Twilight Bunco

Every year about this time my neighbor and I hostess a party where we wine and dine a bunch of our friends and then try to take all their money in a dice game called Bunco. Unfortunately they usually end up taking all our money, but the more important thing is that we have a hilarious evening with a bunch of whooping and hollering and carrying on.

This year, in deference to the fact that we live around the corner from vampire central (Forks), we asked Edward to supply the meat which I used to make the celebrated dish from the Julia movie, Boeuf Bourguignon, accompanied by a green salad, garlic bread (in case Edward was still hanging around) and Julia's French Puff Pastry with raspberries and whipped cream.

As has happened so often in this quest, the first thing I discovered was that I didn't have all the equipment. Some of her recipes list 'Essential Equipment' and in the pastry recipe she listed a rolling pin 16"-18" long. I just assumed mine was in that vicinity until I measured it and got the bad news that in fact it was only 10". So off to the store, and then the next store and then the next store and finally at the 5th store, Bed Bath & Beyond, they had a monster 18-incher for only $8. While I felt like like a victor for having located one at a reasonable price I had also squandered almost 2 hours and what had been an ample time budget and I was once again approaching a critical situation.

The first item on my cooking agenda was the French Puff Pastry. Since I have become better acquainted with Julia I have come to expect some butter to be part of most of her recipes, but this pastry was literally half butter! The ingredients are 6.5 sticks of unsalted butter, 4 cups of flour and a little salt. That's it. You begin by dicing all the butter into little mini cubes, and then putting them with the flour into your mixer using the flat beater attachment. I didn't even know what a 'flat beater' attachment was, but after Googling it, I was extremely pleased to discover that I had one. And I think that turned out to be my undoing.

Julia was quite proud to have developed a recipe that utilized a mixer instead of the traditional hand method, and of course I was quite happy to be using the mixer instead of doing all that mixing by hand, but now that I have a greater understanding of the recipe I think all that hand mixing may be the key to success. The essence of this dough is many many alternating layers of flour and butter which are acheived by mixing them, rolling them out, folding it over, rolling it out again, folding, and so on. She actually suggests that the final product, the result of 6 turns, consists of at least 730 leaves of dough. While I don't quite understand the math behind that figure, I now realize that since it does not contain any leavening, the thing that makes French Puff Pastry puff up is the fat melting into the many layers of flour and causing them to become rigid, thereby creating many impossibly thin distinct layers separated by air and drenched in butter. Delicious, except that mine didn't really puff that much, which I believe was caused by the mixer overly mixing the flour and butter. It was, sad to say, a 'do over'.

Not so the Boeuf Bourguignon. The master recipe in this case is Zinfandel of Beef, or beef stewed in red wine. She recommends a fat-trimmed 3-4 pound roast of either round or chuck because they tend to maintain their shape during an extended simmer. The meat is cut into 1-2 inch cubes, dried with a paper towel, and browned in vegetable oil. Next saute the carrots in the same pan and then put it all into a large pot, adding tomatoes, smashed skin-on garlic, bay leaf, thyme, salt and lots of red wine-until it is deep enough to cover the meat. Simmer 2.5-3 hours, strain the broth, reserving the meat, and discard the vegetables. To thicken the broth whisk in a Buerre Manie, a paste made by combining 1 T butter and 1 T of flour per cup of broth, adding it to the stew and then briefly returning it to a boil.

While this completes the stew, but it does not make it Boeuf Bourguignon, which requires a couple of more ingredients. The first is 24 tiny white onions, which need to be skinned, (boil for 1 minute, shave off the root end and the skin will come right off) sauteed in clarified butter and finally simmered in a little chicken broth for 25 minutes. The second is 3 cups of mushrooms, which should be quartered and then fried at a high heat in a little olive oil and butter. Plop both of these into the stew and now you have Boeuf Bourguignon. And it lives up to its reputation.

I also served my family's famous garlic bread and I will include my recipe for that here too. Melt 1.25 sticks of butter in a sauce pan and add at least 4 peeled and mashed cloves of garlic, allowing them to saute for several minutes. Remove the garlic and apply the butter with a pastry brush to a baguette sliced lengthwise. Then broil it a couple of inches from the broiler until it is browned but not burned, watching it the whole time or it will certainly end up burned rather than browned.

The party turned out great although it was not without incident. We had barely begun to play when another of our neighbors dropped by to announce that a couple of emergency vehicles were down the street at my parents' house with their lights flashing. Luckily that turned out to be indigestion rather than a heart attack and play resumed shortly. Then, as I was preheating the oven to bake the pastry, some of the players (and the smoke detector) noticed that the air was getting fairly dense. That turned out to be the result of a grease fire in the oven caused by butter run-off from the garlic bread. That disaster was also narrowly averted and in the end the Bunco Babes loved all the food because even flat French Puff Pastry tastes delicious with fresh raspberries and whipped cream.

The Bottom Line
Zinfandel of Beef: Thumbs Up
French Puff Pastry: Do Over
Garlic Bread: Thumbs Up