Beef short ribs

Ya’ll know that Thomas Keller is  my new boyfriend. Ever since Mark gave me his new cookbook,  Ad Hoc, for Christmas, I’ve been spending hours and hours with him. And, let me tell you, he’s not a cheap date. So, the other day I decided to make his Braised Beef Short Ribs recipe. That was after I spent two days making his beef stock because the recipe calls for five cups of it.

Let me pause here to say that at the end of the post I’m going to pass along a way to take Thomas’s rather complicated and time-consuming recipe and dumb it down for people like me who don’t have seven hours to make supper.

So you start, or rather Thomas starts, with a red wine reduction. The recipe requires you to dump one 750-milliliter bottle of dry red wine into your pot. This almost killed me as it goes totally against my nature as a girl who loves her wine. But I did it anyway. Then you add onions, carrots, leeks, shallots, mushrooms, garlic and a bunch of herbs and you cook it for almost an hour until it reduces to a thick glaze.

This is all you get after an hour. And this is not even to mix up with the meat. This is to go under the meat. Not to mention the fact that you throw away all the vegetables. After you brown the short ribs, you then mix up more onions, carrots, leeks, garlic and herbs with the wine reduction.  There is barely enough reduction to coat one carrot. You put the vegetables in the bottom of a Dutch oven, cover them with cheesecloth and lay the meat on top. You lay the meat on top. Not touching the wine reduction. Not touching the wine reduction that it took you an hour and $27 to make.

Then you add the five cups of beef stock that it took two days to make and you cover it with a parchment paper lid and braise the ribs for another two hours.

They were utterly delicious. However, I don’t know if they were seven hours worth of deliciousness. But I will make them again with some slight and lazy modifications. I will know how little meat a short rib has on it and find some more meaty specimens, probably at a local butcher rather than the grocery store. I will skip the whole red wine reduction entirely and drink a couple glasses instead. (I have a refrigerator magnet that says: “I love cooking with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.” That’s pretty much how I feel about the subject.) I will brown the short ribs, put them in the pot, add about 1/2 cup of wine, the beef broth, some aromatics like carrots and onions,  and herbs. I will use that parchment lid. That was a neat idea and it kept everything very moist.

I will celebrate the fact that Thomas Keller wants us to go the extra mile and produce as closely as possible his extraordinary food. But I’m not a very good girlfriend. I like him. He’s a great guy. I’m just not ready to go steady yet.

Fooling around with Thomas Keller

“I feel like I’m married to Thomas Keller,” I said to Mark after an eleven-hour day cooking from Ad Hoc. “You’re not married to Thomas Keller,” he said. “You’re just fooling around with him.”

This is Thomas Keller. He runs several restaurants, including the family-style Ad Hoc. He is universally considered the best chef in the world…in the world. And he wrote a book for home cooks. So I was more than excited when I got it for Christmas.

But the man is killing me. Killing me! The first thing I wanted to make was beef short ribs. But in order to make the beef short ribs, you really must make beef stock because store bought wouldn’t really do the dish justice. So yesterday I made beef stock according to Thomas Keller. This required, first, an early morning trip to the farmer’s market in freezing cold for beef bones because where else can you even find beef bones? The recipe says they should be meaty. I don’t know if these were or not but they were the only beef bones within 150 miles of Nashville.

So I get the beef bones home and put them in the oven to roast. This takes about an hour, during which my oldest friend, Stacy, calls from Chicago. We commiserate about our two sons going off the college next year and the fact that we are not ready to cut those apron strings. Just a few short years ago, when we had to bribe them with M&Ms to go Number Two in the potty, were were more than willing to let them go. But now, we’re not so sure. While I am talking to Stacy, I am cradling the phone on my shoulder as I repeatedly turn the bones to achieve  a uniform, dark color as steam gushes from the oven.

I, of course, haven’t read ahead in the recipe and realize that it calls for using both a conical strainer and cheesecloth. I have neither of these. So after the bones brown and I have them simmering away in a huge pot (never boil stock or it will become cloudy, heaven forbid), I run to the mall in search of strainer and cheesecloth. On the day after Christmas. What an idiot.

I secure said strainer and cloth from Williams-Sonoma in exchange for Noah’s first semester of tuition in college. It is now about 2 p.m. The recipe calls for simmering the stock for five hours, then adding the aromatic vegetables and simmering it for another hour. And, bear in mind, this is just one ingredient for another recipe.

So, here’s the stock simmering away. I will admit I did get a good long session of Farm Town in while I was waiting the six hours for the stock to be done. Finally, it was time to turn off the stove because you have to let the stock rest. I can assure you that by this time I was more pooped than the stock.

Ta-da! Here it is. Strained twice through the platinum strainer and designer cheesecloth. By now, it is eight o’clock at night. I started this at nine in the morning. Thomas Keller is killing me. This is not home cooking. But I did realize as I labored through this that I learned at least three techniques I’ll use a lot in my cooking. And maybe that’s the real lesson here. Plus, I got enough stock for the short rib recipe with some left over for other uses.

I freeze it in increments of one cup in freezer bags. And realize after all this that I’m not even hungry. I eat some cheese and crackers. I’m sure Thomas Keller is dining on those short ribs right now and he’s not even giving me a second thought. How cruel.

Doing battle with Thomas Keller

I was in the fight of my life tonight, but it was worth it and I think I at least can claim a draw. Ya’ll know who Thomas Keller is, yes? He’s the most respected chef in the world. He runs a restaurant in Napa Valley called the French Laundry and even the most egotistic gourmets drool over his food. He wrote a book with French Laundry recipes in it and I checked it out of the library just to see. My Lord, I couldn’t make even one of those recipes.

BUT. He has now written a book for home cooks called Ad Hoc at Home. I am pretty sure I’m getting it for Christmas because Mark asked me twice how to spell Thomas Keller’s name. The other day I was listening to a podcast of the Splendid Table and there was Thomas Keller explaining how to make Potato Hash with Bacon and Melted Onions. Skillet potatoes! I know how to do that. Well, apparently I do not.

I got the recipe off the website and decided to give it a go tonight, minus the bacon because I was already going to fry some sausages for supper. I’m linking to it here because it is three pages long. For skillet potatoes!

The first thing I did was make the melted onions. These things are so worth the effort, but it takes about an hour and I had not budgeted my time very well. It was already 6:30 and I had a long way to go. I could just see Thomas Keller sneering at me. Rookie. So I pressed on.

The next thing is the potatoes and I learned a trick here. To get these perfect little half-inch cubes the recipe calls for Keller tells you to square off the potato and then cut the cubes. I’ll use this trick over and over.

So once you get the potatoes all diced up you have to cook them in oil. Thomas Keller says that they should be “tender and a rich golden brown.” They were tender. They were not a rich golden brown. He also says to line a baking sheet with paper towels and put a drying rack on top to put the potatoes on after they’re done. I did this, but apparently my drying rack is not up to T.K. standards because the potatoes just fell through the rack. Ditched the rack. I can feel T.K. sneering at me again, but I am but a humble home cook and I’m doing the best I can.

The next thing is to brown the potatoes in the grease from the bacon you have rendered if you followed the whole recipe. But I have T.K. beat here. I already have bacon grease because all good Southern cooks have a jar of it sitting around. The final step is adding thyme, salt and pepper.

It is now almost eight at night and I am exhausted trying to keep up with Thomas Keller. But I have to tell you, the potatoes were absolutely delicious. Here’s what I like about chefs like Thomas Keller who take the time to write a book for home cooks. Thomas Keller expects that we can do this. He knows that he’s asking a lot of us. Or maybe he doesn’t. But he doesn’t cut corners or give us stupid recipes for turkey burgers or ground beef slop. Tonight, I felt as though I’d stretched a bit as a cook.

I have grease stains all over my turtleneck. The cats are picking up stray potato cubes from the kitchen floor. But I went toe-to-toe with Thomas Keller and I didn’t blink.

Is there anything new to write about food?

This is a serious question since I want to write another cookbook and I am racking my brain to figure out a topic that hasn’t been considered. I went to Barnes and Noble tonight to look for a new and exciting cookbook. I found tomes exclusively devoted to macaroni and cheese, bacon and cookies. I found books all about casseroles that included recipes for paella, which really isn’t a casserole in my mind, but I guess the author ran out of good recipes for chicken divan casserole or hash brown casserole. I found a gazillion Rachel Ray books with really stomach-turning recipes. I found the really good cookbooks that I’ll never have enough knowledge to attempt: books by Mario Batalli, Thomas Keller, Rick Bayless, Marcella Hazan and Julia Child,  just to name a few.  I found novelty books like One Hundred Ways to Cook Hamburger and 365 Days of Vegetables (actually, I made those up – maybe I should consider one of those as my new title).

But I can’t figure out anything truly new. My inclination is toward Southern cooking. There are a boatload of books already out there. Can I beat Edna Lewis? No way. John T. Edge, John Edgerton (could they be long lost brothers?), James Villas – all giants. And those great community cookbooks published by Southern Junior Leagues are better than anything I can imagine.  If you haven’t picked up your copy of Notably Nashville by the Nashville Junior League, do yourself a favor and click here to get your copy.

So I’m in limbo. What’s the next great thing? Actually, tonight I made up something that’s not a book, but it was good eats.  I made quesadillas from leftover cabernet marinated pot roast, Cheddar cheese and caramalized onions. My son and his study partner gobbled them down. Maybe that’s enough for now.