oeuf en sauce meurette--kind of

Last week I invited some friends over for dinner, a good excuse to make something special. I was considering Julia Child's recipe for boeuf bourgignon, inspired partly by seeing Julie & Julia and partly by the cool fall weather. I have a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking from the 60s that was my mother's. I don't think she used it much--there aren't many stains and some years ago a little card fell out of it from the friend who gave it to her. Looking at the recipe, I started to lose steam myself. So many steps! I am not the type of cook who likes to stand around for hours chopping and fussing. That's why I like making Italian food so much--it's generally pretty simple and tastes delicious.

So I turned to Epicurious, my favorite "cookbook" these days. (I love to plug in items that I have in the fridge and pantry to see what I can do with them.) It came up with a recipe for beef braised in red wine--essentially the same thing as boeuf bourgignon, but a little more rustic. I did not use Barolo--I'd already splurged on a bottle of Margaux to drink. (I'd walked into the neighborhood wine store and they were having an informal tasting with a distributor. Of course the one I really liked was the most expensive. The Curse of Good Taste without the wealth to back it up.) Instead I used an affordable Cotes du Rhone.

It turned out very well--I took some pictures, but I accidentally deleted them at a fashion event this weekend while I was trying to make more room on my memory card. (And frankly a photo of a pot full of some red boiling substance is maybe not so exciting.) Unfortunately one of my friends couldn't make it at the last minute, so there was a lot left over. It was definitely Meat Week over here. Not that I'm complaining.

Around the end of the week I had more of the sauce left than the meat. I recalled reading a recipe for meurette sauce in a blog written by an American expat in France, one of the many expat blogs I check in with regularly. It occurred to me that my leftover broth was basically meurette sauce. I poached an egg, made some polenta, et voila!


As a side note, I have discovered a love for polenta. I like it as a side dish with meaty entrees like this, or even just plain, with butter and a little salt. When it cools and becomes solid, I like to fry it in butter and eat it for breakfast with molasses. I bought a little bag at Whole Foods that is almost gone. All they have at Trader Joe's, where I go for non-produce staples, is the premade kind, so I'll probably have to make a special trip to Whole Foods to get more soon.

Paris in Chicago

I think I write this post every year (or maybe every season), but I am so powerfully drawn to the area in Grant Park around Buckingham Fountain. It feels so wonderfully Parisian--a wide-open space that reminds me of the Place de la Concorde with carefully tended gardens and wide allées a la the Tuileries. This weekend I took advantage of the excellent early fall weather to take a bike ride along the lakefront all the way downtown.


The chairs are noticeably bigger than those you see in Paris parks, the better to fit our extra-large American bottoms.

While the atmosphere is delightfully French, the food is not. The kiosk run by the Washburne Culinary Institute really needs to step up its game. There is no excuse for a sloppily put together, supremely mediocre turkey and Swiss sandwich with no finesse whatsoever--especially when you are in cooking school.

A friend had the brilliant idea that someone should open up a crepe cart. If they could get a permit, they would clean up. I can just taste that Nutella crepe now! Are you listening, entrepreneurs?




There are even people walking tiny dogs.