Boeuf

Here is the thing… I have made beef bourguignon a la Julia twice now and I have not documented this with pictures. I am pretty into the recipe because it is such a marathon but I am not a beef stew fan. Of course beef stewed in bacon and wine is a step in the right direction. It is a crime because it is such a long process and I feel compelled to share it, a la Renee. I think this post will be much less interesting than if it had pictures. Of course our vegetarian friends probably don’t want to look at bloody hunks of beef.

I do as Julia says and get my beef bits and make stock from scratch which takes 5 hours. It isn’t hard work, you just throw the beef bits, leeks, onions, carrots, and maybe celery into the pot, cover with water. Bring it to a boil and then simmer for 5 hours. While that is happening you can brown the beef. I am not going to go into details because I will probably post about this later with full details including the kind of meat I buy and everything but I do think you should know that you must MUST dry your beef. Or it will not brown. DRY THE BEEF! Julia is pretty insistent on this and this tip was even featured in the motion picture Julie and Julia. I dry it with paper towels which can be pretty tricky since we don’t really keep paper towels on hand. In this case it was okay because I wasn’t cooking at our house. Anyways, you brown the meat, take it out of the pan, deglaze the pan with wine and cover the meat with wine and spices. Here is the a la Renee part, I put the meat in the crock pot. Julia makes it on the stove and in the oven. Really??? Why? It takes hours, use the crock pot. So I put it in there, when the stock is done, I add that and then crock it all for about overnight.

This time we served it over big whole wheat noodles, and Dave much preferred that. So that is how it all happens. Then Dave eats it every day all week. Which is pretty amazing since he has very low tolerance for left-overs.

Pizza Wrappin'

Pizza is Dave’s favorite food. We love to get pizza take out and appreciate all makes and models, from the junkiest greasiest stuff around to the delicious whole wheat crusted gourmet slices. Back in the day before we cooked, we bought a lot of frozen pizza, but also were big Boboli fans, coming up with our own combinations of toppings. While living in Massachusetts, we started buying pizza dough from Whole Foods and baking our own crusts. After we moved back to Colorado and Dave started learning how to make bread, it was only natural that he tried his hand at pizza dough. We went through a couple different recipes, but the best by far was from Heidi Swanson’s 101 Cookbooks website, modified by Dave. This recipe is super simple, and could be whipped together by anybody who can measure. It goes like this:

4 ½ cups flour (H.S. does all white flour but we use whole wheat as well. Renee likes a more wheaty crust, so most of the time we do 2 ½ cups white and 2 cups wheat. Sometimes Dave just does 1 cup wheat though.
1 tsp yeast
1 ½ tsp salt
1 ¾ cups cold water
¼ cup olive oil.
We like a honey wheat crust, so we always add ¼ cup honey as well, unless we don’t have any on hand, which is an extreme rarity.

You don’t have to let the yeast proof or anything, just put all the dry ingredients in a bowl and then add the wet. Since the honey is sticky, it helps to dilute it in the water. Mix it all up with a big spoon and knead for a few minutes. Then you can divide the dough – we like to divvy it up into 3 equal pieces. Let it sit out on the counter covered with a kitchen towel for 45 minutes, and you are ready to roll! The dough keeps very well in the freezer, just take it out in the morning and it will be ready for you to work with when it’s dinner time. We have been known to either forget to take out dough or not decide what to have for dinner until it is dinner time, in which case you can take the frozen lump (we either store ours in Ziploc bags or in Tupperware) and submerge it in hot water. It will be thawed in about 45 minutes.

Now, as for toppings, we always buy big blocks of mozzarella from the Whole Foods and shred it ourselves – less packaging and fresher taste. Since we don’t like canned or jarred pizza sauce and it’s something of a pain to put together, we usually opt for olive oil and pulverized garlic for sauce. We will try just about anything on pizza crust at least once. One of our very favorite possibly weird sounding pizzas is the aforementioned cheese and oil with Brussels sprouts that have been cooked with bacon and oil in the oven. So good. We do a Caesar salad pizza which we stole from Veggie Planet, most likely the best pizza place on earth. Homemade meatball pizza is always good. Most recently, we made one with goat cheese, apples, and caramelized onion. We have never had good luck making caramelized onions but this batch came out very nicely. Take a look at a picture of said pizza!


To be honest, I (Dave) don’t have too much to say about these wraps – they were delicious and mostly homemade. What we have here is store-bought tortillas of the jalapeno cheddar variety. Then we have our homemade hummus, which is ridiculously easy to make with our spiffy food processor. Then goes spinach and also some parmesan cheese.

The coup de grace is delicious fried chicken that we made with our totally sweet cast iron skillet. These wraps were very very tasty.

Side note: isn’t it hard restraining yourself to only put as much food in the wrap as will fit? When the tortilla is all spread out and unwrapped, it looks like it can hold much more than it actually can. Usually this results in some messy splitting.