More of the happy kitchen dance
So, not to toot my own horn, but last night's beef and green tomato stew with sweet potato biscuits? Mighty tasty, if I do say so myself.
Very spendy in terms of beef, but our dinner guests were delighted, and the leftovers may well feed us for the rest of the week - gotta love stew for stretching meat over several meals.
Two amusing notes: when it came time to cut out the biscuits, I found that the only thing I had that approximated a biscuit cutter was a heart-shaped cookie cutter - so, we had heart-shaped biscuits, laid out in a pretty pattern on top of the stew in its 13X9 casserole dish. Very cute.
The other amusing note had to do with the beef-buying. We almost never buy red meat, partly because neither Doug nor I particularly hanker after it, partly because I'm not particularly experienced in cooking it, partly because can be a very energy-intensive meat to raise, and partly because our organic grocery store is not very well supplied with it. On those rare occasions when we do cook or eat it, though, we like it to be good, so we tend to buy it at a very snooty and pricey grocery store that has very high quality meats (we do the same with our pork and some of our sausages, because those items are also good, more available than at the organic grocery store, and apt to be hormone-free).
Yesterday, at the butcher's section of this store, the man behind the counter, when I asked him for stew meat, suggested in a lovely French accent that I wait until the regular counter man came back, the implication being that while he himself cut the meat, the other man was better at English. So when the other man came back, I repeated my question, and was directed to some already-cubed meat that to my eye looked way too tender to stew for 2 hours. The first man came around the counter to point out which packages of meat were best; aha, I thought, this one knows what he's doing. So I managed to dredge up enough high school French to have a conversation about how long to cook the meat, to indicated that I needed meat that could be cooked two hours, and, when he directed me to some brisket, to ask that it be cut in cubes. We were both grinning as he wrapped up my beef in paper, me saying "Merci beaucoup" and he replying "Pas de quoi."
As I walked away, I thought, in reference to the other man, well, you may know English, but you don't know meat....
Very spendy in terms of beef, but our dinner guests were delighted, and the leftovers may well feed us for the rest of the week - gotta love stew for stretching meat over several meals.
Two amusing notes: when it came time to cut out the biscuits, I found that the only thing I had that approximated a biscuit cutter was a heart-shaped cookie cutter - so, we had heart-shaped biscuits, laid out in a pretty pattern on top of the stew in its 13X9 casserole dish. Very cute.
The other amusing note had to do with the beef-buying. We almost never buy red meat, partly because neither Doug nor I particularly hanker after it, partly because I'm not particularly experienced in cooking it, partly because can be a very energy-intensive meat to raise, and partly because our organic grocery store is not very well supplied with it. On those rare occasions when we do cook or eat it, though, we like it to be good, so we tend to buy it at a very snooty and pricey grocery store that has very high quality meats (we do the same with our pork and some of our sausages, because those items are also good, more available than at the organic grocery store, and apt to be hormone-free).
Yesterday, at the butcher's section of this store, the man behind the counter, when I asked him for stew meat, suggested in a lovely French accent that I wait until the regular counter man came back, the implication being that while he himself cut the meat, the other man was better at English. So when the other man came back, I repeated my question, and was directed to some already-cubed meat that to my eye looked way too tender to stew for 2 hours. The first man came around the counter to point out which packages of meat were best; aha, I thought, this one knows what he's doing. So I managed to dredge up enough high school French to have a conversation about how long to cook the meat, to indicated that I needed meat that could be cooked two hours, and, when he directed me to some brisket, to ask that it be cut in cubes. We were both grinning as he wrapped up my beef in paper, me saying "Merci beaucoup" and he replying "Pas de quoi."
As I walked away, I thought, in reference to the other man, well, you may know English, but you don't know meat....