Roast Chicken & Boeuf Provençal

(Not, not the same night. I screwed up the posting so now we have two under the same heading.)

Roast Chicken

Saturday 1 March

With rosemary under its skin, thyme and lemon in its butt.

Also roasted beets on the side: just add a 1/4 cup of water to a pan, put unpeeled beets in, and cover. You still need Julia Child's asbestos fingers for peeling the hot beets, and resign yourself to the fact that you're going to look like the last act of Sweeney Todd.

Also watercress fresh from the market: dressed with oil, a drop of balsamic, and slightly wilted with several teaspoons of chicken gravy/fat from the roasting pan.

Boeuf Provençal

Sunday 2 March

This is one of the great recipes from Cuisine of the Sun. In its original form it takes three days, but we have cut it down to two, or even one. We started it on Saturday to serve Sunday.

Take a big piece of beef (this time it was a shoulder roast), and cut it into cubes.
Then make a cooked marinade of
onions
garlic
celery
carrots
sprigs of thyme
a bay leaf
all sautéed and then doused in red wine.
Let it cool and pour over the meat. This is supposed to take a full day, but we let it marinate for most of "Carmen."

Now cook the stew.
To a big pot (dutch oven) add some olive oil, then bacon, and when it's rendered up some fat, brown the boeuf on all sides. Then add
yet more onions, and when browned,
add the marinade,
with the secret ingredient, orange peel. (The recipe calls for the orange peel to be removed the next day with the thyme sprigs and bay leaf, but in fact we love the taste so much that we slice the peel into strips and cook the heck out of them)
Cook this for 2-3 hours until the burf is exceedingly tender.
You can serve at this point, or leave overnight.

(The original recipe calls for removing the fat, which will have formed a smooth sheet on top. So it will, but only if you have used far more wine than I like, in order to raise the level of the liquid over the solids. You can scrape off any excess fat, but there's really not that much, if 1) you've trimmed the beef, and 2) are using bacon rather than French fatback. All in all, a nice step but not absolutely necessary to the triumph of the dish.)

Next day, rehot and add still more carrots. Cook for half an hour or so. The old carrots of the marinade will have virtually disappeared into the thick stoo. Add some chopped parsley (if it isn't winter, which it is) and a handful of black olives (if you don't forget, which I did) about 5 minutes before serving.

There were no prisoners, which is bit of a pity, since one of the the great things about this recipe is that it has three lives, so make the biggest batch you can. We haven't done the full hat trick in a while, but for Round II, you take the left-over stoo, grind it all up with some cooked spinach and lots of parmesan to make a ravioli filling; and then for Round C, you take any left-over filling and roll that in cooked rice to make little meat balls, which you brown in the oven.