Three Cheers for Miss Leah Chase & Dookie Chase

here is a link to Miss Leah's delicious cookbooks http://www.ecookbooks.com/search.aspx?searchterm=leah+chase&x=10&y=7

If you can make some chicken as good as Miss Leah....call me!

Why Whille you don't seem to be enjoying yourself!

Why Whille you don't seem to be enjoying yourself!
No Uncle, Im having a miserable time
Auntie told me to eat as much as I wanted and I can't !

Happy Birthday Julia Child

In celebration of August 15th, also known as Julia Child's birthday, a party was given in her honor last night in Tucson Arizona. The menu
needed to be worthy. Boeuf Bourginon might seem like an obvious choice of entree to some to celebrate and honor the original French Chef. After all, it was Julia Child who introduced a developing gourmet nation to it. Boeuf is now being newly rediscovered as a "star" dish by the original Star Chef(www.starchefs.com). With its star turn and attendant hoopla surrounding the marvelously wrought movie Julie & Julia corralling our culinary cultural consciousness, I am frankly surprised not to have seen the savory winey french beef stew in the now ubiquitous "red carpet" footage from the film's premier. The stew as much a star as Streep or Adams themselves. I can see the shot of a French cast enamel dutch oven carried by a kitchen wench in oven mits
stopping to answer the shouts from the papparazzi along the velvet ropeline edge. Boeuf! Boeuf! Look this way! Click! Click!Click! As the obliging wench turns and gently tilts the slightly steaming stew pot just so, in order that a perfect picture can be captured and zipped around the planet for all to see and be inspired by. And to try to make at home. Hooray. It would be the sort of exalted and ridiculous attention that might just have delighted Julia. Because, this great dish deserves such attention and rediscovery.

But during this otherwise dull, depressional summer of unseasonable rainy & cool temperatures all along the eastern shore. Our comfort food craving might reasonably be drawn to such fabulous, warming, fulfilling, hearty fare. I mean, who craves piping hot beef stew in the midst of a heat wave? Summer 2009 has been perfect Boeuf weather. The movie has also stimulated our Beouf fantasies and cravings. So simple beef stew with wine or Beouf Bourgignon it shall be for our celebration.

Though let me say there is very little that is purely simple about crafting a Beouf from Mastering the Art of French Cooking(www.ecookbooks.com). Like all simple things, it is actually very hard to do well. Let alone perfectly. But Julia gives us a fighting chance with mostly precise direction and near fool-proof description. Assumptions for 21st centure culinary duncery notwithstanding ( ie; browning to a non-browning experienced cook).

But this is not the eastern shore, and it is the wild west and it has been hot. And so on a really hot Tucson night, during the dog days of what has felt like the longest hottest summer in recent memory, Boeuf Bourgignon seemed a most unlikely menu choice for a table full of VIP guests from the worlds of food, science, medicine & entrepreneurship. Yet the circumstances of this unique moment in time, including our cultural clamoring for comfort, and collective thoughts of Julia made our desert dinner decision a no-brainer.

So I dove in, like Julie Powell and a multi-generational sorority of women before me to make the now world famous version of this classic stew. Good wine, grass fed beef from Montana thanks to Bryant Family Farm Beef (www.bryantfamilyfarm.com), purveyors to the US Culinary Olympic team, perfect mushrooms, European butter.Check. The result was a grand success according to all those at table. But the most gratifying moment came when I recalled my own time with Julia and how she would have loved the fact that wonderful friends came together for a swim in the Arizona twilight, with joyful music playing and twinkling stars complying in the perfect desert sky. She would have loved that we toasted her and used her recipe and that it turned out per her instructions in Mastering. That the recipe for boeuf works and triumphs, even in the hands of a passionate serventless amateur cook-housewife like myself, would cause her to raise a glass in our honor right back. Happy Birthday Julia and Thank You. Bon Appetit!

Drink Biograph Whiskey ...

Drink Biograph Whiskey and see moving pictures