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.

the ancient version of the revolving restaurant

Archeaologists in Rome have uncovered what they believe is a revolving banquet hall in the emperor Nero's Golden Palace. "The purported main dining room, with a diameter of over 50 feet (16 meters), rested upon a 13-foot (4-meter) wide pillar and four spherical mechanisms that, likely powered by a constant flow of water, rotated the structure," says the New York Times.

The palace was the ancient Roman version of the Aaron Spelling mansion--sprawling and flashy. From thecolosseum.net:

The area of the property was 985 feet long by 295 feet in width or depth. Among the other things there was an amphitheatre, a market, and bath-gymnasium complex, served by an aqueduct 75 Km (50 miles) long. Baths were served by a flow of both salted water and sulphurous one from the Albulae springs. Upon the Caelian Hill there were beautiful gardens, zoos, woods and parks where cattle roamed . There were hundreds of statues, grottoes, nymphaeums, porticoes painted with romantic landscapes; multiple waterfalls flowed all over. The lake - where the Colosseum was later built - was surrounded by woods and fake sea villages, and it was so big that ships could manoeuvre in it. The rooms of the palace were decorated with rare stones and mother of pearl; in the banquet rooms the guests were inundated by flowers and perfumes from the ivory ceilings (R. Lanciani, Rovine...). One of the most famous of these rooms featured a circular roof painted with the stars and the planets, that revolved mechanically imitating the movement of the stars.

The Golden Palace, or Domus Aurea, as it is also known, was one of the more obscure and enjoyable sites I remember touring in the city. It was right when I was leaving Rome--I went with my stepmother and sister, pitching it to them as something few tourists bother to visit. (I let them go to the Vatican on their own--after dealing with the crowds in the Sistine Chapel, I wasn't eager to do it again.) I seem to remember the guides saying that after Nero's death the emperor Vespasian actually had it covered up with dirt to erase all traces of Nero's profligacy. I can't find a reliable source for this online, but I like the idea of an entire palace sealed up for thousands of years. At any rate, the structure is completely underground (quite near where I lived in Rome, in a much more humble abode), and they've only excavated a small percentage of it, even though its existence has been known of since the Renaissance. Raphael and other artists used to rappel down into the darkened rooms to take a gander at the wall paintings.

It's quite an eerie feeling to head into the cave-like rooms that are open, and even in the height of summer a jacket or scarf is a good idea as it can get really chilly. The rare stones and mother of pearl are long-gone, but some of the wall paintings still exist, and the scale and size of the rooms offer a sense of the building's grandeur.

the end of the season

Lifeguard stations in a jumble, ready for storage.

I haven't done much to tie in the last couple of posts to Italy--but surely the appreciation of fiori, giardini, e il lago is molto italiano?

favorite summer spot of 2009

As you may have figured out, my favorite spot this summer is a section of the lakefront bike path that is actually a little detour off the main path. It is a narrow, gravel stretch between the Sydney Marovitz public golf course and the lake. I like it because it runs right next to the shore, there are weeping willows and the sound of crickets and cicadas in summer, and the traffic on Lake Shore Drive seems very far away.



At either end, various section of land are fenced off for butterfly and bird sanctuaries, or to let it to back to its original prairie nature. A field of pink, purple, and blue flowers at the north end attracts not only butterflies and bees but a surprising cross-section of the public--men on bikes, couples out for a stroll--who stop to admire the view of the blooms.




Sailboats gently sway in the harbor as the golden, early-fall light wanes.

Wistful signs of the end of summer . . . but fall has its own pleasures.

(PS: I just figured out you can click the photos to view extra-large versions of them.)

lake and sky

Spent the weekend on the beach in Michigan, where the landscape is perhaps not so different from that of the northern French coast. (Certainly the weather, which was freakishly cool for August, felt northern.) There are even vineyards . . . and lots of old barns and houses along the back roads.




For food, though, we went pretty much all-American--grilled skirt steaks and s'mores one night, plus frozen custard and cheeseburgers for lunch one day. We did have an Italian flavor on the second night, with me making a great amatriciana sauce out of fresh tomatoes (N.B., in my version, I do not use garlic--I like to have the bacon-y flavor right out front). The grocery store even had pancetta--they were well set up for us city folk.

The lovely little cottage we stayed in was well-stocked with vintage cookbooks and other books about food. I picked up this one (you may know Ludwig Bemelmans better as the author of the Madeline books) and read it all weekend. Now apparently out of print, it's a memoir of his life as a waiter and eager gourmand in Europe and the U.S. in the middle of the 20th century. It put me a very pleasant Continental frame of mind, for which I was very grateful.

corniche

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We had a few really lovely, golden, late-summer days here. Maybe I was in a French mood from watching this movie the night before, but driving along North Lake Shore Drive to work in the morning reminded me of Cannes--something about the combination of the road, the trees on the median and the park to the left, and the sun glinting off the water and the gently swaying boats in the harbors.

It's somewhat odd that given how much the lake is a part of the city--and how huge it is--that we don't have more of a coastal culture. Of course, there are probably many people who spend every weekend on their boats or at the lakefront and would strongly disagree. I wish I knew more of them!

Blogging reminds me daily how pathetic my photography skills are--at least for this one I have the excuse that I was driving at the time. Please use your imagination!