Snow Days...

It snowed a foot in New York today, which makes me feel less guilty for being at home once again, due to the dusting Sumner County got two nights ago. To justify canceling school, the district's web site posted evidence of dangerous roads. The best photo was of this municipal truck in Portland, Tennessee, the county's northernmost community, up on the Cumberland Plateau ("The Ridge") near the Kentucky state line:

What does one do on such days? I've done some work, read two novels (Light Years by James Salter and That Uncertain Feeling by Kingsley Amis), watched (or re-watched) a few movies (including "The King's Speech," "On the Waterfront," and "Manhattan Murder Mystery"), and tried in vain to find a detailed history of boeuf bourguignon (more on that below).

I have lost track of how many snow days we have had this month, but I think it may be 8. Here are some pics I took earlier in January, on the fourth day of our "snow week."

The Parthenon. This looks pretty but it was an extremely cold (Omaha-like) morning.

Our parking lot. Before last February's "blizzard," this was a rather unusual sight.

Snow days are good for drawn-out activities like organizing one's bookshelf, catching up on old New Yorker articles from last summer, and making stock. The secret to a good, hearty, winter-y stock is using root vegetables (parsnips, celery root), a piece of "sacrifical meat" in addition to leftover roasted chicken (bones and all), and as we have discovered in the past year, cloves. This new secret ingredient leads to a barely perceptible numbness of the tongue and throat when the stock (soup, etc.) is consumed. The most recent place I've seen this ingredient in a recipe is, coincidentally, this past weekend's FT. Here is a link to their recipe: Golden bouillon. Some minor differences. I guess the brisket makes that broth more pot-au-feu-ish, but I have not tried to make it yet. Also, I haven't seen leeks in three months.

The initial straining.

Eight hours later, a beautiful silky stock. (If you don't have at least six hours, don't bother).

The parking lot ices over.

We used part of the stock as an ingredient for one of the first dishes we cooked from our venerable, eleven year-old copy of The Joy of Cooking: Boeuf Bourguignon.

Weekends or snow days are good for this dish, because it requires some preparation, at least time-wise. I had the luxury of marinating the beef, onions, carrots, garlic, herbs, etc. in a mixture of red wine and stock overnight.

Browned beef.

Caramelized.

Thickening the sauce with flour.

This dish is usually eaten with egg noodles or potatoes, but we had a dipping baguette with it instead.

Finding out the history of the dish, unfortunately, is much harder than cooking it. It turns out that it is mentioned by Escoffier, and probably goes back much farther than that, but an intense searched has yet to yield anything, except peripheral trivia, such as the dish's migration to Belgium, where it is known as Carbonnade a la Flamande, with beer taking the place of wine (another great stew which will soon re-enter the rotation).
The only interesting thing worth noting comes from the Toronto Financial Post of April 25, 1988 (yes, I even did a LexisNexis search!), which yields some very interesting etymological information regarding Burgundy's other specialty:

Most of all, however, Dijon is known for its mustard. Fifteenth-century rulers had their chefs create a sauce to disguise the rancid taste and smell of meat that had been kept too long. The French name for this sauce, moutarde, is a corruption of the language of the time, moulte ma tarde, meaning ''a long time I delay my meat.''

What was it called before Napoleon's time, then?
Regardless, if anyone reading this (if anyone is reading this, that is) can find concrete information about boeuf bourguignon's origins, please let me know.

While the beef was marinating, I went out in the snow:

After leaving Centennial Park, I took a drive to Bowling Avenue, assuming that West End Middle School would look nice in the snow...

And now, with "warm" weather on the way (40s) for many days, the Long Christmas Vacation of 2010-2011 might be truly over. In all, there have been only six days of school this semester, between January 6 and today. My highly anticipated experiment in making sauerbraten (I think it's at least a three-day process) will have to wait until Spring Break.