Tuesday, February 18, 2003

Navarin Printanier, or: Mastering the Art of French Cooking, sans water. There was a foot and a half of snow on the ground, I didn’t much feel like going to the grocery store at all, much less wandering Astoria looking for a leg of lamb.  So I skipped ahead a bit, to Navarin Printanier, Lamb Stew with Spring Vegetables.  Perhaps I held onto a dream of warming temperatures and freely flowing pipes.  Besides, as Julia so generously writes, “it is not a seasonal dish any more thanks to deep freezing.”  There was the added advantage that this dish would require a minimum of pots, which is vital since, as you can imagine, our dishwashing situation is dire. Start by drying the chunks of lamb stew meat – I got some with bony vertebrae-looking stuff, and some boneless shoulder meat.  Sear the pieces a few at a time in lard, and when they’re browned, place them in a great big casserole.  Sprinkle the lamb with a tablespoon of sugar – “sugar?!” you say? That’s right – and toss over pretty high heat for a few minutes.  This is supposed to carmelize the sugar, which will make the sauce all pretty and brown.  Then season the lamb with salt and pepper, toss it with a few tablespoons of flour, and set it in a 450° oven for a few minutes.  Take it out, toss it, stick it back in for another five or so.  Turn the oven down to 350. Pour the fat out of the skillet you browned the meat in, and deglaze it with beef stock, or if you are some kind of super-human hyper-foodie like me, with the lamb stock you just happen to have in the fridge.  Pour that over the meat.  Add peeled, seeded, juiced and chopped tomatoes or, if you’re a sub-par lazy bastard like me, a few tablespoons of tomato paste.  Add mashed garlic, thyme or rosemary, a bay leaf, and probably some more beef / lamb stock, so the meat’s almost covered.  Bring it to a simmer, then cover and stick it in the oven for an hour. Have a drink and chop some vegetables – potatoes, carrots, and turnips, peeled and quartered.  Julia offers that “if you have the patience” you can trim the edges to round them slightly.  Well, thanks for the suggestion, Julia, I don’t believe I will.  The pearl onions I peel the hard way, without boiling first, for obvious reasons – we have neither water nor a clean pot to boil them in.  We have taken the kind suggestion of a Vermont-raised reader and collected snow for gray water.  And “gray” certainly is the word.  Long Island City snow is not the sparkling clean stuff you might imagine.  It works for getting the toilets to flush, but for washing dishes and boiling onions, it leaves something to be desired. After the lamb’s been in an hour, take it out and “press the vegetables into the casserole around and between the pieces of lamb.”  There are way, way too many vegetables, and not nearly enough casserole, to do this effectively.  I put quite a bit of muscle into it, jamming away at turnips and potatoes, but some of them inevitably wind up on top of the meat.  I make sure they all at least get dunked in the liquid, which has turned a lovely reddish brown color and smells fabulous. Stick it back in the oven.  Wait for Emily, who’s due for dinner.  Check in on the final – thank Jesus! – episode of “Joe Millionaire.”  Raise a glass to the spurned Allison, who gets off the snark of the evening – “Who doesn’t eat goat cheese?” After an hour in the oven, the lamb is basically done.  Wait for Emily a little bit more.  Realize there’s a blizzard out there, for Chrissakes, and Emily ain’t coming. Now here’s where I screwed up.  See, right before the end you’re supposed to add green peas and chopped green beans.  What I should have done was briefly cook them, then add them to the stew.  But I forgot the pre-cook step.  Not a disaster – I just let them simmer on top of the stove with the lamb for a few extra minutes.  That cooked the peas just fine.  But the green beans remained a bit ‘runchy, as my little brother used to say.  (as in “I don’t like me ‘reen beans ‘runchy….”  My brother and I didn’t know until we were half-grown you could find green beans outside of the canned foods section of the grocery store.)  I’m guessing that’ll solve itself upon reheating.  Eat the stew, which is fab, fab, fabulous, with bread.  It really is just great.  Do you think the carmelized sugar really made that much difference?  Oh, and some cheap-ass Australian wine.  Drink too much of it, to celebrate the fact that your pipes are still frozen and you will therefore not be going to work tomorrow. Wake up at three o’clock in the morning with a dry mouth and your last bottle of Poland Spring getting low, and curse the name Shiraz. 8:18:21 AM    comment []