recipe Friday (on Monday)

[kindkit]

On Thursday I accidentally cooked a pot roast. The accidental part was that I had originally intended to cook beef rendang, but then at the last second I found that I didn't have enough lemongrass. Nor did I have the time or energy to go out and buy more lemongrass, but the beef had been thawing in the fridge for a couple of days and needed to be cooked, so I improvised a pot roast based on what I had around (i.e. an onion, a stick of celery, some dried shiitake mushrooms, a few fragments of dried porcini mushrooms I found while looking for the shiitakes, and some sherry). So on Thursday I ate pot roast with mashed potatoes, then on one of the intervening days had some leftover pot roast over pasta, and tonight I made a sort of cottage pie with the remaining pot roast topped with the leftover potatoes. I was amused to realize it was in fact the same meal as on Thursday, only upside down. (But for some reason the pie tasted better than the original pot roast + potatoes. Maybe it's true that stews and braises get better--within reason--after they've been around a while?)

I still want to make beef rendang, but now I have no beef. I'll need to wait for beef chuck to go on sale again, I guess. Or beef short ribs, if I'm incredibly lucky. It's a dish I've wanted to try for years, in part because, while I love the idea of braised beef, I have seldom loved the thing itself. But to my taste it's very hard to go wrong with coconut milk and spices.

Speaking of braised beef, a while back I picked up some beef cheeks on sale. They're in the freezer, and I'm thinking of cooking them for Thanksgiving. Anyone have ideas for how to cook them that are more exciting than the usual "stew them in wine or beer" sort of thing? (I don't think they're suitable for beef rendang because they require v.v. long cooking.)

In other cooking news, I think I might try baking an apple pie on my next days off.