WhimsyLand

With all this snow and manly shoveling, I decided I deserved to make myself a nice beef stew.  I probably eat meat less than 3 times a month now, but since my last kid left, it's just easier to take a couple of extra-large scallops out of the freezer, microwave them for a minute, and sauté them in with scallions, red peppers, capers, olives, and whatever else is interesting in the fridge.  Like most cooks, I have dozens of stew recipes, not that I use recipes actually, which I consider more as guidelines.  When Dima ran me over to Safeway this morning, I picked up a 3-pound hunk of beef chuck.  You definitely want a flavorful inexpensive cut for stew, so just look for something under $3 a pound, preferably on sale. After sautéing a large chopped white onion and nearly whole garlic until they were translucent, I set these aside and threw half-inch cubes of the beef into the pot to brown.  I cut away most of the fat and sinew, but left about 20% of the cubes with a little of each.  After the initial sear, sprinkle a couple of tablespoons of flour on them, grind liberally from the pepper mill, and dust them with a little paprika if you have any Hungarian blood.  Toss them when they brown, like dwarves onto a Rohan bridge.  It's best as they say, to do the browning in batches, but when I'm impatient I just turn the heat up and turn the whole mess of beef pieces periodically.  When the beef was just starting to crisp, I tossed the onions and garlic back on top, added a can of tomato paste, and dowsed the whole thing with a half-bottle of Greg Norman's excellent Australian cabernet sauvignon.  At that point, I poked around in my spice cupboard, which has hundreds of bottles in complete disarray, and came up with thyme, sage leaf, oregano, and a couple of bay leaves.  I considered cumin, which I love, but decided against it.  I then added two cups of water, and waited for time to soften the meat and small bits of tendon.  Now you have a hour or two to wait, depending upon the degree of bite you want in the meat.  I will be adding red pepper pieces, carrot disks cut on the diagonal, celery half-moons, and perhaps a small  loosely-diced russet potato (haven't decided yet).  The good news is that Dima and his wife gave me a set of these wonderful Riedel goblets that have no stem, are featherweight,  and hold in the hand like a silky ostrich egg.  Just perfect to pour some of the remaining Norman Cab into, and sip away reading poetry while the whole concoction slowly becomes stew.  The fabulous thing about this dish is that, with changes in the plan midstream, it could have become chile (delete red wine, add chile powder and cumin) or any one of a half-dozen bubbling wonderments.

I'm in the TechBiz, so of course one of our clients announced their new gizmo would be arriving from the ASIC foundry about now, and were we available to work just after Christmas (by which he meant, the 26th).  Dima celebrates Christmas according to some variation of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Junie's not in town, so I said yes.  That gives me until Tuesday to buy the remaining stocking stuffers for my sons and spend some time on projects that pay by the hour, which might just cover the expense of buying all those pigs, sheep and llamas on behalf of my loved ones.  As my son Derek picked up the All-Wheel-Drive Subaru 24 hours before the blizzard hit, I'm going to have to enlist him for taxi service, but he's a good boy and, besides, he's likely to be one of the principal beneficiaries of my weekend shopping.  Both boys have these gigantic Christmas stockings that I found at Target years ago, which need to get filled with interesting items that I haven't sprung on them in prior years.  It's a complete sell-out to put gift cards in, so I will have to get creative.  At least as creative as Easter, when I hide plastic eggs around the house with a bill of some denomination and a cryptic clue to where the next egg may be. 

It was sunny this morning and I thought the vaunted Colorado sun (we are a mile farther up in the atmosphere than you are, by the way) would banish all this snow to runoff and water table replenishment.  It was not to be, as the clouds rolled in and temperatures dropped.  Good thing I made stew. 

See you tomorrow.