Mr Bwren and I are omnivores. We enjoy our vegan and vegetarian dishes and are blessed with an abundance of local seafood, but every once in a while we want cow. A number of years ago we had the opportunity to buy a share of home grown beef from a friend's parents. We've done the same every year since.
Purchasing home grown beef allows us to be partially responsible for both the life and the death of our cow. We know that he was bought at auction and that instead of being shipped to a veal factory he found himself transported to a pasture. We know that he grew up eating grass and rolling in the dirt, that he had comfy shelter when the weather was bad and that he got ear and nose scritches when his people made their daily rounds. We like that he ate apples and fresh cut hay every day as he matured. We know when he is killed, and that this final act takes place on the farm where he was raised. We find comfort knowing that his last experience was the crunch of fresh apples and a gentle hand on his neck.
Our share arrives in late October, wrapped and frozen. We pay around $4.50 a pound, expensive for soup bones or hamburger, but such a deal for rib roast and tenderloin steak. We thaw out a portion perhaps once a week. A few weeks ago it was the last of the large cuts from 2008, a four pound cross-rib roast.
I'd never cooked a cross-rib roast before, so spent a little time online looking for information. I found that it comes from the shoulder and can be a little tough, so I put it in a marinade for 24 hours. You could marinate it longer, up to 2 days.
Marinade
1/2 cup red wine
2 T balsamic vinegar
3T olive oil
10 cloves coarsely chopped garlic
a couple of fat slices of red onion
1/2 t dry mustard
thyme and oregano sprigs from the garden
a crumpled bay leaf
one clove (because Grammy Helen always seasoned her beef with a clove)
about 1/8t salt
a dozen coarsely ground peppercorns
and just for the hell of it, 1T sliced orange peel
I put the marinade and the roast in a plastic bag, smooshed the air out, tied it close and set the whole thing in a covered pan down in the cool of the basement. The next morning I flipped it over so the marinade could permeate the whole thing.
My online research had some conflicting information about the actual cooking. Some sources said to cook it dry like prime rib, others said to use the liquid pot roast technique. I compromised:
Preheat oven to 450.
Remove roast from marinade, place on rack in a heavy dutch oven.
Strain the marinade and add about 1/3 of the liquid to the bottom of the dutch oven. Save the solid bits.
Put the roast, uncovered, in the preheated oven and turn the heat down to 325.
Roast for ~20 minutes a pound (80 minutes for this roast). Pour another third of the strained marinade over the meat after 15 minutes. A half hour later do the same with the rest of the marinade, then pile the solid bits that you strained out of the marinade on top of the roast. Check every 10 minutes to make sure the marinade hasn't evaporated off. Add a little water or beef stock or wine if it's gotten too low.
Take the roast out of the oven when your estimated time has passed, remove it from the dutch oven and place on a serving plate. Cover with foil and a folded up bath towel to keep the heat in. It will continue to cook as it sits. Take the rack out of the dutch oven and let your dog lick it clean. S/he will adore you.
(Note that I felt the meat a bit overdone. There was no pink core. If I do this again I'll reduce the cooking time by 15-20 minutes. Still, it was tender and moist.)
Now I was confronted with the reduced marinade staring at me from the bottom of dutch oven. I really wanted to use it as a base for gravy, but blood from the roast had seeped into it during the marinating and had then coagulated during cooking. It smelled wonderful but looked really yukky. I broke out the strainer again:
Run the cooked marinade through a fine strainer into a small saucepan. Just let it drip through by itself. Heat gently until it begins to bubble.
Moosh together 1 T butter and 1T flour until it becomes a smooth paste. Whisk about a third of this into the bubbling marinade. It should begin to thicken. Repeat, whisking all the while, until it's as thick as you want. I used about 2/3 of the butter/flour mix.
The gravy was lovely. I'd worried about the amount of salt in the marinade, thinking it was too much, but it was just enough. There was a hint of citrus mingled in with the wine and garlic, and the vinegar added a teeny bite. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough to pass around at table, so we just drizzled it over the thin slices of meat before we served.
I roasted chunks of red potato in olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper to serve on the side. We also had a lovely dish of thinly sliced bulb fennel, baked in walnut oil and sweet white wine and topped with aged parmesan cheese.
Now comes the wonder of potluck. Four pounds of cow are way too much for the two of us, so we invited friends to share the feast. They all brought goodies. One of the goodies was a sublime plum chutney, sweet and musky with a hint of smoke. Where did that smoke come from? The cook refuses to say, but a teaspoon of that chutney brought all of the flavors - cow, wine, garlic, citrus, spices - together in a way that I could never have imagined.
We began our meal with this blessing:
Thank you, cow.
So, what's for dinner at your house?