Boeuf Bourguignon or Burgundy Beef

One of the keys to avoiding food boredom is trying new things.  Take this meat, for example.  I usually use chunks of beef to make beef stew, but this popped up in my blog reader, and I decided to give it a try.  I had to make a lot of substitutions, so maybe this dish should be called "Suggestions of Burgundy Beef" or "Essence of Burgundy Beef"...









The first step in my not-beef-stew is to toss the meat in flour.









Heat up some butter and olive oil.  (Is it just me, or does anyone else love butter?)









Brown the beef in batches.  Remove to a casserole dish.









Use the same pan to cook chopped onions.









This stuff works great in place of fresh bacon.  Just throw it in at the end of the cooking.









A little dried parsley...









and spread it  over the beef.









Pour red cooking wine over the whole thing, cover, and bake for an hour and a half.













Mix equal parts butter and flour and stir into the liquid, cover, and put everything back in the oven for thirty minutes.













It's definitely a lot of effort, but the end result is a very tender, very flavorful dinner.

Just Another Sunday Dinner: Cauliflower, Pork Chops, and Salad

I don't really have anything exotic or exciting to share, but this is a pretty typical Sunday dinner for us.

It started with some cauliflower.  I know, I know, cauliflower is one of those unglamorous vegetables with a fairly high yuck-factor, but I've been in love with roasted vegetable recipes ever since I found an earth-shattering broccoli recipe.  (I'll take pictures and share it next time I make it.  It will make your heart flutter.)  Roasted broccoli with garlic was so good that when I came across a recipe for roasted cauliflower, and the store had fresh cauliflower THE EXACT SAME WEEK, I knew I was destined to make it.

I poured some olive oil over the cauliflower.

Note to readers: Steve and I have gone through over two liters of olive oil this school year.  Is this unhealthy?

I added whole garlic cloves.  (They're kind of hard to see, but they're there, I promise.)

As far as Steve is concerned, this is the secret ingredient: bacon.  (Or, more accurately, bacon bits.  You know, the real kind.  The hefty chunks of bacon in a ziploc bag you buy at warehouse stores.)

Sprinkle it all with kosher salt, throw it in the oven, and out comes...

this.  And, yup, it tastes as good as it looks (unless you think it looks nasty, in which case it tastes much better than it looks).  Steve and I polished off an entire bunch of cauliflower.  By ourselves.

But, the cauliflower was only a supporting character to the porkchops.  I have a really good recipe for pork chops with a creamed herb sauce, but I wanted to try something sans sauce.  One of my favorite food blogs posted a simple pork chop recipe, I got right on it (this was kind of a week of food blog providence).

I started the pork chops with rosemary...

brown sugar...

cumin and pepper.

Then mixed it all up on a paper plate because I was too lazy to wash a real dish.

I coated the pork chop with the mixture and threw it in a hot frying pan with some olive oil (see, I use it in everything).

A few minutes on each side, and it was done.  I was kind of embarrassed by the blackened parts, but they tasted really good, so now I display this picture with pride.

Tossed a quick salad with dried cranberries, pistachios, and blue cheese.  Mmmmm, mmmmmm, mmmmm.

I love Sundays...

Spaghetti Carbonara

Food boredom has already set in out on the Alaska Frontier, so I had turn to my trusty friend.  Amateur Gourmet.  His spaghetti carbonara seemed reasonable and (more importantly) was compatible with the contents of my pantry, so I decided to give it a shot.

(Warning: for some reason today I completely forgot how to focus my camera.  The pictures looked fine in the viewfinder, but they ended up blurry.  Maybe I should have put my contacts in before shooting...  My sincerest apologies, and please don't sue me for eyestrain.  I probably can't afford it.)





Alaskan cooking is always in adventure in substitutions, and this recipe was no different.  In fact, the only ingredients in this recipe I didn't substitute were spaghetti noodles and olive oil...





I was supposed to add pancetta to the olive oil.  I don't usually keep pancetta around the house, so I had to settle for a handful of bacon bits (at least they were the real bacon bacon bits).






I looked at the bacon/olive oil mixture in the frying pan and decided I needed to add more oil.  Due to the fact that the olive oil had the above pictured pour top (also due to the fact that I am a moron), I ended up putting way too much in the pan.  I briefly considered trying to pour it back in the bottle, but I decided that if I'd used real pancetta the whole thing would be full of fat anyway.  (If Steve dies of a heart attack this week, it's my fault.  I sincerely apologize to his family and friends.)





Fresh garlic turned into garlic powder.  I'm usually a throw-however-much-looks-good-into-the-pan kind of chef.  But, I recently had a very bad experience with some garlic mashed potatoes, so I busted out the old measuring spoon for this addition.




I fried this all up, and it smelled great!





I was supposed to add white wine, but I was fresh out (if only the recipe had called for red wine*), so I used chicken broth and lemon juice.  Stop laughing.  The sages at switcheroo.com said it was okay.





I added the "white wine" to the wannabe pancetta mixture, and it boiled down to a nice sauce.





Meanwhile, I did have parmesan cheese in the refrigerator, although I'm not sure it's what Amateur Gourmet had in mind when he said "fresh grated parmesan."





I mixed the high quality parmesan with a couple of eggs.  The resulting substance looked, but did not, I repeat: DID NOT, taste like corn muffin batter.








I stirred the noodles in the egg mixture like crazy.  I was terrified that I wouldn't stir fast enough, causing disgusting egg chunks to develop.  Luckily, the disgusting chunks were evaded.  Pppphhhhhheeeeeewww!





After mixing in the faux pancetta, I had the finished product.  Ta-da!!!  I know, I know, it's a little anti-climatic.  Please excuse the poor presentation.  I lacked the fresh parsley to use as garnish, and I didn't think dried chives or oregano would have the same effect.  Don't judge this recipe based on the poor picture above.  Look at Amateur Gourmet's picture in order to be inspired to prepare this recipe.

Despite its homely appearance, the Spaghetti Carbonara was delicious.  I was thrilled to be able to serve it to my well-deserving husband who said, "This was a lot better than the chili mac I was going to have for lunch."

Sigh.  Oh well.  At least he didn't put ketchup on it.


*That was a joke.  The Alston household is one hundred percent free of both red and white wines.  Thank you.

Onion, Cheese, and Bacon Tart

Curious readers have asked how we survive in the food department up in the frozen north.  In addition to expanding our diet to include exotic animals, we've also had to resort to some creative cooking.  It's easy to want to choose starvation over boredom (from eating the same food over and over), so we occasionally try to spice things up with new recipes.  Tonight I had an adventure with an Onion, Cheese, and Bacon Tart.  Inspired by Adam at Amateur Gourmet and his brilliant attempt at the same recipe, I decided to give it a try (seriously, you should read his entry about making this tart and the accompanying comments; they are outrageously hilarious).

You can read the recipe via the above link if you want specifics, but these were my basic steps:

-Prepare to make said tart.

-Feel like a good wife for actually planning to make dinner.

- Reread the recipe and realize the dough has to chill for an hour.  Realize I am way too hungry to wait that long.

-Heat up some leftovers and eat them.  Spouse eats canned chili sprinkled with cheese.

-Make the crust and refrigerate overnight.

-Go to school.

-Come home tired but excited to make dinner.

-Remove dough from refrigerator, roll it out, and place it in pyrex pie dish.

-Vaguely recall the recipe stating that if you don't have pie crust weights, you can use dry beans to hold the shape of the tart crust while baking it.

-Dump a bunch of dry kidney beans into the crust.

-Remember that the recipe said "line crust with foil" before it mentioned adding beans.

-Feel like an idiot

-Scoop the beans out of the crust.

-Bake the crust.

-While the crust cools, slice an onion and sautee it in a frying pan.

-Substitute dried bacon for bacon because I don't have any bacon and don't know how to get any without having to auction off random body parts (because it's so expensive at the stores here).




-Marvel at how yummy it looks so far.

-Substitute 3/4 cup of powdered milk and 1/3 cup of butter for 1 cup of cream (thanks to the instructions at switcheroo.com).




-Realize that milk and butter don't exactly mix well together and look nothing like actual cream.  Hope it turns out okay anyway.

-Pull down the spice box.

-Curse at the fact that although I have Dried Mandarin Orange Peel, Chinese Mustard Powder, and Curry Seasoning, I have no Nutmeg.

-Send spouse to the store for nutmeg.  He agrees because he's so excited I'm cooking.

-Spouse calls from store because nutmeg costs an astounding ten dollars.

-Curse at high food prices in rural Alaska.

-Call two neighbors who don't have nutmeg.

-Curse in disbelief that NOBODY has ANY nutmeg.

-Remember that there is nutmeg in my classroom left over from my Explorers and Spices activity.

-Ask spouse nicely to please go to my classroom and locate the nutmeg in a box under my desk.

-Spouse is annoyed but complies (again with the gratitude about me actually cooking).

-Switch Ipod Playlist to Simon and Garfunkel.

-Rock out to "I am a Rock" and dance in circles around the kitchen waiting for Steve to come back.

-Be disappointed that he comes back so soon.  Add nutmeg to the goopy mess.

-Be double disappointed that he turned off the Ipod in order to watch MacGyver on DVD.

-Resume Simon and Garfunkel via my laptop.

-Feel happy.

-Scoop onions into the crust.

-Sprinkle cheese over the top.  Substitute cheddar cheese for Gruyère cheese because I've never heard of Gruyère cheese and certainly can't buy it in Shishmaref.

-Pour milk, butter, and precious nutmeg mixture over the top of everything.

-Scrape the remaining hunks of butter into the dish.



-Observe that tart does not look anything like the pictures on the website (the website version was free of the butter clumps because they used real cream).

-Worry.

-Put the tart in the oven at 7:55 pm.  Be shocked at how late it is.




-Check the tart. Sigh in relief at the fact that the butter clumps have melted and nicely combined with other tart elements.

-Get sucked into watching MacGyver.

-Pull the tart out of the oven.  Let it cool longer than necessary in order to finish episode of MacGyver.

-Serve dinner at 8:45 pm.

-Say, "Gee, I wonder why I don't cook more often, it only takes two and a half hours."  (Insert sarcastic tone here.)

-Steve says, "I was thinking the same thing."

-Realize he was kidding before I punch his lights out.

-Eat tart.  Tart is good.

-Watch Steve get a second piece of tart.  Feel good about myself.

-Get offended that Steve put ketchup on tart, but don't let it ruin my night.


All in all, it was a very successful culinary experience.  We were well fed, and we did not die of food boredom.