Beef Brisket Cherry Tomato Meat Sauce - Blending Low and Slow with Fresh and Fragrant

Pardon my Latin, but once in a while I like to shake up my meat sauce modus operandi, and this brightly colored beef brisket cherry tomato sauce recipe is an example. The video shows two major deviations to my usual ragu-how-to: I used beef brisket instead of chuck; and I used some fresh cherry tomatoes, instead of all canned product.

The result is a deeply flavored sauce, heavy with that special beefiness that only a brisket can bring. Despite being such a slowly cooked dish, the fragrant cherry tomatoes give the sauce a surprisingly bright, fresh flavor and glow.

The brisket does take a long time to cook, but all that connective tissue adds a certain body that I love in a meat sauce. I cheated here with some additional boneless beef short rib meat I had on hand, so feel free to add any tough, stewing cuts of beef.

As I mentioned in the video, if you haven't seen how we finish our pasta recipes around here, click on some of the links you'll see below the post, or in the pasta category, and watch the last steps.

Sauces like this should never be ladled over drained pasta! You need to let the hot pasta absorb some of the sauce before serving – so check it out, and enjoy!




Ingredients:
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 1/2 pounds beef brisket, cubed
1 teaspoon salt
1 qt chicken broth
1 bay leaf
1/4 teaspoon dried rosemary
1 pint small, sweet cherry tomatoes
2 shallots, chopped
4-6 cloves garlic
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
3 1/2 cup prepared tomato sauce
2 tablespoon tomato paste
1/4 cup cream
salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste
hot red pepper flakes and/or cayenne to taste
1 pound penne pasta

Rosemary, Walnut and Fleur de Sel Bread Rolls

Receiving my KitchenAid stand mixer in the mail was the closest thing to Christmas in the middle of the summer. I opened the package like an excited child and gazed at its beautiful light pink tint — it was just perfect.

I was looking forward to using the stand mixer for bread because one of the three attachments that comes standard with the mixer is a dough hook. The dough hook attachment is amazing for kneading dough, a part of bread-making that has traditionally been a point of frustration for home bakers.

This bread recipe was a little time-consuming, but the spectacular results made it well worthwhile. Because it is a basic recipe, it can be used in a myriad of ways. Try adding some cooked diced pancetta, some coarsely chopped olives, sundried tomatoes or some grated parmesan — the possibilities really are endless.

I flavored these rolls with generous amounts of chopped walnuts and fresh rosemary, then lightly brushed the rolls with olive oil right before baking them. The finishing touch was sprinkling them with a little fleur de sel.

Rosemary, Walnut and Fleur de Sel Bread Rolls
Click here for this recipe as well as other delicious Kitchen Aid sponsored treats!

Slow Scrolling Mystery Solved?

Since the blog redesign some of you have expressed issues with the pages scrolling really slowly in Firefox. I believe we have an answer.

Go into your browsers "Prefences" and in the "Advanced" settings, make sure you uncheck the "Use smooth scrolling" box (see illustration to the left). This should make the blog scroll much faster.

Thai Rice Soup

A common brunch when I was growing up was Thai rice soup. Made with cold cooked leftover rice, it was a bracing meal. Handfuls of coriander would be lobbed in and spoonfuls of fish sauce, studs of raw garlic and chopped birds eye chillis bobbing around, would splash into our bowls. It was guaranteed to make you whiff a bit for the rest of the day. Limes would squirt with abandon as we seasoned and tasted our dishes, adding bits of this and that as we went along, to suit our tastes.I would eat bowlful after bowlful of it, the delicately flavoured stock filling me up nicely. The pictures don't really do it justice, given it looks like murky dishwater with bits of greenery floating atop.

Prawns are a luxury-around-payday treat, but commonly balls of minced pork, seasoned with white pepper and salt are be dropped into the broth to cook instead. You could be ultra decadent and do both.


Thai Rice Soup

Serves 2

150gr (uncooked weight) rice, cooked and cooled preferably overnight
350ml water
A couple of handfuls of raw prawns, shell and heads on
1 stick of lemongrass
1/2 inch piece of galangal
3 kaffir lime leaves
4 tbsp fish sauce
1 fat clove of garlic
2 red birds eye chillis
2 limes
2 tbsp Tianjin preserved vegetable (not very Thai, but I like it)
A handful of coriander
A few cherry tomatoes, halved

Deshell the prawns and place the shells and the heads in the water with the lemongrass, galangal and kaffir lime leaves, roughly chopped. Bring to the simmer and simmer very gently for 20 minutes. Strain and reserve.

Meanwhile, crush the garlic roughly and add to the fish sauce in a bowl with the juice of half a lime. Chop the chillis up and add them too, giving it a good stir. Chop the coriander and add to another bowl. Rinse the preserved vegetable.

Bring the stock up to the simmer and add the rice, breaking it up with your hands as you add it in. Simmer for 2 minutes. Add the prawns and as soon as they turn pink, take off the heat and add the cherry tomatoes. Ladle the soup into bowls, scatter the preserved veg in equally and serve with the coriander, fish sauce mixture and the rest of the lime cut into wedges to add as you please.

Seared Halibut with Hot Bacon and Roma Bean Relish – 'Cause That's What I Had

When I bought the halibut you see in this video, the last thing I wanted to use with it was bacon. If I'm not mistaken, every other halibut recipe video I've posted has bacon, and I was determined to do something different.

But there I was, staring into the refrigerator, daylight fading, needing to get the fresh fish cooked, filmed, and on a plate while I still had time. Having recently traveled to New Orleans, the fridge was a barren wasteland, inhabited by little more than a few assorted condiments – oh, and two slices of bacon.

While halibut simply seared in bacon would have certainly made for a decent dinner, the idea wasn't exactly inspiring my inner Tarantino. I really wanted to do something a bit more creative than that.

Then I remembered I hadn't checked my Roma bean vines since returning to San Francisco. I was happy that despite our city's typical gray-icy summer, I was able to harvest a small handful. That's when things got crazy.

Instead cooking the fish in the bacon and serving the beans as a side dish, I decided to try a sort of hot vegetable relish. I figured by slicing the beans thin and cooking them raw in the hot bacon fat I could concentrate that great bittersweet flavor, and turn what was in danger of being a very mundane plate, into something new and exciting.

How exciting? Well, they're just beans, but I loved how this came out. A little lemon was used to make a sort of hot bacon dressing, and together with my gratuitous hot sauce design, the plate came together wonderfully.

Roma beans seem to be in season right now, but I think this would work nicely with regular string beans, or even sugar snap peas. If you want to make this "meat-free," just substitute some diced shiitake mushrooms for the bacon and proceed as shown. Either way, I hope you give this a try. Enjoy!

Note: This isn't a sponsored post, but I was sent a few knives to try by New West Knife Works, including the red-handled beauty in this seafood video. I love the look and feel, but will continue to use and evaluate them before making any kind of formal review. You can check out the New West Knife Works website if you'd like more info. Thanks!




Ingredients for 4 servings:
4 oz bacon, sliced in 1/4-inch pieces
8 oz Roma beans, or other fresh green beans, sliced into 1/8-inch pieces
4 (7-oz) halibut steaks
salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
Sriracha hot sauce, optional

Coming Soon: Cherry Tomato Beef Brisket Meat Sauce

Eggs Florentine

If there's anything that'll get my perpetually lazy arse out of bed, it's Eggs Florentine. Toasted muffin, spinach, topped with a poached egg and covered in eggy buttery Hollandaise sauce? Yes please. You can't go wrong with such a fat-fuelled breakfast.

There are many versions of the dish; Benedict uses a slice of ham, Blackstone uses streaky bacon and a slice of tomato. Wikipedia tells me there is a Country Benedict, or Eggs Beauregard; the muffin is replaced with biscuits, the meat with a sausage patty with country gravy, a béchamel-type sauce with the roux made from meat drippings with black pepper and mild sausage added. Ooof.

The only Hollandaise I've ever made is Delia's foaming version. The base of it is made from the egg yolks, while the whites are whisked to stiff peaks and then folded in, to create a lighter, fluffier sauce. It may be slightly time consuming, but it's well worth it. Often when I have Eggs Benedict or Florentine in restaurants or caffs I leave feeling mildly sick, the richness of it all sitting uncomfortably in my belly.

Eggs Florentine

Serves 2

4 fresh free range eggs
200gr frozen whole-leaf spinach
110gr butter
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp white wine or cider vinegar
2 English muffins
Salt & pepper

Separate 2 of the eggs. Place the yolks in a warmed bowl. Place the lemon juice and the vinegar in a saucepan and heat until it bubbles. Whisking the egg yolks, pour this into them in a steady stream.

Set a pan of water on to boil and add the spinach. Simmer for a couple of minutes until it has all defrosted and then drain, squeezing all the water out. Melt the butter in the same saucepan and again, drizzling it in a steady stream into the egg yolks, whisk like hell. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Whisk the egg whites to form stiff peaks. Slice the muffins in half, toast each side. Poach two eggs. To serve, place a mound of spinach on each half of the muffins and place one poached egg on a half. Fold the egg white into the Hollandaise sauce, and drizzle it on top of the egg and spinach. You can have two poached eggs, one to go on each half of the muffin, but I find this too much.

Any leftover Hollandaise sauce can, according to Delia, be frozen.