beef short ribs!!!!

Friday night my friend Thomas visited from Pennsylvania and I used it as an excuse to make beef short ribs....here's the recipe
I started Thursday afternoon...these are best if it's a 3 day process like in the recipe above but still really really good with only one night sitting in the fridge. Didn't take a ton of pictures this time, i got carried away with the cooking and eating....no picture of the final dish i was too excited to eat it...! oops! Thursday I went to the food co-op hoping they'd have beef short ribs...all that was in the meat case were some nasty looking old ones that also seemed to be priced wrong, twice as much as usual. So i paged and asked if there were any more downstairs that hadn't been brough up yet. Lucky! There were and I got to go down to the meat cooler in the basement and pick out some fresh ones myself. Then i got the rest of the ingredients and went home to get started.

getting the mirepoix started...

browning. like the recipe says, brown like crazy. really important.

all browned up...

mirepoix into the pan...brown brown carmelize carmelize

add the wine and port. a bottle of zinfandel and a cup and a half of ruby port...

bring to a boil and reduce to half...

add 6 cups of beef broth, bring back to a boil, put the short ribs in and then braise in the oven for about 3 hours.

that's it for photos! got carried away. next it all sits overnight. the recipe says to let them sit separately but i've always let it all sit together. The next day take it out, break up and remove the layer of fat, take the ribs out, reduce the sauce to half again, shortribs back in to heat through, then back out and into the oven to brown, strain the sauce through a fine sieve, reduce more or add more wine or both if necessary and in the meantime make sme potatoes and greens. Steffi doesn't eat meat and thinks this recipe is gross, so for here i dredged some soft shell crabs in tapioca starch, salt, white pepper, and five spice powder and lightly fried them, serving them with some nuoc cham for dipping - along with the potatoes and greens. yum!