We had "Martha Stewart Living"'s Daube de Boeuf Provençal for dinner tonight, something tempting from the October magazine. I've never tried a daube before, so it was new to all of us. This recipe is quite time- and pot-intensive, with an hour or so of chopping prep the night before, the marinating, and today the hour or so of reducing the sauce and sautéing the beef, not to mention the two and a half hours of baking in the oven! I felt a little tentative this afternoon, for some reason, and this recipe seemed to leave as many things unanswered as not (what size "heavy pot," which is apparently supposed to be oven-proof with a lid, although this is not stated previously? do I remove the vegetables as well as the beef from the marinade? do I then sauté the vegetables with the beef or before/after? at what point should I remove the bouquet garni?). Laura and Julia, however, were delighted with the leftover olives, of all things, and sat together on the little kitchen stool guzzling them straight out of the measuring cup.
I didn't have egg noodles, but the sturdiest pasta I did have on hand was rigatoni, so I used that -- a bit un-PC, I suspect, but I wasn't in the mood to run to the market.
With all that, the daube tasted pretty good. I did use all of the orange's juice, instead of 2 tablespoons, and it wasn't too much. The sauce looked much thinner than the one in the magazine photo, though! Perhaps the photographer had a sauce stylist on hand.
(Here, by the way, is a pretty good tomato-paste saver idea....)
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