An aside - I tried to find the original Julie Powell blog posting on cooking bouef bourguignon from the Julie/Julia Project, but alas, no luck. As my sister will attest, I am not very good at finding things on Google! Julia Child photo courtesy of Fairchild Archives.
A couple of years ago, we came up with a system at our house that simplified the dilemma of the evening meal or know better as, "Its 5:00pm and what are we having for dinner tonight?!! We spend either Saturday or Sunday comprising a menu for the week, gather all the ingredients together, do the grocery shopping and if we're lucky, prep whatever can be done ahead of time and then the weekly menu is posted on the fridge. It sounds more involved than it is - we can usually get it all accomplished in about 2 hours and then there's no fretting about what to eat after coming home from a hard day of work. We often double the recipe for an entree and freeze half so that the weekly menu is a combination of fresh made choices as well as selections from the freezer - so there's no complicated cooking every night of the week. And Saturday night is always "Chef's Choice" - aka- leftovers. We usually like to include one new recipe to try each week and so boeuf bourguignon was a natural choice.
I remember watching Julia Child, The French Chef, on PBS growing up in Wisconsin - I even remember my mom owning the cookbook from the series...whether or not she ever made any of the recipes I don't remember but she was always game for new things so she might have...
I checked out the cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1 from the Everett public library and added the recipe to the weekly menu. When Monty and I did the grocery shopping, we made a few adjustments to expedite the process - this was already a three hour recipe! We used frozen pearl onions instead of fresh (they are so small- peeling them did not seem as if it would be easy) and we bought fresh mushrooms already sliced. And so on Sunday afternoon, we began...
the meat...
the vegetables...
the anticipation.
the pearl onions...
the mushrooms...
the wait...
the end result...it was quite fabulous!
Bon Appetit!
March 3 - thanks Julie for finding the original Julie Powell post on making this wonderful dish...hers was not so wonderful but I'm sure she perfected it!
http://blogs.salon.com/0001399/2002/12/11.html
