Banana Beef

I found some chuck "steak" in the recesses of my freezer the other day, so I thawed it out today and proceeded to try to figure out what to do with it. We can't just throw steak on the grill an eat a big hunk of meat. Much as I would love to do that, I'm far too stingy with my meat for that kind of thing, other than as a very occasional special treat. So I have to figure out a way to make it go for about 4 meals (there are two very giant steaks here, so there's enough to go around. With leftovers, it may well be 6 meals.)

Flipping through my beloved Joy of Cooking brought me to Beef Bourgiugnon. Mmmm... Alas, I realized it was too late to start making it tonight. So I settled on Beef Paprikash with brown rice and squash for tonight. And... hmm.... yes, Beef Bourgiugnon for tomorrow night-- AND I'll even follow the recipe AND I decided to start it today so it will get the full benefit of the marinade. "Thinking ahead" I belive it's called. What will they think of next?

(Please note: I do not always cook like this. In fact, it seems rare sometimes. Now that I think of it, we've had potato salad for supper the last three nights. I'm noticing that creativity of cooking is directly related to the current state of my hormones. Totally. Appologies to my male family members for mentioning "hormones" here. Try to purge your minds and do the best you can at getting on with your lives.)

Where was I? Ah, beef. So I started chopping. As usual, I had help. "Jonah, please go get me a brown onion."

"A purple onion?"

"Noooo... I need a brown onion."

"Okay." He troted off. After a minute, he returned, "We have no banana ice cream today."

"No banana ice cream?"

"No banana ice cream."

"Well. It is a very good thing I did not ask for banana ice cream. I asked for a brown onion."

"Okay!"

Eventually, I got my onion and everything was happily combined and well soaked in red wine and fresh herbs, awaiting it's cooking tomorrow.

In anticipation of the meal, I got out this wonderful garage-sale find:

This dutch oven for which I paid 2 whole dollars made my entire garage-saling season. Le Creuset it ain't, but it'll do, rust notwithstanding. So I got it all srubbed and oiled and I'm excited to put it to use tomorrow. (Wow... I'm looking forward to cooking supper. Tomorrow. Cool. I've been having difficulty with lack of inspiration lately...)

A certain sister-in-law of mine has been perpetuating the myth that a dutch oven is the same as a stock pot. "Au contraire" my dear SIL-- they have become erroneously synonymous in recent years, but they are not the same. A dutch oven is what you see above (which, as you can also see, is very much not a stock pot)-- heavy, wide, usually cast iron or enameled cast iron with a heavy, tight-fitting lid. They can be used on the stove or in the oven. I have long yearned for this piece of equipment... (more specifially, for a red enameled one...) and this will be quite useful and I'm going to give it a good trial run tomorrow.

And now my poor writing skills do not know where they are going with this. I wrote this whole post as a guise for the "banana ice cream" conversation and to show it off my dutch oven. So here I will end, with all my disjointedness, and go off to work on tonight's supper.