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By Bill Altreuter

We saw short ribs at Wegman's late last week, but the weekend did not yield an opportunity to cook them, so last night I made two dinners. Working with LCA to prepare my mise en place, on one burner I prepared a sort of pork chops Lyonnaise, and on the other I made the short ribs, in a Provençal manner. Because LCA has abjured meat, I have been cast back into my Cajun repertoire lately, in order to make seafood that is more interesting than grilled salmon again and again and again. It's fun to do-- there is a lot of chopping, and making roux, and the result is deeply satisfying, but the same can be said of working with French recipes. We Netflixed Julia Child's early programs last week, so this was all part of the household zeitgeist I guess. (Julia is a member of our household pantheon, an eclectic group that also includes They Might Be Giants and Edward Eager.) It was fun to watch her, in glorious black and white, flipping a potato dish, missing the pan, then reassembling it, saying, "If it happens in the kitchen and no one else sees it, who needs to know?" Working with my short ribs, it was fun to think about how the Cajun style uses bell peppers instead of carrots to impart a particular sweetness to the mirapoux, or how in the Cajun style I would have started out by browning flour in oil, then added the vegetables, but for this dish I started by softening the vegetables, then added the flour to pull it all together. The whole works went into the oven to braise, and the house was filled with the scent of thyme and lavender from the herbs de Provence.

Full post as published by Outside Counsel on February 19, 2008 (boomark / email).