January 21, 2007

Quite Contrary

I have a tendancy to dig in my heels. To go in the direction I'm not supposed to. It is not a virtue, so much as it is a stubborn refusal to be led by the nose. This does not, of course, mean that I am bandwagon-free (nor does it mean that you can trick me into doing what you really want by suggesting otherwise), but it does mean that it shouldn't be a surprise that while newspaper and magazine articles would have us frantically making diet recipes in a last-ditch attempt to atone for December's excesses, I'm having ribs. Short ribs, to be exact.

Short ribs, for some mysterious reason, don't make an appearance at my local supermarket very often (although they are always available at the meat shops, they are usually the thinner flanken style), so when I do see a meaty set o' bones - one that hasn't been "pre-marinated for the grill" - I can't resist. Since these are cut across the bone, they are in fact flanken style, as opposed to English style, which are my preferred (and, for some reason, even less frequently seen in these parts), but they are considerably meatier and more substantial looking than most of the flanken variety that I've seen around here.

I had been craving short ribs for some time - since I found a recipe for Chimay-braised ribs in the Zuni Cafe Cookbook, to be precise. However, since I didn't have any Belgian beer handy (or enough mustard for the glaze that recipe recommends), and I did in fact have a bottle of wine, I went with a simple red wine braise, full of shiitake mushrooms and chopped red onion and accompanied by some roasted fennel, carrots and brussels sprouts. The herbs were kept simple: bay leaves, salt, pepper, and whole yellow mustard seed, which creates a wonderfully deep background note for the beef. I'll have to go the Chimay-route with the next batch of ribs that I find. Maybe I'll even find a nice accommodating butcher who will cut English style for me. In fact, I'm starting to think that I should go on a mission... just, you know, to be contrary.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

Hi Dawna, I'm a little curious why you deleted my comment about pressure cookers. Have you ever used a modern pressure cooker?

Dawna said...

Any comment from an anonymous poster which contains links to a commercial site is considered to be probably spam, and therefore deleted.

Most anonymous comments that I get are viral marketing, so it's a decision I have had to make. My blog, my prerogative.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Dawna said...

I've deleted the above post (to remove the link), which said:

"Anonymous said...

Fair enough but nearly every website created since the mid-1980's has a commercial element of some kind. As an example, two out of the two external links embedded in the main text of this page point to sites marketing something. The Chimay site promotes products from that area in Belgium, and the Hormel Foods site promotes products from, you guessed it, the Hormel Foods Corporation. The Hormel Foods website states that “Hormel Foods Corporation is a multinational manufacturer and marketer of consumer-branded meat and food products..” I assume you decided to link to those sites because they contained an educational component.

Pressure-cooking ribs is considerably faster and cheaper than the roasting method you describe here. The pressure cooker website I linked to is a commercial website but also contains a huge amount of useful information, and, therefore, is a good resource about the lost art of pressure-cooking."

Look, you've done it again - posted a commercial site link in a comment to my blog. Please stop it. If I include a link to a commercial site, that's my choice. I do NOT choose to allow random anonymous people to use my blog for their own marketing purposes. Your argument that "nearly every website..." is full of crap, is not relevant, and does not justify your attempt to piggyback on my relationship with my readers for your own gain. If you are, by some remarkable chance, NOT affiliated with the site you keep trying to flog here, you should know that your comments sound like cheap, unsophisticated ad copy. Either way, stop it.

For the record, I really don't have a preference one way or the other with regard to pressure cookers, and yes, I have used them.

Anonymous said...

There was a small technical error in my last comment as a result of pressing the wrong key. “Nearly every website created since the mid-1980's has a commercial element of some kind” should, of course, have read “since the mid-1990's.” The first popular web browser, NCSA's Mosaic, didn't come on the scene until November 1993. As the Internet then moved from the university and scientific communities into usage by the general public, aided by Mosaic's more user friendly interface, the web shortly then became commercialized. I never said every website is full of crap.

Dawna said...

Your argument is irrelevant and does not justify why I should permit someone else's marketing device on my site, and you are not going to be able to convince me otherwise.

There really is no further discussion to be had on this topic.