So the Day of The Remembrance of Our Betrothal fell on this past Sunday and I found myself still on Saturday in somewhat of a quandary as to what sort of caloric sustenance would be most fitting to mark the auspicious occasion with proper solemnity.
Wandering as I am wont to do through the cornucopious aisles of Costco I heard this package calling out, nay yearning aloud in its desire to grace our plates
Boneless short ribs! Something I’d never attempted before! Being completely clueless about how exactly one would shortly ribify I trolled about AlGore’s Interwebs and ended up where I most often do, at the Simply Wonderful site Simply Recipes, which is more or less what I followed. I do have this problem of wandering off message when I cook and not really following every jot and tittle of the instructions. Perhaps it is the wine involved, or perhaps it is my lack of formal culinary training that makes my technique more of a slash-and-burn affair.
I’m thinking it’s the wine.
Anyhow, I was off-message from the get-go as I had boneless short ribs and just had to guess what the conversion ration of bone-in short ribs to boneless was/is/would be.
So at about 2 o’clock on Saturday afternoon I gathered my resources to prepare Sunday’s meal, got the oven going to 350 and pulled out the big honking oven-safe dutch oven from its place of honor in the garage.
Luckily for all those about to be harmed by the making of this I had my Ever Able Assistant primed and ready to assist me in my Herculean task
I cubed up the ribs into chomp-sized pieces and salt-n-peppered away
and browned them in some olive oil
then took those out of the pan, set them aside, and sauteed in the pan some sliced carrots (3), celery (2 stalks) and a large cuisinarted white onion (Daughter likes the taste of onion but not the texture, so I invariably puree the onion into apple sauce before cooking). Note to self: spoon out some of the pan/oil juices before cooking veggies, as it didn’t look like much but there was indeed a little too much grease from the browning.
Anyhow, once that’s all properly browned remove the veggies as well and deglaze the pan with a full bottle of wine.
Now this did require that I open up another bottle of wine to keep myself properly glazed but that was soon accomplished in reasonably good order. That’s the Balance of Nature: Pan de-glazed, Bingley Glazed. Yin/Yang baby.
So the wine swirls about and gets reduced over highish heat to about 1/3 of it’s original volume and all the tasty bits on the pan get liberated, add back in the browned meat and enough veal stock to cover (I used 4 cups veal stock and then about another 1 1/2 cups beef stock, but YMMV) and bring to a boil
and then cover the pot with foil and fling it into the oven
Two hours later I pulled it out gingerly (because it was frickin heavy and frickin hot) and stirred in the aforementioned sauteed carrots/onion/celery
foiled the pot yet again and back in the oven for another 30 minutes or so and then I took the pot out and put it on the counter (THANK YOU JESUS FOR GRANITE) to cool down. By now it was 6pm on Saturday night and, oh yeah, I now had to make dinner for Saturday (bump the oven up to 400 to bake some tilapia, use the open beef stock carton to make some richly flavored rice to go with, etc, I am Captain Efficiency).
And open more wine, engage in familial pleasantries, yadda-yadda-yadda.
After the dishes were done the pot on the counter had cooled sufficiently that it could be covered and put into the fridge so off it went at, oh, 9:30 or so to sleep with the knishes.
The next afternoon I skimmed off the fat which had thoughtfully risen, creme-like, to the top
Damn that’s nasty looking.
and then gently re-heated the ribs
and allowed the sauce to reduce and thicken as I got the brussel sprouts ready and boiled the big fat fluffy egg noodles
The meat just fell apart and was quite yummily infused with gentle wine flavor and all-around goodness (it got two thumbs up from Daughter).
The slight tweaks I’ll make next time will be to use a more robust wine (I just used a fruity chianti I had lying about; I agree with the recipe that a hearty zin or shiraz would be more better) and I’ll add some rosemary and schmaybe a tablespoon or three of tomato paste just to add a little greater depth of flavor; but really, this turned out quite delish.
Which is a good thing after two day’s work.
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August 15, 2012 1:09 pm | 
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