A Bonne Année Feast

This year, we were excited to make our traditional NYE beef burgundy using only meat from our CSA share.

By Genevieve Rajewski

This New Year’s Eve, as has been our tradition, Nate and I cooked a French bistro-style meal at home to ring in 2010. The menu not only reminds us of Paris (where we got engaged) but also provides the kind of comfort food necessary when it’s snowing outside and wind chills are diving into the single digits.

Pulling it off required a full day of cooking and carefully paced eating. Should you attempt this gluttony at home, remember it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Our day should have looked something like this:

3:00 pm    Get beef burgundy mise en place

3:30 pm    Snack on cheese 

4:00 pm    Brown meat (takes about 45 minutes)

4:45 pm    Put beef burgundy (first stage) into oven

5:00 pm    Mince shallot/garlic for escargots and let butter soften

5:15 pm    Make chocolate mousse and put into refrigerator to set 

6:00 pm    Assemble escargots, bake, eat 

6:15 pm    Brown onions and mushrooms in butter

6:45 pm    Add mushrooms and onions to beef burgundy in oven

8:00 pm    Enjoy main course 

10:00 pm   Use Calvados to make room for more 

10:30 pm   Savor dessert

...but my impromptu nap on the couch threw us off by about 30 minutes from where we should've been at 5:00 pm.

Don't worry: We didn't come close to eating all this cheese. Well, except for the Truffle Tremor.

We started with a cheese course from provisions from the new Beacon Hill Wine & Gourmet in Melrose. The store has a small but well-curated cheese cooler, but we saw nothing French. So we just grabbed a baguette and followed three of cheese guru Robert J. Aguilera's four rules for a good cheese plate. We settled on Truffle Tremor, a ripened goat-milk cheese from California; Brenta Stagionato, a hard cow-milk cheese from northeastern Italy; and Bayley Hazen Blue, a whole-milk blue cheese from Vermont.

Next up, was escargot, prepared by yours truly. We have never tried to source this locally or buy fresh snails—always considering ourselves lucky if we can find a can of Roland snails imported from France. (This year, we struck out at the South End Formaggio and all the local grocery stores, before finally finding them at J. Pace & Son in Saugus.) In fact, in his Les Halles Cookbook, Anthony Bourdain scoffs at the idea of any chef actually using fresh snails (even if they are serving escargots to you in shells). I did recently read an article in New York Magazine about a woman who decided to solve her garden "snail problem" by cooking them up, but I can't seem to find it online or remember how the escargots turned out. In any case, I'd never actually go there.

Of course, the sole purpose of the snails is to serve as a vehicle for garlicky butter, with the baking dishes creating perfect little pools for dunking your bread. So when it comes to “preparing” escargot, it is really all about making the butter.

Note the cracked dish in the background. Whoops.

Escargots (adapted from a recipe in Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook)

1 can of escargots (12 snails)


6 tablespoons of butter (3/4 of a stick)

1 shallot, minced

1 clove of garlic, minced

a splash of Calvados

special equipment: escargot dishes

Soften the butter at room temperature and mash in the shallot and garlic. Stir in the Calvados--a French apple brandy made in Normandy, which (as a bonus) can be sipped to create a “Norman hole” in your belly mid-meal. (Brix recommended Le Compte Original and it is an incredibly, nay dangerously, smooth digestif.)

Drain and rinse the snails. Put a dollop of the prepared butter in each hollow in the escargot dishes, place snails on top of the butter, then top snails with butter. Bake at 400 degrees until butter is bubbling. Serve at once with bread.

Because we had the beef burgundy in the oven, we decided to bake it on the gas grill. Even though it only takes 5 minutes to bake, we didn’t carefully watch the temperature, which shot up to 500 degrees, and cracked one of our dishes. Another warning: hot snails tend to explode. 

 

Beef Burgundy (adapted from a recipe by Elvira Johnson, Nate's mom)

olive oil for browning meat (We used three strips of bacon from Chestnut Farms)

2lbs of lean beef, cubed into 2-inch pieces (we used 1lb sirloin top round and 1lb beef chuck shoulder steak from Chestnut Farms)

salt and pepper

2 tablespoons of flour

3/4 of a bottle of red wine

2 and 1/2 cups of water

a garni bouquet: 2 sprigs of fresh parsley, two sprigs of fresh thyme and two bay leaves tied together with cooking twine

2 cloves of garlic, minced

1 cup and 1/2 of carrots, cut on the diagonal into 1-inch pieces

butter for browning onions and mushrooms

1 cup and 1/2 of pearl onions, peeled and left whole 

1 cup and 1/2 of mushrooms, sliced thin (we like a mix of shitake, Portabella and oyster)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Sprinkle salt, pepper and flour over the cubed meat. 

On stovetop, heat olive oil in a large Dutch oven over high heat and sear the cubed meat in batches, until it’s browned on all sides--placing browned meat aside on a plate. (We had leftover bacon to use up, so we substituted three strips for the olive oil.) 

Add garlic and the garni bouquet to Dutch oven and pour in the water and wine. Scrape frond off the bottom of pan and bring the mixture to a boil. Return the meat to the pot and add the carrots, cover, and move pot to inside the oven.

After an hour and 45 minutes, sauté the onions and mushrooms in butter until browned and soft (about 15 minutes). Add the browned vegetables to the pot in the oven and cook an additional hour. (If the liquid looks too reduced, add the remaining wine.) At the three-hour mark, take beef burgundy out and serve.

 

Chocolate Mousse

Many years ago, I attempted to make Nate chocolate mousse--and ended up with chocolate soup. A Facebook plea for a fail-proof recipe yielded this gem from Craigie on Main (passed on by Cynthia). The original recipes makes 8 to 10 servings, so I halved it, using a bar and a half of the darkest Vahlrona chocolate available at Trader Joe’s, five eggs and Calvados. It turned out amazing and has given Nate new faith in my dessert-making abilities.

Comments

[Conor]

You know who probably eats fresh snails? Patti Moreno (http://www.gardengirltv.com/).

that all sounds amazing. Happy new year indeed!

[April Paffrath]

I love your themed NYE meal! Sounds wonderful! Although, I could see you trying to herd and purge fresh snails. It seems a challenge that goes well with garlicky butter.