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.