think, to get a little bit of an idea of the mechanics of how it works. The high-starch flours — rice, potato, cornstarch, arrowroot, etc — don’t have a lot of taste, and tend to get gummy. The higher protein flours — garfava (which is a combo of garbanzo and fava bean flours), sorghum, flaxseed meal, teff, quinoa — if used alone, will get really heavy and leaden. The key, I’m learning, is to put them together in a combo, and then add all kinds of enhancers to make it rise (to take the place of the gluten it doesn’t have, which is what forms little pockets that trap the air and steam and push the crust upward).

Flour mixing. My photog, who works at UT College of Pharmacy, said it looked like pharmacy to him.

The other thing is, none of those flours really seem to have much taste. So I’m learning that you need to add flavor elements — cheese, herbs, spices, maybe even browned sausage or such, to savory breads, or fruit and nuts and other flavoring elements to sweet breads. (The date nut bread I made a couple of weeks ago was pretty awesome, and I’m going to use the apple butter I bought as if it were banana puree and make apple bread in a few weeks.)

I bought the Gluten Free Gourmet Bakes Bread book, and I’ve made up the flour mixes the author recommends, plus I have several other flours I’ve run across. So I have:

• Regular gluten-free flour mix, which is basically rice and cornstarch and tapioca 
• Bean flour mix, which is garfava and sorghum and cornstarch and I forget what else
• Light bean flour mix, which is garfava and sorghum and yet assorted other stuff
• Featherlight, which I haven’t made up yet because I ran out of one of the things I needed
  

  Some of the collection.

The individual flours I have are potato starch, potato flour, brown rice, regular rice, oat, cornstarch, tapioca, teff, millet, quinoa, almond, and maybe one or two others. I had buckwheat flour from my BCD baking experience, and apparently buckwheat, despite its name, has no gluten in it.

The combinations, I suppose, are pretty much endless. I’ll get there, eventually. And when I do, you and y’mama ‘n em can come have sandwiches with me.

Sigh.

Baking, or alchemy? Life was much simpler with King Arthur.

I’m TRYING. Truly, I am. I’ve almost said “hell with it” half a dozen times, and gone ahead and eaten the pasta/sandwich/pastry that is voluptuously reclining there on the plate or the buffet table, leering salaciously at me. But I’ve refrained.

And I’ve spent a good C-note on different flours and xanthan gums and egg replacers and such stuff, and have studiously perused recipes and foregone the sensuous pleasure of kneading and shaping a loaf in favor of spooning a thick, viscuous batter into a pan.

OK, so Miz Scarlett used to knead for me. You know what I mean. It’s freakin’ poetic license, ferGawdsakes.

Well. It makes a pretty loaf, at least.

So today, I try this whole-grain loaf that one of the multitudinous gluten-free bloggers had posted. It’s like five different kinds of flours, all designed to take the place of wheat, with its troublesome gluten component.

Amber waves of grain, my happy ass.

Anyway. It did rise. And it has a nice looking crumb to it. But dammit all to hell, it tastes bland.

I will grant that this has the best texture and mouth-feel to it of any of the gluten-free breads I’ve tried yet. It was reasonable, toasted with butter and a schmear of apple butter. But it leaves much to be desired. The quick breads, as a rule, tend to be better. But I want me some plain old, honest-to-God, all-purpose flour.

Good apple butter forgives a multitude of sins.

Sigh.

Here is the recipe. It ain’t all that and a bag of chips. But I guess it’ll have to do when you can’t have the real thing.

On the other hand, dinner tonight was pretty doggoned excellent. Tamarind braised pork. A recipe mostly of my own devising, one in which I started out with no particular idea where I was going to wind up, but I like where it went.

I’d bought country style ribs, which are really just the trimmings off pork shoulder roasts to make them fit in the little styrofoam trays in the supermarket meat counter. They have a moderate amount of fat on them, plenty of collagen that wants to melt into tenderness in a long braise, and are generally on sale. All those are Good Things.

So I chunked the strips of pork up into little cubes of pork, and I salted and peppered and browned them. At this point I was thinking maybe of braising the pork in apple juice, or in barbecue sauce. But I was glancing at my spice rack for inspiration, and I saw a jar of tamarind paste.

Aaaaannnnnddd...Dinner!

H’mmm, sez I. Tamarind braised pork? And off to Google I took myself.

It seems that mostly, it’s pork belly that gets tamarind glazed. I browsed four or five recipes, got the general flavor profile down, and proceeded to wing it.

I browned the pork chunks, then deglazed the pan with a couple of small onions, sliced into half-moons. These were soon joined by some chili-garlic paste and some grated ginger, about a tablespoon each; some five or six cloves of minced garlic; two tablespoons of tamarind concentrate, and a healthy portion of ground coriander. Meanwhile, the browned pork chunks had gone into the crockpot, sprinkled liberally with some soy sauce.

All the sauteed onion stuff eventually got happy and joined the pork. I added maybe a cup of water to give the pork plenty of liquid to braise in, and kicked the crockpot up onto high, and went about my business.

Sometime in the afternoon, I added a shot of fish sauce, turned it down to low, took some of the juice, and stirred in a heaping tablespoon of cornstarch and added it back in to thicken the sauce. Just before dinnertime, I cooked some rice, and there I was.

It was pretty doggoned good stuff. Doesn’t rise to Sweet Baby Jesus level, but we can’t all be masterpieces. The leftovers will get eaten, I am quite sure.

I cannon complain. About the pork, at least. I will continue to complain about the bread, until I find a recipe that’ll make a decent one, without benefit of REAL flour.

If you and y’mama ‘n ‘em have a recipe for gluten-free loaf bread, give me a shout, wouldja?

I’m cooking all sorts of disparate things. To date today, I’ve made sheep’s milk ricotta, have a batch of tamarind braised pork in the crock pot, and have the sponge rising for some multigrain gluten-free bread. Next up is either some tomato sauce or tomato soup, yet to be determined which. And there’s fresh mozzarella cheese to be made, so I can enjoy the real stuff with my tomatos.

This makes me happy. And it, and I, are in my kitchen, which also makes me happy.

Damn, it’s good to be back. Orlando was OK. It’s not my favorite Florida city — what’s the point of going to Florida if you’re not going to the beach? But the weather was nice and I spent one afternoon by the pool drinking Bloody Marys, and went one evening to a Cuban restaurant and had quite respectable lechon asado and plantains, so I have no major complaints. Except that when the waitstaff at the banquet asks if you have any dietary restrictions, and I tell them “nothing with wheat flour,” and then get a chicken breast with bread crumbs on it….well. They did not bring me a roll, which I guess was their nod to gluten-free, and there was a nice flourless chocolate tart that was intensely chocolatey.

What brings me back to cheesemaking, which I had commenced almost a year ago and then abandoned? The fact that for the first time since I abandoned it, I have access again to fresh milk, both the cow and sheep variety. As referenced in the photo caption above, this makes me happy. Very happy. And it’ll be regular access, too, since Ed my organic farmer, he of the formerly PJF, now Mountain Pastures organic beef, pork and lamb, now is supplying his faithful CSA members, of whom I am proud to be one, with fresh milk. And cheese. And I am just about delerious with joy over it.

Gettin' there....

I started out with ricotta, because all you need to make that is milk, salt and vinegar. It could’ve used a little more vinegar; it was a touch bland. It also drains dry much more quickly than does cow’s milk ricotta. Decent yield, though; a quart of sheep’s milk yielded me a good cup of ricotta. I’m thinking that’s going to appear on a pizza some time soon.

I also had to yield to the temptation to drink a small glass of it. Ed was giving away samples a couple of weeks ago at the market, and I couldn’t believe how excellent the sheep’s milk tasted. It’s very rich and creamy, and actually sweet. So about the first thing I did when I got home was to pour a glass and drink it — the first glass of milk I’ve drunk in, oh, probably 10 or 15 years. Because, you see, I have a mild case of lactose intolerance; I can cook with milk products, eat hard cheese in sizeable quantities or soft cheese in smaller quantities without it bothering me, but if I consume more milk than what I use on cereal, it ain’t pretty.

The finished product!

I figured it’s the weekend, I’ve got no plans to go anywhere, so the excellence of the taste would be worth the ill effects. Which, surprisingly, I have not experienced yet, and that was three hours ago.  I’ve read that lactose intolerance can be spurred by gluten intolerance, which leads me to wonder if my abstention from gluten has anything to do with the fact I drank milk and am not troubled by it. Or maybe it’s that it’s sheep’s milk, or that it’s unpasteurized and unhomogenized.

But damn, it’s good.

And I’m about to betake myself to the New England Cheesemaking Supply site and order some of the stuff to make more cheese, now that I have ready access to milk. Yeah, buddy. You and y’mama ‘n ‘em come get you some cheese and crackers. I’m about to try my hand at gluten-free crackers, maybe tomorrow, because? Those suckers are about four bucks for a teeny-tiny box, and I’m thinking I can do that good on my own. May have to experiment.

If I ever get back in the kitchen for more than long enough to make coffee, I’ll write about it.

Meanwhile. You ‘n y’mama ‘n ‘em please go to Rockville.wholefoodsmarketCooking.com/contests and vote for my boeuf bourguignon. And make it. It’s good.

At this point, the supermarketa rotisserie chicken is your Very Best Friend. Because you can do any number of things with the  flesh of that bird, particularly if you are, as I am, getting ready to leave the youngsters  to their own devices for three or four days.

In this instance, said bird became the makings for a dozen chicken enchiladas and a chicken pot pie, which will standbetween the  heathens and starvation while I am in Florida eating Cuban food.

Here’s how you prepare for four days out of town when you’re me. You stop by the grocery and pick up a chicken and a bag of frozen mixed veggies. You already have pie crusts and cream of chicken soup at home. You shred up a leg quarter and about half of one breast to make a cup or so of chicken, mix it with the soup and the veg and the cheese, dump it in a pie crust and top it with another one. Wrap that in foil, stash it in the fridge,and there’s one meal.

Then you can shred the rest of it and wrap it up in tortillas with diced green chiles and cheese, cover it with Las Palmas enchilada sauce,  then sprinkle that with more cheese, and you’ve got another dinner. Then you lay out two pounds of ground beef to thaw, so you can make chili at oh-early-thirty in the morning, and with a Stauffer’s lasagna, voila, the urchins are fed for the duration.

They are on their freakin’ own for breakfast and lunch. Somehow, I do not believe they will starve.

Meanwhile, I will be enjoying some lechon asado and some picadillo and some plantains in Orlando. You and y’mama ‘n ‘em check in on the kids while I’m gone, ok?

Chorizo, eggs, ranchero sauce, cotija, tortillas. What's not to love?

I wish I had a picture of last night’s dinner. But the SD card for the camera was still in the laptop at work, and my phone has decided it doesn’t want to take pictures any more, so we have none. Nor did I take any today when I had the leftovers.

White beans, tuna and tomatos. Now, I love each of those ingredients, but I’d never considered combining them until I commenced reading food blogs and seeing that the combo was a common one, and in fact, a classic Italian prep. Warm, as a pasta sauce; cold, as a salad.

I opted for room temperature, as a salad.

I had a GOOD can of tuna from the Culinary District — one of those five-dollar jokers. No Starkist or Chicken of the Sea. Italian tuna, canned in olive oil. (I don’t think you can even GET mass-market tuna packed in olive oil at the grocery any more.) I had a can of Great Northern beans, aka cannelini beans. I had good Mennonite tomatos. And I did not want the spaghetti and meatballs everyone else was having.

So I drained the tuna, saving the olive oil in a cup; dumped it in a bowl. Drained the beans, not saving the liquid in anything. Dug out a good tablespoon full of capers from my salt-packed jar, rinsed them and let them soak in hot water a bit. Added a splash of balsamic vinegar to the olive oil and whisked it up. Dumped everything except the tomatos in together and gave it a stir. Spooned some out on three slices of Mennonite tomato.

Sweet Baby Jesus. I am going to have to try this with grocery store tuna, just to see if the fancy stuff is that much better and is what takes each of these elements out of its natural state, which ain’t too doggoned bad as it is, and elevates it to new heights and a totally different flavor profile. If a salad can be rich and hearty, this one is rich and hearty. The balsamic vinegar cuts the richness of the olive oil and the tuna, the beans provide a smooth, satisfying counterpoint, and the capers give it a pop of flavor. And all of it plays just marvelously with the bright freshness of the tomato.

Damn, it was good! And I didn’t even add the basil that was suggested.

I still love the old-fashioned, classic tuna salad — mayo, sweet pickles, hard-boiled egg, tuna — and it won’t disappear from my menu (although I may go for a year or more than not make it, but there’s a local deli that does a marvelous version). But this — this is something different, kinda like you can have chili or you can have hamburgers and love them both, but they’re both ground beef.  (Speaking of which, I think I’ll make some chili for the kids to eat while I’m gone Sunday-Tuesday.) Makes me wonder what all else I can do with some fancy tuna.

Tonight, though, I’m going to be stewing some chicken in some coconut milk for a Caribbean-inspired stew, in honor of the fact I got me some Jimmy Buffett tickets and will be doing the Fin Dance at Verizon Arena March 1! You and y’mama ‘n ‘em come get you some chicken stew, and we’ll put some Jimmy on the Bose and enjoy ourselves.

I think I'll call it "A Study In Brown." Also, I'll call it good.

I did at least complete this dinner. It’s a very monochromatic dinner. No matter. It was good.

I’d ordered a nice pork shoulder roast from the PJF people, planning on braising it in apple juice in an attempt to approximate the flavor of that marvelous pork shank I’d had at Murphy’s in Atlanta last month. I didn’t quite get there…but it was a pretty doggoned good way to cook pork roast, I have to admit.

I browned the (still mostly frozen; don’t tell anyone) roast in my Dutch oven, decanted about a pint of apple juice over and around him (her?), and dropped a quartered onion in the pot. I pondered for a few minutes, and added some caraway seeds (maybe a half-teaspoon?), a half-dozen allspice berries, and four or five whole cloves. Then I cut a circle out of parchment a tad smaller than the pot, and stuck it down inside and over the roast, because I didn’t want all the liquid to cook away while I was at the racetrack losing my ass.

I’ve always read that the parchment thingy works. I can now testify, at least anecdotally, that it does. There was very little, if any, of the juice that had cooked away 3 1/2 hours later when I got home. This is a Good Thing when you’re going to braise something a long-ass time and not be at home to add liquid. The things you learn.

Anyway. I let it braise for another 45 minutes or so while I hydrated myself with a glass of wine and started some side dishes, and then pulled it out and popped it onto a rack in a hotter oven to give it a nice overall crust. I strained the solids out of the juice, put it in a saucepan to reduce, and used some of it to baste the roast while it was browning. I was going for that wonderful sticky-sweet crust Murphy’s got on its pork shank, but I didn’t get it. Still, I damn-sho wouldn’t throw it out of bed.

I used a little more of the sauce in a side dish for which I have to credit Michelle at Thursday Night Smackdown. She had, in a stroke of what I can only consider genius, caramelized onions and combined them with fried apples to strew over spaetzle with pork chops. Genius. Genius, I tell you! So I promptly caramelized me some onions, threw some apple slices in the pan and let them get soft, and helped everything along with a splash of the pork sauce.

Can I just say Sweet Baby Jesus here? The pork was good; the apples and onions were divine. It just looks funny to type “apples and onions” as a single dish, but try this stuff. I’m telling you. It’s marvelous. Killer good.

Before I left for the track, I took the rest of the slaw mix from Friday night’s okonomiyaki and made up a hot vinegar bath for it, hanging with the caraway and allspice and clove theme. Made a good, very different, slaw; if I ever didn’t want to do red cabbage with German food, I’d do this. And it ought to be just kickass with brats or knockwurst. Just sayin’.

Gnocchi. Residing in my freezer as we speak, for when I get ready for 'em.

Roasted turnips and parsnips rounded out the very, very beige-and-tan plate. They were good, but they were not what this dinner needed. It needed a green thing. If I had it to do over, I’d'a roasted the broccoli I had on hand to roast with the next night’s dinner that was going to be duck confit over butternut squash gnocchi, which was one of my unfinished weekend projects because my stomach took that opportunity to inform me it was missing gluten and was Not Happy About It. So I roasted the confit leg quarters, and made the gnocchi, both of which are now residing in the freezer, and I’ll deal with that another time.

Lovely little duckies, they are. Now they're shredded duck meat in confit in the freezer.

The other unfinished project had to do with baking, and I’ll get to that in another post.

So that’s it for paving the road to hell with my good intentions. I’ll do the same next weekend, since I will barely have time to get to the market and pick up my fresh farm milk! both sheep and cow variety! before leaving for a three-day conference in Orlando. So making cheese will have to wait until the middle of next week, and boy, am I a happy camper about THAT!

So that’s it from the Chez Brockwell kitchen tonight. You and y’mama ‘n ‘em get ready to head on back to work with me after this long weekend, and we’ll see if we can’t pick backup on some of these projects later in the week.

A fitting and suitable breakfast upon which to go gambling for the afternoon.

You lucky people are getting two posts in a row here, because I just posted the one I wrote early this morning on the iPad, which pretty much sucks for posting, not least because I cannot download photos to it (or if I can, I can’t figure out how), and because I cooked a damn fine brunch today and I am killing time waiting for the confit duck legs to come out of the oven so I can put the pork roast in.

The dark specks are bacon fond, which makes the latkes Methodist.

This morning, we had Methodist latkes, country bacon and over easy farm eggs with apple butter from the community market.

Honey. I am replete. Two Sweet Baby Jesus meals in a row. I may not can play the horses worth a diddly-damn, but I can surely cook this weekend. Or am batting 1,000 at it right now, in any event.

These are Methodist latkes because they are, besides being consumed side by side with bacon, cooked in bacon fat. Even if you’re Reform, I don’t think that flies, at least not without a primal cringe. Forgive me, my Jewish friends. I’m glad I’m nominally Methodist, as much as I’m anything; could not deal with cringing over my pork and shellfish.

These are also gluten free latkes. No matzoh meal for me in these babies; the onset of the gluten free diet has caused me to accumulate about a bajillion different kinds of flour, including potato starch. Seemed reasonable to me that the proper GF flour to put into latkes would be potato starch, no?

Potato starch, yes, with a note of caution. These were some Extremely Wet Potatos, which, even after I drained them in the colander for 20 minutes and pressed liquid out, took a significant amount of potato starch to bind. They turned out just a touch gummy. Next time, I’ll put the grated potatos in some cheesecloth and wring it out first.

Methodist Latkes:

• 4 russet potatos
• 1 medium yellow onion
• 2 eggs
• about 1/2 cup potato starch flour
• salt and pepper

Peel and chunk up the onion and pulse it a few times in the FoPro. Leave it there while you peel the potatos; chunk them up and add them to the onion, and pulse them long enough to get them grated to your satisfaction. Dump the whole mess in a colander lined with cheesecloth and let it drain for 15 or 20 minutes while you do something else. Come back and gather up the cheesecloth full of drained potatos and wring and squeeze them until you’ve squeezed out as much moisture as you can.

Put the wrung-out potatos in a bowl, add the eggs and hit it with a dash of salt and pepper; stir. Add potato starch a little bit at a time, just until it looks like the batter will hold together when you fry it.

Fry about four slices of bacon in a skillet. Take the bacon out to drain, and in the hot bacon fat over medium high heat, put spoonsful of latke batter. I use my 1/4 cup measure; it makes them about the size I want, which is between 3 and 4 inches across. You may need to flatten thems slightly. Let fry until you can see a nice bit of golden brown around the edges, flip, and brown the other side. Let drain on a rack over paper towels in a warm oven while you fry the rest of ‘em.

Top with an over-easy egg, also fried in the bacon fat. Ignore the twinges of conscience about your cholesterol and arterial condition. It’s Saturday. You can eat whatever the hell you want to, particularly if you are going to the track afterward.

Which I am fixing to do. It’s 50-cent corned beef sammich day. I plan to buy four, discard the bread, and use the corned beef in hash tomorrow morning.

I’ll see you and y’mama ‘n ‘em at the finish line.

Make you some of this. It's Sweet Baby Jesus good.

Who’d a thunk it? You take a pancake, and you add tasty things like shredded cabbage and chopped green onion and shrimp and assorted Far East condiments. And you replace the syrup and butter with a spicy mayo. And for good measure, you cook some rice and add some Japanese pickles that have been residing in your fridge.

And, et voila, or the Japanese equivalent thereof, you have okonomiyaki, a 30-minute dinnner which has the advantage of being Sweet Baby Jesus good.

These babies were the winner of a Food 52 “Your Best Street Food” contest a while back. I’m not sure how I missed having them when I visited Japan, but I will NOT make that mistake again.

To wit:

• 5 eggs
•  2 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon sesame oil
• 2 tsp sriracha or chile garlic paste, to taste
• 1/2 cup all purpose flour ((I used a gf version that’s a mix of rice, tapioca, garfava and sorghum)
• 1 bunch green onions, trimmedd and chopped,
• 2 cups shredded cabbage,
• 3/4 cup minced shrimp

Spicy Mayo:

• about 1/3 cup mayonnaise,
• 1 tsp or so sriracha (to taste),
• 1 tablespoon or so soy sauce.

Whisk together the sauce ingredients and set aside. Beat the eggs with the chile garlic paste, the sesame oil aand the soy sauce. Add the flour and whisk in until the luumps are gone (this takes a bit more work with gf flour, I discovered).  fold in the cabbage (I will confess I used slaw mix), the onions and the shrimp.

Heat 2 or 3 tablespoons of neutral oil over medium high heat. Spoon out batter into pancakes; the Japanese version is generally full skillet size, but I do not place that much trust in my pancake flipping ability, not when there’s hot grease involved. So I made mine about palmsized.

I’m not real sure how anything this easy can be this good. I garnished them with some sesame seeds on top, not having any bonito flakes in the house, that being the other suggested garnish. They’re tender, eggy, the shrimp adding that note of, well, shrimp, and the onions and the cabbage get cooked just enough to be crispy-tender.

I’m telling you. They are Sweet Baby Jesus good. I had some sweet chile sauce on hand, so I used a little of that on the side, committed the major faux pas of putting soy sauce on my rice, and commenced to eat myself silly. I WILL be making these again, yes I will, because they are so easy as to be unfreakingbelievable. I can see how you can make a clean-out-the-ffridge meal out of them — you could sub diced ham or bacon or beef or whatever for the protein, add most any shredded green thing — broccoli, zucchini, whatever — throw in a muushroom or two, add some carrots; I suspect your combinatins would be limited only by your creativity.

I’m off to the market, then back home to put a pork roast on to braise while I am out losing my arse at the track this afternoon. I was perfect at the betting window yesterday — did not cash a ticket — and I expect to do the same today. No matter. It’s a gorgeous sunny day, if cold, and the horses are running at Oaklawn, and I’m eating well, and all’s right with the world. Hope all’s right in you and y’mama ‘n ‘em’s world, too.

Chuck roast; underappreciated, but the best thing that ever happened to winter.

I continue to have a love affair with chuck roast. It makes the most delectable wintertime dishes, and it heats up your house so nicely on a cold, wintry, rainy day. And it just yields itself to whatever preparation you want to do to it — pot roast, carbonnades a la flamande, vegetable beef soup, stewed up in some kind of chili- or goulash-style prep.

Or bouef bourguignon.

Getting happy in the pot.

You will recall I was making bouef bourguignon on Sunday, with plans to eat it on Monday. And I did, and we did, and it was just outstandingly wonderful. I’m always amazed at how a watery sauce, banished to a low oven for half a day, turns so glossy and thick and shiny and unctuous, and just flows over the lumps and crevices of your mashed potatos (I LIKE my mashed potatos lumpy, thankyouverymuch) and the heavenly scent just wafts up to your nose….

No words. Just looking at it makes my stomach growl.

Have mercy. Sweet Baby Jesus, but this stuff is good.

Without further ado:

• 1 3-4 pound chuck roast
• 1 yellow onion
• 4-6 cloves garlic, or more, if you’re a garlic lover, or less, if you’re a vampire
• kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
• 3-4 carrots
• 1/2 can tomato paste
• 3 tbsp olive oil
• 1 pound boiler or pearl onions
• 1/2 oz. dried shiitake mushrooms
• 1 750-ml bottle of red wine
• 2-3 cups beef stock
• 2-3 sprigs of thyme
• 1 sprig of rosemary
• half a dozen fresh sage leaves

Prep: Whack the roast up into roughly 1 1/2 inch chunks; salt and pepper well, and set aside. Blanch the pearl onions for a minute or two, enough to loosen their skins; use about a cup of the onion-blanching water to rehydrate the shiitakes, and set those aside. Peel the onions and set aside. Thinly slice the big onion, and mince the garlic; cut the carrots in 1-inch chunks. Tie the thyme, sage and rosemary together in a bouquet garni.  Get out the wine and pour yourself a glass. Now you’re ready to cook.

In a heavy ovenproof Dutch oven, heat the oil over medium high heat and brown the meat in batches; you don’t want to crowd it because you want it to sear nicely on all sides, and if you crowd it, it’ll just steam and turn a nasty gray. Gray meat = not good. So brown it, good, on all sides, and put it in a bowl. Lower the heat to medium and throw in the carrots and onions; saute those for a few minutes, until the carrots start to brown and the onion gets soft and translucent, while you’re scraping up all the nice brown fond from the bottom of the pot. Fond is your friend.  Add the garlic and the tomato paste, and swirl that around and let it cook until the tomato paste turns a nice reddish brown. Add the mushrooms and their water, the meat with any accumulated juices, the wine and the bouquet garni. Cover it and bring it up to a boil, then stash it away in a 325-degree oven for at least four hours, preferably five, and you can go as long as six if you feel like it. Check it occasionally, and add the beef stock if it gets to looking too dry.

You can bring it out and eat it right then, but it really improves if you let it sit in the fridge for a day or two or three. Then you can return it to the Dutch oven, put it over low heat and let it warm. Resist the urge to add some water — as it warms, it will liquefy more.

I used to love to serve it over egg noodles or just with a big fresh baguette, but that was Before Celiac Disease, or BCD. I can testify, though, that it is Just Fine over mashed potatos, and would be equally fine over polenta.

I brought leftovers for lunch today. Lucky me.

The best part about it is that it’s not really labor intensive, and it can be merrily cooking away on Saturday or Sunday and making your house smell marvelous, and then you can bring it out and heat it up during the week, take 20 minutes to boil and mash some potatos, and Voila, you and y’mama ‘n ‘em have a dinner that looks and acts and tastes like it took half a day to cook and that is a serious treat in the middle of the week.

It’s almost worth cold weather.