Rainy day stew from bookish, a weblog by George Girton

Rainy day stew . . . . . dec 5 2004 — bookish114.dat

Last night I coarsely chopped two onions, swearing like a navvy through my tears, sliced two big orange carrots, squoze two garlics through a blue plastic press, minced two half-ribs of celery into sminy little pieces and because I don't have a large enough dish, I popped it all into TWO flame-proof casseroles. Each dish was filled about half-way up with cut-up chunks of stewing beef, for a total of about two and a half pounds. I split 3 bay leaves and a fresh bunch of thyme between the two pots. THEN I poured a bottle of wine into the dishes, half the bottle into each dish, and put them in the refrigerator overnight.

The wine? Vin de Pays du Gard 2001 from Mas des Tourelles, a small family vineyard between Provence and Languedoc. I obtained this from the good-time flavor fanatics over at Wine Expo in Santa Monica (310-828-4428). Just the thing for Provencal beef stew, n'est-ce pas? It's a mixture of 60 percent syrah and 40 percent merlot grapes, so you can duplicate the recipe just by getting a bottle of each, and mixing accordingly.

What am I doing right now, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, when I should be over at Caltech listening to Edward Tufte talk about his forthcoming book "Beautiful Evidence?" I'm simmering the pots of beef stew for three or four hours, before popping them back in the fridge for another overnight flavor-meld. And, of course, I'm writing to you from high up in my atelier loft, the beef-and-thyme aroma wafting all the way to the nearby rafters. Welcome me back online and join me in the pleasures of life.

One of the pots I'm using is a standard flame-proof casserole with a glass cover that I have employed to such great success in the past for the life-changing "lamb baked at 350 with 40 cloves of garlic". The other dish is a heavy brown container from Washington state, crafted from volcanic ash. Sad to say, it has lost its cover and so it's topped off with aluminum foil and, for God's sake, an upside-down plate. Whoever said cooking isn't rocket science would feel right at home in my kitchen.

And here's a thing to worry about, a small fear in today's too-fearful world. If I place the volcanic pot on the flame, will the flame, a thin flickering barely-lit blue light from a gas stove, approximately one-one hundredth as hot as the interior of a white-hot violent volcano, could this cause the pot crack in half, ruined? We must live as we live: The answer to the question of whether the pot will survive, will appear tomorrow, along with the beef stew. The recipe, estouffade Provencal (I forgot to mention 2 tablespoons of olive oil) can be found on p. 202 of Bistro Cooking [buy at amazon] . by Patricia Wells

Note: the word "sminy", appearing above and not in any dictionary, was first heard used by Mr. Gregory Schern of Moab Paper (moabpaper.com) in a presentation of his company's paper products to the Southern California Adobe Technical Exchange (atxsocal.org). "Sminy" is intended to combine the meanings of the two words "small" and "tiny". Sminy pieces of celery are, therefore, not very big at all, while "sminy little" pieces would be smaller still.

Index of Previous Journal Entries

If you like what you read, click here to sign up for our mailing list and we'll notify you when we post new book reviews