Weekend schedules

Do you have a schedule for your weekend? Following on from last week’s post, I’ve been thinking more about time blocks and how useful they are - but also how important it is to not fill up all those blocks with chores. It’s just as important to set aside a few for fun things, or to do absolutely nothing. 

My mother had a tendency to fill her days with chores from morning until night, and to try to combat this environmental conditioning, my sisters and I have been encouraging one another to follow the practice laid down by one of our aunts for herself post-retirement - chores in the morning, fun in the afternoon. 

I can’t say that I’m fully succeeding at implementing this system for my weekends, especially as I regularly push the envelope by doing things like not eating lunch until 2pm. But I think it is making me more mindful about how I use my time. This includes paying attention to how long things actually take; I have a tendency not to notice that, and trying to estimate that more accurately ahead of time is helping me to better manage my own expectations of what’s feasible in a morning. And maybe also helping me to normalize that an hour or two on the couch with a book or a movie is a perfectly reasonable way to spend a weekend afternoon. Even if this weekend I instead gave chunks of my afternoons to an Instant Pot beef stew (very) loosely based on this recipe, and a longstanding family Valentine's Day tradition. It's all about progress, right?  

Unplanned detours

My recently formed small department (four people) has been going through some major upheaval in the last few weeks. And when I say “upheaval,” imagine me cruising along a smooth highway in my little car, only to find I have suddenly been diverted into a game of bumper cars (dodgems?). Not disastrous, but somewhat unnerving. More on that later, I hope, when the dust settles.

Meanwhile, it’s midway through autumn in Canberra: dark not long after six o’clock, temperatures dropping down into the single digits (Celsius) at night, trying to hold off on turning the heat on until ANZAC Day (25 April), in accordance with Canberra tradition. Put the two together and the need for starchy comfort food becomes self-evident.

Short rib risotto

This is more of a suggestion than a recipe; I made my favorite short rib recipe for dinner a few nights ago, and hit upon this as a good way to use up some leftovers. I started the risotto in the usual way – soffrito, rice, wine – and heated up several cups of the short rib cooking liquid, thinned with hot water, to use as stock. I shredded a couple short ribs’ worth of beef to stir in at the end, along with the leftover braised kale I had made to serve with it the first time around. Finished with butter, pecorino romano, salt & pepper.

Top with more grated pecorino romano. Serve in your old bunny dish if necessary.

Early autumn

In the northern hemisphere, the change of seasons is always associated with the celestial event which correlates to its appearance – equinoxes for spring and autumn, solstices for winter and summer, sometime around the 20^th of the month, four times a year. In Australia, I’ve noticed, the first day of the month in which the celestial event occurs is generally designated as the official change of seasons. This meant, most recently, that March 1 was the First Day of Autumn.

I had been mentally dismissing this as some weird Australian quirk and figuring nonchalantly that I still had another 3 weeks of summer. Then, over the last week of February, we had more cloud than sun, with plenty of rain mixed in, and the temperature dropped about 10 degrees (or 20, in Fahrenheit). We woke up on Friday morning to cold winds, grey skies, and temperatures in the low teens (50sF).

Okay, I’m convinced – March 1 really is the First Day of Autumn in Canberra. Which means it’s time to break out the slow cooker again.

Braised short ribs

I didn’t use a recipe for this, so I’ll just describe what I did do. Braising stuff in the slow cooker allows for leeway on various things, as you’ll see. I started this at about 10:30 am, in preparation for serving dinner at 6:30ish pm.

1. Turn on the slow cooker to start heating. (I usually turn mine on high to get going and then turn to low after about 30-45 minutes.) Put a medium-sized cast-iron skillet to heat on the stove over low-medium heat, and add 2 Tbsp olive oil to warm up. Add 1 anchovy to oil.
2. Chop up 2 pieces of good-quality bacon and add to skillet. Peel, quarter and chop 1 red onion and add to bacon.
3. Cook mixture in skillet, stirring regularly, for about 5 minutes, until bacon begins to crisp and onion to brown.
4. Dump contents of skillet in slow cooker. Spread out and lay 5-6 beef short ribs on top.
5. Put skillet back on burner and fill halfway with about 2 cups red wine. Heat the wine and use it to deglaze the skillet.
6. Empty the skillet into the slow cooker and check the liquid level. If the short ribs are not at least partially submerged, add some more wine (or stock) until they are. Cover and leave to get cooking.
7. Decide that this concoction also needs some mushrooms and tomato paste, neither of which you have in stock. Go to the store.
8. After returning from the store, turn the stove on again and return the skillet to the burner over low-medium heat. While it warms up, clean and quarter about 1 dozen mushrooms. Add to the skillet to cook, along with 1 clove garlic that has been peeled and cracked. Cook mushrooms, stirring regularly, until they have released their liquid and shrunk to about half their original size. Add to the slow cooker.
9. While you have the slow cooker open, scoop out a ladleful of cooking liquid into a small bowl. Into this stir 2 heaping Tbsp of tomato paste. Add the mixture back into the slow cooker, stirring to disperse through the cooking liquid. Put the cover back on.
10. Leave alone until about halfway through your estimated cooking time, at which point turn the ribs over. Cover and leave be again.
11. The longer you leave these, the better they get. I took the lid off for the last hour of cooking time, to allow the cooking liquid to thicken up a little.
12. I served this with blue cheese polenta and braised kale and carrots. Made enough for 3 adults and 1 child, plus leftovers.

Disruptive innovation

Have you heard this term? I’ve come across it repeatedly in the past six months, but before that I’d never heard it. According to Wikipedia, it is used “to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect” – particularly in business or technology. Naturally I’m planning to appropriate it for cooking.

I mentioned a while back that I’ve started volunteering in the school canteen one morning a week, because I want to do my bit for the school community, and focusing on something involving food is the obvious first choice. Through working in the canteen, I’ve already learned the finer points of rolling sushi, making vegemite sandwiches (trickier than it sounds), and, most recently, a whole new approach to making bolognese sauce.

Spaghetti bolognese is one of the standard items on the canteen menu, and a few weeks ago, the manager-mother of the day was cooking a big batch of sauce while the rest of us worked through the list of daily canteen chores. She mentioned in passing that she doesn’t brown the mince for bolognese sauce anymore, thanks to a tip from her sister-in-law; according to her, skipping this saves a step and completely changes the texture of the sauce – for the better.

The other day, when I had literally five minutes to get something into the slow cooker for dinner, I remembered this piece of information, and decided to test it out for myself. I turned on the slow cooker, emptied in a jar of passata, and tossed in about a pound of mince I had sitting in the fridge. I clapped on the lid and went about my business. A couple of hours later, I was able to check and stir it for the first time, and used a potato masher to break up the mince lump. By dinnertime, the sauce had been cooking for about 2.5 hours on high, and the house smelled wonderful.

The texture and taste of the finished sauce were noticeably different, as promised: the texture was much smoother than usual, and the taste very rich and meaty. Whatever flavor might have been lost by not browning was more than made up for by how robust the finished sauce came out. I would never have come up with this idea on my own, but I’m happy to adopt it.

Disruptive bolognese sauce

I’m sure this would be good with sautéed onions, grated carrot, minced garlic, and all the other accoutrements that help to build a really good sauce, but this was how I made it, and it was delicious out of all proportion to the work involved.

1 23 oz/700 g jar tomato passata

1 lb/450 g good-quality beef mince (I used the grass-fed, hormone-free, gold-plated mince I got at the farmers’ market, which I’m sure contributed to the excellent flavor of the sauce)

1 heaping Tbsp/30 g pesto

salt & pepper

Turn slow cooker to high. Add passata and beef. Cook for 2-3 hours on high (maybe 3-5 on low?), stirring once or twice to make sure that the beef mince is broken up and incorporated into the sauce. Just before serving, stir in pesto, and season to taste with salt and pepper.

Makes enough to feed at least 4 people spaghetti bolognese. Leftovers freeze very well, using the method shown above.

Wayback Wednesday: Steak Salad

Two years ago, I was just back to Canberra from my organization's annual meeting in Singapore, enjoying burgeoning spring weather, and devouring this salad. This week, I'm preparing to head from KC to this year's annual meeting in Madrid, enjoying perfect fall weather...and wondering if I have any steak in the fridge?

Challenge 5.1

I have a feeling I’m not going to be buying this cookbook after all. When I first picked it out for the Cookbook Challenge, I had been through it exhaustively. I had covered one whole side of loose leaf paper (aka A4) with the names of recipes I wanted to try. Of course, I had also overlooked how many of them required specialist equipment not currently available to me (you know, things like mixers and cake pans). But even with the ones that are possible with my limited range of tools, I keep finding myself in the same situation: I read over the recipe, realize how similar it is to one I already have or have been wanting to try—and then make that one instead. Over the weekend, I was all set to make Poor Boy Beef Stroganoff, expecting it to be simply a frugal variation on traditional beef stroganoff. Then I re-read the recipe and noticed that, if I made the cookbook version, after preparing all the major components of the dish—including the accompanying starch—I was going to have to put the whole thing in the oven and cook it again.

Square two

If you’ve been following along here the last couple of months, you’ve probably gathered that we’ve been trying to buy a house.

One house in particular, in fact. Since before we got here. We found it on the internet before we left Australia, and went to see it five days after we arrived. Then we spent the next nearly three months dealing with banks (six of them, if you count trying to get the mortgage and trying to get all our funds into one place), organizing inspections, negotiating, and faxing enough documents hither and yon to deforest a small state park. It was that cliché: a roller coaster of emotions: non-stop and, at times, nauseating. My father-in-law, who works in finance, consoled me more than once with the maxim that “Every deal dies a thousand deaths.”

Cottage pie

Once upon a time I had a life-changing revelation while making cottage pie. It made me look at a long list of dishes from a different perspective, and led to the development of:

Roving Lemon’s Leftover Rule of Thumb: If the recipe calls for any major ingredient to be cooked two different ways in a short space of time, it was probably originally devised to use up leftovers.

The correlative effect to this discovery was that I stopped wanting to make anything from scratch that I could use leftovers to make more easily, whether it was fried rice or omelet fillings. It just seemed like too much work. I’ve gotten to the point where I won’t even make a tuna melt unless I’ve already got a batch of tuna salad sitting in the fridge.

Red meat

A month ago I had rarely given beef salad a second thought. Now I seem to be obsessed with it.

It started with lunch at Gus's, a Canberra institution. (Anything that's been around for more than 40 years in Canberra is kind of a phenomenon, and an institution by default, but it's deserved in Gus's case.) It's the kind of place where I know Miss B is going to want pasta or risotto, which I will often split with her, since I'm almost always in the mood for carbs and she can't eat a whole adult portion. But then I saw "chili beef salad" on the specials menu. For some reason, that magical combination of words was enough to make me give carbs the cold shoulder, and cozy up to the red meat and spice and the cool, crunchy salad vegetables. It was such a great contrast, and such a flavorful—and filling!—meal that I couldn't stop thinking about it. Then there it was again, a couple of weeks later, at a different restaurant: this time with peppery beef and shavings of parmesan along with the vegetables. It was offered as a starter, but it was all I wanted for lunch.

Yesterday I made my own. I had some leftover steak in the fridge, along with some marinade-turned-sauce*, which I used to help concoct a weird but tasty dressing.

Carnivore beef salad
This salad provides a lot of scope for improvisation. I used what I had on hand, but just some of the things I thought of adding if I'd had them were: chunks of avocado; slices of red onion (raw or caramelized); toasted nuts (pine, walnut); croutons.

Dressing
1 Tbsp steak marinade/sauce
2-3 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
1 inch/2 cm knob of fresh ginger, peeled and cut into strips
Pinch brown sugar

Salad
2-3 cups salad greens
8-10 cherry tomatoes, halved
6-8 thin slices cooked steak (about 2 oz/60 g)

Garnishes
Hunk of parmesan/pecorino + vegetable peeler
Black pepper**

Put all dressing ingredients into a mini-processor and blend until smooth. Taste and adjust seasonings. Set aside for a moment.

Assemble greens, tomatoes, and steak in a good-sized bowl. Pour about half of dressing over and mix. Decide if you need more dressing (yes), and add more to taste.

Shave thin slices of cheese and grate pepper all over surface of salad. Either serve as is, or mix in and repeat this step a couple of times.

Serves 1, very satisfyingly.

* I used this marinade from The Pioneer Woman Cooks! (although I substituted red wine for cooking sherry), and reduced it to use as a sauce as Ree suggests.
** Between the soy in the marinade/sauce and the cheese, I didn't feel the need for any extra salt. You may want some, depending on your ingredients.