Stracotto with Porcini: Recipe 1!

Stracotto with Porcini over
creamy polenta

With not too much further ado (after all, you’ve waited five years for this, all my zero long-time readers), here is the last recipe!  For context, I ate this at an Italian wine tasting at a slice of heaven, Dave’s Fresh Pasta.  My good friend and I liked it so much (despite already eating five plates of food…), that I wrote them to request the recipe a few days later.  They replied and told me they’d just used Giada’s recipe, and sent me the link.  

This recipe is easy, smells great while cooking, and could feed the entire army of...Vatican City?  According to the Internet, it’s a country, so I’m stickin’ with it!  Clearly this called for a crowd, so I sent out a call for meat eaters, and Hannah, Emily, Zoe and Peter turned up hungry.  I fed them this over some creamy polenta (ie. milk instead of water and some parmesan and spices stirred in) and made sure they left feeling disgustingly full and a little tipsy after serving them the Smitten Kitchen’s delicious recipe for Red Wine Chocolate Cake (I'll share that recipe later, but here is the link).

Good friends = good eating times

Despite me having a celebratory Old Fashioned that caused me to forget to add salt and pepper at the end, they all claimed to really like it (but don’t forget to season it; it does enhance the flavor, duh). And, despite five hungry grown adults (although Emily and I might only count as one standing on each others shoulders), I had at least five servings left over.  I can attest to this, like chili, deepening in flavor over time, especially when you say, add some more wine when you reheat it…All in all, it was a great dinner, with great company, and a delicious way to cap of my 52 Le Creuset Project!  I’ll have some thoughts on that for you tomorrow, along with my top 10 list from the project.  

Stracotto with Porcini

Serves 8-10

Recipe adapted from Giada/Food Network

Stracotto with Porcini and Polenta

Ingredients

1 5lb boneless chuck roast

2-3 Tbsp olive oil

2 onions, chopped

6 cloves garlic, crushed or minced

1.5 cups red wine

1.5 cups beef broth (low sodium)

½ oz dried porcini mushrooms (rehydrated and rinsed)

2 sprigs fresh rosemary, destemmed and chopped

6-8 sprigs of fresh thyme, destemmed

salt & pepper

Dijon Pulled Chicken (Recipe 5)

Dijon Pulled Chicken

There's no good reason I was a chicken for so long about trying any sort of braised/pulled/roasted meat, especially now that I can confidently say that I wish I'd done this sooner, so I could have optimal levels of this Dijon Pulled Chicken for my whole life. I love Dijon Chicken, but that's a pretty straightforward yet delicious recipe.  Pondering my options, I began to wonder if I could do a BBQ pulled meat with a totally different flavor profile (I live near a really good BBQ place that I can smell allllll summer long, so I suspect that is where this idea originated). However, pulled anything just seemed so...complicated, what with all the smokers and roasting and rubbing...I never thought it could be pulled off in a Le Creuset! Oh, how wrong I was.

It is shockingly easy, but a definite time commitment. Luckily, this winter is never ending and relentless, so you've got ample time on your hands after the fiftytenth snow/ice storm/cold snap of the season, and probably most of the ingredients on hand already. If you need a really good reason never to leave home again until spring for the afore mentioned reasons, get cooking and get some some of this deliciousness in your belly. Having never cooked BBQ or pulled anything, I consulted several recipes for flavor profile ideas and cooking techniques (The Kitchn's BBQ Shredded Chicken and Braised French Onion Chicken and Pete's Recipes Pulled Chicken were especially helpful). I gobbled mine up with some lightly sauteed brussels sprouts, kale, and garlic and served it over quinoa, but I'd say any of the usual BBQ pairs would go well with this riff on the typical BBQ pulled dish (ie. cornbread, a baked sweet potato, on a roll, rice, cole slaw, etc.).  I drank it with a nice Cote du Rhone (c'est French, mes amis), but I suspect a nice crisp white or beer would be great with this lightly sweet and savory mess of deliciousness.  Warning: this even tastes good cold out of the fridge in the morning.  Trouble.  

By the way - only FOUR more recipes to go before I finally complete my New Years 2011 challenge to cook 52 Le Creuset Recipes in a year! 

Dijon Pulled Chicken in a Le Creuest

Deluxe Luxor, Day the second

Hatshepsut's Temple

On my second and final day in Luxor, I opted to take a tour through my hotel to see the Valley of the Kings, Valley of the Queens, Hatshepsut's Temple, and other things.  It was a wise choice, barring the fact that our guide, though lovely, kept trying to sell us things, like necklaces of our names in Ancient Egyptian script.  That whole area is HUGE!  You can spend all day there and not see it all; we just did the alleged highlights.  By us, I mean myself and the only other person on the tour, a truly lovely Nicaraguan woman from, get this, my mom's hometown: Coral Gables, FL!  Photography is not allowed at all in the Valley of the Kings, which is for the best.  All the tombs there still have the original, beautiful, full color paintings decorating the walls.  I assure you, they are gorgeous to behold.  Our guide didn't go into the tombs with us; I kind of wish I had done a little preparing on my own to refresh myself on Ancient Egyptian mythology and art.  I later discovered that there is a whole section in the Lonely Planet Guide...oops.  I encourage you to check out the super cool Theban Mapping Project website if you are curious about the Valley of the Kings.  Of course, we could not spend all day at the Valley of the Kings, so off we went to Hatshepsut's Temple, where photography is allowed!