cooking – Peacock Orchard

The best roast you’ll ever make!

I’ve cooked a lot of beef roasts and there weren’t that many of them I was proud to claim, until now. This recipe has never, ever turned out poorly. I have essentially dumbed down a beef bourguignon recipe. This recipe has a few less steps and way less active cooking time required. You can vary the recipe with the variety of wine you use and how much of each ingredient you use as well.

Start by thinly slicing a large yellow onion into a dutch oven with some olive oil in the bottom. Add salt and cook until golden in color.

Next add mushrooms, carrots and cut bacon. Cook until the mushrooms start to brown. I don’t have an exact on any of these ingredients. It’s whatever I have and feel like cutting. I only had 2 carrots when I made this roast. The roast before it I used 5. Completely up to you.

Remove everything from the dutch oven, season the meat and brown on all sides.

I use a Hudson Bay Beef Spice mix from Savory Spice Shop.

Make sure you flip the meat. You may add butter at this time if the pan is dry.

Perfection! Add the onion/mushroom/carrot/bacon mixture back to the pan with the meat.

Now add the wine. Whatever red variety you have on hand. I have used Malbec, Merlot, Cabernet, etc. Red wine and beef, you pretty much can’t go wrong here. I add wine until there is about a 1/2 inch in the bottom of the pan.

Cook the wine until slightly reduced and add beef broth until the roast is covered.

Bring to a boil.

Cook in a 275 degree oven for about 6 hours. You can do longer or less time. I’ve never had it turn out badly.

Bon Appetit!

Eggtastic Tuesday- The Fluffiest Scrambled Eggs

The key to fluffy scrambled eggs is a simple one, air. The more air you can get in your eggs the fluffier they will be.

Now, I do not claim to be an expert whisker but I’ve whisked plenty of things in my life. I whisked and whisked the eggs but I can’t beat the blender for adding air.

30 seconds in the blender and the eggs are airy and light.

These are hand scrambled eggs. Now, it should be known the eggs got a bit overcooked as we were having photo problems. Thankfully our first two eggs were equally over cooked so the experiment was still good.

Eggs in the blender. Noticeably fluffier.

Once I picked which method made the airiest eggs, I then tried adding a teaspoon of water and a teaspoon of milk to see which would would assist in further fluffing.

This is eggs poured into a hot and oiled pan after being blended with water.

Eggs blended with milk.

There wasn’t a very noticeable difference between the milk blended and water blended eggs. I do not believe it affected taste either. So I suppose that’s a personal preference thing. I will say that adding water or milk to thin down the eggs did produce lighter eggs.

So get out your blender and blend some eggs.

Oh, as an added note all of the eggs were laid that day so they were all the same age.

Eggtastic Tuesday- Italian Baked Eggs

This is something I thought was going to be gross. I was in need of a good breakfast and I was lacking in a lot of ingredients so, Italian Baked Eggs it was. Boy am I glad I made this. I love this recipe. I think hot sausage really adds to the dish, which would probably be un-filling and bland without it.

I had varying sized jars of spaghetti sauce, and various styles of sauce. The sauce I used for this was a roasted sauce with big chunks of veggies and basil.

Cook up some nice sausage patties. Spicy sausage really adds to the flavor!

It’s looking great already!

Mozzarella and Parmesan would probably both work great on this. We were out of Parmesan so mozzarella only was.

It is pretty once cooked. We prefer our eggs hard and the yolks were just cooked through.

Italian Baked Eggs

Ingredients:

4 eggs
2 cups of spaghetti or marinara sauce
Hot Italian sausage
1 cup mozzarella cheese
Salt and Pepper (to taste)
Basil

Directions:

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Cook the sausage fully. In four soufflé dishes spoon ½ a cup of spaghetti sauce. To the sauce add a piece of sausage, one egg and salt and pepper. Sprinkle mozzarella over the top. Place in oven for 15 minutes, or less if a runnier yolk is preferred. Remove from oven and sprinkle fresh basil over the top. Enjoy!

Crock Pot Beef Bourguignon with updated review of Chateau Maine D’Arman 2010 wine

One very energetic winter day I looked up Julia Child’s recipe for beef bourguignon. It was a very labor intensive meal taking a long period of time to complete. It was also out of this world delicious! I couldn’t see doing it often though, a shame since it is so tasty. I decided to attempt to modify the recipe. I’ve done so twice, both worked very well. The first was simply taking out some of the prep steps, using only a single pan; the second was using my previous modified version and doing the cooking in the crock pot.

Crock Pot Beef Bourguignon

Ingredients:

1 beef roast of desired size and cut (I prefer tri-tip)
4 slices bacon- cut into 1” pieces
1 medium onion- sliced, or 1 lb broiler onions
2 cloves garlic- minced
8 oz bella crimini mushrooms- sliced
2 large carrots- cut into large pieces
6 potatoes- halved
1 cup red wine (I like to use Chateau Maine D’Arman 2010)
3 cups beef broth
2 sticks butter
3 bay leaves
Flour for dusting

Seasoning mix:

1 tsp sea salt
¼ tsp black pepper
¼ tsp white pepper
¼ tsp ground coriander
¼ tsp caraway
1 tsp rosemary
1 tsp thyme

Directions:

In a medium skillet heat 1 stick of butter over low heat. Add the onion and garlic and saute until the onion is caramelized, about 40 minutes. Add the mushrooms and cook until golden brown.

While the onion is cooking add the potatoes to the bottom of your crock pot, then add the carrots.

Add the caramelized onion and mushroom mixture to the crock pot. Do not mix up. You want the potatoes to remain on the bottom.

Slice the beef roast into large chunks, pat each chunk dry with a towel. Coat the beef in a mixture of flour and the seasoning mix, set aside.

In the same skillet you caramelized the onions in, brown the bacon. Remove the bacon pieces to the crock pot but leave the fat in the bottom of the pan. Add the beef and brown on each side. If needed add more butter to the pan.

When the beef is browned move it to the crock pot and de-glaze the skillet with ½ a cup of wine and add to the crock pot with the rest of the wine and the broth. At this time also add the bay leaves and any remaining butter.

Cook on low 8 hours.

To serve remove the potatoes and mash them with some garlic, onion powder and sour cream. If you prefer you do not have to mash the potatoes. You can also take some of the liquid from the crock pot and make a thicker gravy with it at this time. I do this by adding butter and flour to a saucepan and then adding the liquid, whisking until the proper thickness.

If you do not want to do the cooking in a crock pot I would advise getting a pan like This. Then you can do all the steps in the same pan and cook it in the oven for 5 hours at 325 degrees.

I get a lot of hits for This wine review. It seems a lot of people want to know if this is a good wine and I do not know if my previous review covered it all. So I am going to give a few more thoughts after having tried this wine a few more times.

The wine does have good flavor. We had a glass while eating this dinner and it went very well, quite enjoyable. What I did not like, and I’m not sure it was like this last time, was that it was grainy. You could see little bits of red stuff floating around in the wine and they had an awful texture in our mouths. It was really bad at the bottom of the bottle and I actually just threw that out. I don’t want to have to try to chew my wine. If our previous bottle had been like that I am not sure we would have purchased a second. I am unsure if we will give this wine another try after this experience or not. It’s still amazing in this recipe but, that graininess…..yuck!

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