Bœuf braisé aux carottes

Bœuf aux carottes is a classic French dish, I think, but I've found the recipe under that name in only one of my 8 or 10 French cookbooks. There seem to be quite a few other names for the same thing. Simply bœuf braisé, it being understood that carrots and onions will be in the pot with the meat. Or bœuf mode. Even bœuf à la mode (no, no ice cream with it).

Braising used to be done in a fireplace, with a special cooking pot called a braisière set right on top of the fire's glowing embers. The braisière had a tight-fitting lid with a rim around it so that you could put some of the glowing embers on top to turn it into a kind of oven. Nowadays, we cook things like bœuf aux carottes or bœuf bourguignon on top of the stove or in our oven.

To braise meat or vegetables, first you brown the main ingredients in what is called un corps gras — butter, oil, duck fat, or lard. That's called faire revenir la viande or faire revenir les légumes — to "bring them back", as Walt pointed out on his blog a few days ago. I've been thinking about that expression, and I think it means that browning is a way of bringing food back to life. The meat or vegetable was alive and then it was dead and maybe not very appetizing. Browning it in the corps gras turns it into something appetizing again. Does anybody have a better theory?

Here's how you make bœuf braisé aux carottes. Like so much of the good food in France, it's not so much a recipe as a method. As I said, first, on fait revenir des oignons, des lardons, et des morceaux de bœuf. Start by browning 2 or 3 sliced onions with a hundred grams (3 or 4 ounces) of diced bacon or ham in a stew pot. I like to use a high-sided pot so the cooking fat doesn't spatter everything in the kitchen. You can also include 3 or 4 garlic cloves, smashed and peeled, for more flavor.

When the onions and bacon are lightly browned, take them out and into the same pot put 2 to 2½ lbs. (un kilo) of beef cut into big chunks. Chuck roast is a good choice. It doesn't have to be the tenderest beef, but you want it to be tasty. Have the pot very hot, put the beef chunks into it in a single layer without crowding things too much, and let them brown really well on one side. Then turn them over and brown them on another side. Finally, just start stirring them around so that they brown more or less all over. You shouldn't have any or much liquid in the pot at all during the browning.

Now add the onions and bacon back into the pot and stir everything around again. Pour on enough white wine — red wine would turn the braise into a bœuf bourguignon instead of a bœuf mode — and stock or water to just cover the ingredients. Add salt and pepper at this point, along with some thyme, bay leaves, and maybe a little ground cloves or allspice. If you want a nice brown sauce, add a tablespoon of tomato paste, but don't overdo it. I added some dried shitake mushrooms and some green leek tops to my stew. The leek tops are just for flavor; leave them in big pieces so you can take them out of the stew at the end of the cooking time.

Let the beef and aromatic ingredients cook at a low simmer for at least an hour. Taste the sauce for flavor and seasonings, and add some more wine, water, or stock as you think necessary to keep the meat just barely covered. Meanwhile, peel and cut up half a dozen carrots weighing 1 to 1½ lbs. Add them to the pot and push them down into the liquid, again adding more liquid as needed. The carrots need to cook slowly for a long time and they will lend their vegetable sweetness to the meat. Let the pot continue to simmer for an hour or even two hours longer on a very low flame.

I think that's it. You can put some potatoes into the pot for the last 30 or so minutes of the cooking time if you want to eat the bœuf aux carottes with potatoes. Or, separately, you can cook some rice or pasta to have with it. It needs a green salad too, either before or after you eat the main course. Bon appétit and happy cooking.

December 11ths past

Sometimes when I don't have anything better to do, I snoop around on my own computer to look at different photos I've taken over the past 11 years. Yes, yesterday marked the 11th anniversary of the day we saw this house for the first time. Six months later, we crossed the Atlantic and moved in.

December 11, 2013: Leek and bacon pizza — pizza aux poireaux et aux lardons

On Wednesday 11 December, two days ago, Walt was in the kitchen making us a couple of pizzas for lunch. They were going to be leek and bacon pizzas, one of his favorites. We hadn't had leek and bacon pizzas in a while. Walt first started making them some 15 years ago, when we still lived in San Francisco.

To dress up this year's pizza, we liberally sprinkled on grated parmesan cheese at the table.

Since I wasn't working in the kitchen, I opened up a folder of photos from December 11, 2004. What did I find? Well, on that day, nine years ago, Walt made leek and bacon pizzas too. It was a funny coincidence.

On December 11, 2004, we had the same kind of pizza. It wasn't the first time, or the last.

This morning, I had a look at the photos I took on December 11 in 2003 and in 2005. Here are two of them.

On December 11, 2003, we were amazed by one of the first winter sunrises we saw from the kitchen window of our 'new' house.

Collette was Callie's predecessor in our household. The photo dates from 11 Dec. 2005.

Collette was a dog we rescued from the Humane Society shelter in Santa Clara, California, in 1992. She was six months old and had been found wandering the streets with no collar or tag. She moved to France with us in 2003, at the age of 11½. And then she passed away at the age of 14, three or four months after I took this photo.

P.S. Today is CHM's birthday. Happy Birthday to him, and many happy returns of the day.

Electricity in the air and on the ground

I don't know why I like these but I do. They are the old and new warnings about the danger of our electrical feeder lines. The first one, which was posted on a utility pole, says:

It is absolutely forbidden
to touch the wires
even if they are lying on the ground
DANGER OF DEATH

The second one is less picturesque — more modern and functional. La Renaudière is the name of the hamlet we live in near Saint-Aignan:

Electricity Distribution Network France

High-tension transformer

La Renaudière

DANGER OF DEATH

Now that the feeder lines that bring electric current up to our hamlet from the river valley have been put underground, there's obviously no more mention of wires lying on the ground. We hope there's much less danger of power outages now.

It's possible too, to get a charge out of our local sunsets. No danger of death, however — at least I hope not. Even so, I guess you could call this a killer sunrise.

The way the sun was illuminating the trees in the background of this shot was drop-dead gorgeous, in my opinion.

Rouille

Rouille in French means "rust" — it's pronounced [ROO-yuh], with the French uvular (back-of-throat) R of course. It's really just one syllable, but with that tiny, short [yuh] glide at the end. The OO vowel is much rounder than any OO sound we have in English. You really have to pucker your lips to say it right.

Anyway, this post isn't about rust. It's about a sauce called rouille that people in the south of France serve with fish soup — either soupe de poissons or bouillabaisse [boo-yah-BESS]. Rouille is essentially an aïoli [eye-yo-LEE] sauce with hot pepper puree or powder stirred into it to give it a rusty color. And aïoli is basically a mayonnaise with a lot of garlic in it — at least one version is like that. Mayonnaise is a raw egg or egg yolk with vegetable or olive oil beaten into it to make a thick emulsion.

The easiest mayonnaise in the world to make is one using a whole egg, a cup of oil, and a stick blender. I've never seen it fail. Break an egg into a high-sided bowl — I use a tall, flat-bottomed glass pitcher — and put in a teaspoonful of Dijon mustard (or a good pinch of mustard powder) with some salt and pepper. Then pour in a cup of oil — I like to use half olive oil and half canola or sunflower oil — and mix it all up with a stick blender. Using a tall pitcher keeps it from going all over the room.

To turn the mayonnaise into aïoli (ail means garlic and is pronounced [EYE-yuh]) you just drop in three or four peeled garlic cloves as you blend the egg, mustard, and oil together. Or press the garlic into the finished mayonnaise. Finally, to turn that into rouille you add in a teaspoon or tablespoon of hot red pepper paste or powder, to taste. If you want a redder color, mix in a little bit of tomato paste.

Other ways to make rouille leave out the egg and use either bread crumbs or a pureed cooked potato as the thickener with oil, garlic, and red pepper paste or powder. I've never tried those. The whole-egg mayonnaise is just too easy to make. Juilia Child's MTAOFC has a recipe for the potato version*.

One way to serve with rouille when you're having fish soup is slather the rust-red mayonnaise on slices of toasted baguette and then float them on the surface of the soup when you serve it in big bowls at the table. The bread of course starts to go soggy and the rouille sauce ends up gradually mixed into the soup. The garlic and the hot pepper really perk the soup up, as you can imagine.

As a crowning touch, sprinkle some grated parmesan or swiss cheese (Gruyère, Comté, Beaufort, or Emmenthal, for example) over the rouille "rafts" and onto the surface of the soup. Eat it all with a big spoon while it's hot.

*Here is Julia Child's recipe for the potato-thickened rouille: