Marlene

Buck up partner. It's a camera. I know you loved yours. This is life and life happens girlfriend. Remember, you're a great mother, friend, sister, daughter, wife. I for one could not have done this without you. Have a martini, and I swear, it will be brighter in the morning.

grrrrrrrr.

Dinner tonight was Chufi's Butter Braised Beef. How can anything with that much butter possibly be bad? It wasn't. It was good. I used blade steak cut into cubes. I did use my Le Crueset braiser pan for both browning and braising. Starting out: Once I got the hang of the browning thing, I got a nice browning effect on the beef (yes, I added more butter!) I did start out braising on the stovetop, but as I had to go out and didn't really want to leave an open flame going, I popped it in the oven. I braised it for 4 hours at 225. it was decidedly tender and very buttery! Served with mashed potatoes (excuse the crappy plating) And peas! Yes, I know they're frozen. But they're green. And they count as a vegetable. (although WW in the days before the points system, made us count them as a starch. And now I'm really dating myself). Now I like my peas in a bowl, not on the plate. Why? well, because I like lots of butter with my peas, and by putting them in a bowl, the butter doesn't drain away all over the plate, and when you eat the peas in a bowl with butter you can get a bite of butter with every bite of peas! Sorry, this bite shot's a little blurry: I wanted to make JAZ's nuts as well so after dinner, I blanched and mixed up the nuts (I used walnuts with some pecan halves to appease the Southener in Dave) These are just out of the oven and salted: I had one warm and it was good. I think I might have gone a bit heavy on the cayenne though. I'm waiting till they cool down to really dig in. Thanks to Janet and Chufi for the recipes!

Yeah, I don't know all that much about cameras, but I do know she could get a better, new camera for the money they want for a refurbished one.

I have this aversion to buying refurbished electronics. Seems to be you're spending $300 to buy someone else's problem. But then, it's been a while since I've been camera shopping. This one is very similar to the one I'm using for the pics for this blog and it's $139.00. In fact, mine is an older version of this If you really want to spend $300 you could consider this one. Canon

Silipat makes sense. Remember I said 7 bags of chips? Ok, so two aren't showing in this pic. It didn't help that Lay's chips were on sale 3 for $5.00. Another snack I really like when I have fresh crusty bread in the house is slices of bread with a nice olive oil and balsamic for dipping. This constituted lunch today. Beef is braising. I confess, I've got it in the oven at 225. I promise Chufi, the liquid is barely moving, and I've got the lid a bit ajar. I had to go get Ryan and I have a total aversion to leaving an open flame going when I'm not in the house.

Janet, I want to make these this afternoon or evening. Grease the baking sheet or no?

I doubt if tenderloin has enough fat in it. Brisket maybe. ← Isn't that point of using a whole pound of butter as the braising medium? ← No not really. Tenderloin is just not a braising cut. Not enough fat, expensive as Abra says, and it's tender all by itself anyway.

I doubt if tenderloin has enough fat in it. Brisket maybe.

Ok I confess. I added another half stick of butter. Now simmering.

Duh. of course. Somebody tell me my brain will come back after a few weeks of not smoking.

Sounds good to me. Of course, the meat (even though I dried it) seems to be releasing a lot of water as I'm browning. So it seems to be simmering in liquid rather than browning, as I understand browning. Is this ok? nothing like having your very own instructor on line with you!

yeah that's pretty much what I did. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't doing the conversion wrong and using enough butter. Browning beef now.

Ok so even though I'm Canadian, I'm somewhat metric challenged. 75 grams of butter seems to be about 3/4 of a stick of butter?

Jack, I'll see your roasting temp and raise you 150 degrees. Although I'm supposed to be smoking butt on Sunday. Pick a day and we'll have a roast off.

jack and I always disagree on how to cook a roast. I do mine at 300 convection. Brush with olive oil, season with kosher salt and pepper. Cook to 122 for rare, 125 for med rare , 130 for med. I use the ratio of 22 minutes per lb. Using convection if you have it will give you a nice crust regardless, but at 17 lbs, even a regular oven at 325 will do the same thing. At 22 minutes per lb figure six hours for med rare. and go up from there. Do not cover it. use drippings for yorkshire pudding. See here for finished 4 bone rib roast.

Arne, I send you extra yogurt. . Here's a good way to not smoke for a couple of hours anyway. Go get your nails done, then go grocery shopping. Come home and commence to put things away and realize that you've got nowhere to put the 7 bags of chips you just bought. Immediately start cleaning out dratted pantry. Crackers. I have crackers. I counted em. 20 boxes of different kinds of crackers. Good grief.

Morning all. Up and ready to get going. Ry made a salami sandwhich for lunch (I think he's fixated on these) and is eating the last two doughnuts for breakfast. Yeah I know, terribly healthy, but I'm just not inclined to argue with him this morning. At least he's having milk with them. He also polished off the last bowl of peach soup last night and then when I was making a bowl of the French Onion for Don when he finally got home, Ry decided he needed a bowl of that too. I'm cleaning the kitchen (I swear fairies come in the night and mess it up). Then I'm going to drop Ryan at school and go get my nails done. That should leave me plenty of time to come back and get the braise started. Oh, and I guess I should shop for ingredients for tomorrow's dinner. I'm thinking pommes frites which means I would actually have to get my mandoline out and use it! ack. Oh, and let's do a mid week check on the weight thing. Remember I started out at 160. This morning, I weighed in at 157. I'm one of those people who can gain weight just by looking at food, so I'm relieved to note that not smoking is not having an impact on that particular challenge so far.

Janet, here's a link to Chufi's recipe Butter braised beef and Here is the link to the actual post with pictures. Chufi, this is a stovtop braise, right? Or can I braise it in the oven after browning?

Fifi, I'm a woman on the edge. It's best not to toy with me.

A few things to (hopefully) look forward to. Tomorrow, I think Susan and I are going to do Chufi's butter braised beef, (I mean how could that be bad?), Friday I think I'm going to try steak au poivre, and Sat, well maybe I'll get to the cuban then. Sunday is our last day and we're smokin' butts. Of course, I've had this weber smoker sitting in my back yard since June and we haven't used it yet, so this could be an interesting experiment! Dave should be back from the wilds of Florida by Friday evening and will get everyone updated on what he's been eating, and hopefull not smoking. Dave also owes us big time, so maybe we'll just let him cook and make us girls some cool drinks in those nifty glasses.

The problem I always have with grated, and it may be just me, is that first, I don't get a really good cheese coverage, which to me is a must, and secondly, grated tends to melt really quickly and sink to the bottom of the bowl. The crouton thing was actually an accident as they were the only thing I had in the house once. After some experimenting, I really found croutons + sliced cheese (although it's harder to find sliced gryuere than you think) works wonderfully well.

fifi, on the oven rack thing. I'm not sure if mine are chrome plated or stainless steel.. Given the weight, I suspect the later. However, I once left racks in an oven while cleaning. They never slid in and out easily after that. Plus the Dacor has a really cool full extension glide rack and I'd hate to screw that up. So Daddy-A, if you're reading along......Racks in or out?

They are great, aren't they? And yeah, I got them at WS back when they were delivering to Canada. I seem to recall paying about $20. US for them

We ate early tonight because of music lessons, and Susan is of course right. Once I got all the work out of the way earlier, dinner was a snap to pull together. I started out this morning making French Onion Soup first. Now, I normally make my onion soup with Onion Confit, but for once I didn't actually have any in the fridge. Ok, so I'll carmelize the onions the old fashioned way. I used both red and yellow onions for this. By the way, it takes an incredibly long time to carmelize onions when you're in a hurry. While the onions were carmelizing, I made croutons for the soup. I like lots of croutons in my soup as oposed to the single toast point that is traditional. For one thing, lots of croutons hold up the cheese better and for another, they stay relatively crispy, and I'm not a fan of soggy toast. When I'm not making a lot of croutons, I'll buy one or two of these to cube up. In the meantime, I melt butter, olive oil and garlic paste together. I use garlic paste instead of minced garlic because I find that the minced pieces just burn when the croutons are baking. The paste allows you to spread the garlic throughout the oil/butter mix and remains smooth. When the butter mixture is ready, toss the bread cubes with it and spread on a cookie sheet and bake: The onions were not finished carmelizing, (still) so I got the bread maker set up for making bread. I love this model: Got that started and returned to the onions. Ah, maybe now. I added beef stock wine, bay leaf and some port and sherry. When I made stock last time, I reduced some and packaged some in ziplock bags in one and two cup portions. They freeze flat very well. So we'll leave the soup to simmer while I start on the peach soup. First I made peach syrup: The halved and peeled those pesky peaches and roasted them. Then they went into the food processor to be pureed and then I added the peach syrup. And chilled it. Meanwhile the dough was ready. Once it had rested I rolled it more or less into a french loaf shape and let it rise. Then prepped the top and into the oven it went. Please humour me by pretending it looks like french bread. And finally it was time for dinner. Peach Soup. ( I was supposed to have mint for a garnish as well, but I seemed to be out of it) Ryan had three bowls of this: Fresh slices of bread: bread close up: And french onion soup. I use slices of gryuere cheese. Ok, I'm tired now, and my teacher's going to be annoyed that I haven't had a chance to practice much this week.