New England Braised Dinner

Milo and decided to go to Vermont on a whim; he rightly pointed out that we hadn’t been there yet this year, and since Mommy was away I had all the dizzying power of an unchecked Unitary Executive. So naturally I abused it. There is still a ton of snow up there, which was fun, but I’m so smitten with Spring fever that it did feel like a great leap backward to have to deal with his snow pants again. He loved it though, and used the same yellow backhoe to dig snow that I used when I was his age. Watching him line up all my ancient matchbox cars caused time to telescope far more alarmingly than the snow pants.

I had thrown a bunch of essentials into a cooler for the trip, since I hate to shop up there, so I made do with what was in the kitchen to embellish the meal. Prior to snow-excavation, I browned some lamb stew meat and onion with most of the non-fossilized spices- which happened to be very lamb-appropriate: cumin, cinnamon, garlic, plus a few dried herbs that smelled less like sawdust than some others. This luxe maillard met its doom in the form of some semi-horrible cheap merlot (if that’s not redundant) from the cabinet and we left it to simmer while we completed our spacetime compression by digging a ditch from the driveway all the way to dinner time.

Bootless, breathless, and famished, I threw some cubed turnips into the stew and steamed half a kabocha, then mashed it with a knob of butter. Last a quick sautĂ©e of some baby pak choi and we were in business. I’ve been pulling most of my Australian wine out of the basement there so I can sell it, but I’ve pretty much decided to keep all my Dead Arm. In an effort to make up my mind, I popped a 2000 and decanted it when I started the stew. Come time to eat, it was an opaque wall of petulant tannins with a tiny hole through which one could catch whiffs and glimpses of gorgeous fruit and naked ladies dancing. Somewhere around the 7 hour mark it finally got interesting, but by then it was midnight so I went to bed. If I were going to drink more of this in less than five or ten years, I would decant it the day before or double-decant it in the morning.

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5 Comments

  1. cook eat FRET
    April 6, 2008

    i for one, thoroughly enjoyed that post…

  2. Zoomie
    April 6, 2008

    Love the time warp as well as the sound of that dinner! Too bad about trying the wine “before its time.” 🙂

  3. peter
    April 7, 2008

    C: I thoroughly enjoyed the weekend.

    Z: Watching him be a kid is allowing me to relive big chunks of my own childhood.

  4. Heather
    April 8, 2008

    We’ve been getting arsed with a wintry backlash too. All my flowers covered themselves back up with bud scales and hit snooze.

  5. peter
    April 8, 2008

    Here it’s full blown Spring (though we might have a relapse too) but it was amazing what a difference a little latitude/altitude made.

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