A little bit ambitious

While we were in Italy for our honeymoon, I read the book Julie and Julia. I really enjoyed the book, it actually made me laugh out loud while I was reading it. Last weekend, Adam and I rented the movie and I made it through the whole thing without falling asleep. I guess Adam was feeling inspired because he decided to cook beef bourguignon in our Le Creuset yesterday for dinner.

On Saturday, he looked up the recipe and wrote down all of the ingredients. We proceeded to go to the store, where he bought 95% of what he needed, but somehow managed to forget the beef stock. Yesterday, we stopped after church to grab the missing ingredient and ended up standing in line for about 25 minutes with our one item.

Throughout the early afternoon, I kept reminding Adam that the football playoffs were on at 3:00, and kept inquiring about when he was going to start cooking so that he wouldn't miss the game. He remained on the sofa, laptop open with ESPN.com emblazoned across the screen. Usually when he is in this entranced computer-viewing state, I suspect my voice sounds like the teacher on the Peanuts.

At 2:37PM he decided he'd better get started, the beef bourguignon needed 3 hours to cook in the oven and there were 47 steps in the recipe.

"47 STEPS," I gasped, "how are you going to accomplish this in 23 minutes?"

"I'm not worried," he explained, "you're going to be my sous chef."

There goes my relaxing Sunday afternoon.

What I realized is that the title of sous chef is code for clean up crew. While he splashed grease and oil and beef stock all over the kitchen and dirtied every pot, pan and spoon we own, I followed behind him with the Lysol spray and a paper towel.

After about an hour of cooking (combined with catching glimpses of the game) and an emergency run to Target for a forgotten sieve, the beef bourguignon was in the oven and the kitchen was semi-clean.

At 7:00PM we took it out of the oven and tasted it to find that it was delicious disgusting. It was insanely salty, and resembled the canned dog food you might find at the dollar store (see picture below). Even Adam agreed that it was not very edible. We ate rolls for dinner and finished watching the NFL playoffs. The smell of beef still lingered in the air as the master chef licked his wounds and Tobey licked his chops.



So much for Julia Child!