Happy November! I’ve decided not to do NaBloPoMo this year, but I do intend to try posting a little more often. I have enough other writing/photography projects going on that I’m not feeling up to the post-a-day commitment, but we’ll see how it goes.

We’re trying to work more new recipes into our menu planning, after what seems like  several months of making old standby-type stuff. We’re experimenting with pulling out a cookbook at random, then opening it and pointing to something. This is quite dangerous, as it can lead to strange meals of onion sauce or rice pudding, so we’re keeping it flexible. Last week I pulled out Falling Cloudberries, a book that I was wildly excited about when it came out but have never actually cooked from. I chose a promising Cypriot recipe for pork marinated in red wine and braised with coriander seed. It was, I’m sorry to say, kind of meh.

There was nothing wrong with the pork – a roast of well marbled meat from our last pig (which is nearly gone, except for several pounds of pork belly), which I whacked up and put in a bowl with two cups of red wine the night before. I had some issues with the cooking instructions, which optimistically say to sear all of the pork in a casserole until golden. Well, first, it’s soaked in red wine, and even if you dry it off first it’s not going to sear at all unless you do only a few pieces at a time in a very hot pan. Second, it’s soaked in red wine and is dark purple, and is not going to turn “golden” no matter what you do to it at this point.

I knew what she meant, though, so I fried the pork, added in the marinade, some garlic, bay leaves and five teaspoons of lightly crushed coriander seed, cooked it until the meat started falling apart, and served it with roasted pink fingerling potatoes and some lightly wilted arugula. It was…okay. The pork flavor was overwhelmed by the wine, and the coriander was incredibly strong and acrid, not to mention kind of a weird texture. The potatoes (which turned out fantastically) and greens helped to balance, but I didn’t really like it all that much.

The leftover pork was improved by chopping it up finely with the rest of the potatoes and cooking it up as hash with some sweet onion, then serving with an egg on top. That wasn’t bad at all.

Anyone else made this recipe, or anything else out of that book? I want to give it another chance but not sure what to try.

I hadn’t necessarily thought this blog needed yet another recipe for red-cooked meat, but that was before I stumbled across a Sichuan version. This is, of course, out of Fuchsia Dunlop’s Land of Plenty, like all our recent Sichuan recipes. It’s a perfect thing to make at this time of year, with the rich beef and ginger scent filling the house while cold rain beats against the windows.

The recipe could be made with any stewing beef, but we have several packages of short ribs from our latest cow in the freezer and I hadn’t done anything with them yet. Following directions like a good girl, I blanched the ribs (apparently this keeps scum from forming in the final dish), then cut them into chunks.

Next I assembled my mise en place: bean paste, scallions, star anise, ginger, Sichuan pepper, a quart of chicken broth, rice wine and soy, and a cardamom pod, which was as close as I could come to cao guo on the spur of the moment (I think this is the same thing as black cardamom, but can’t tell from Dunlop’s description).

The exciting bit came after I had already put my pot to heat with some peanut oil and had gotten a spoon to add the Sichuan bean paste, which I bought a few months ago at Ping’s in Seattle and had just then opened. I stuck the spoon in, took a sniff, and realized that I had foolishly bought the wrong kind of bean paste. Instead of “Chili bean sauce” I had simply gotten “Bean sauce”. It smelled rather like baked beans with extra sugar. Oops. Thinking quickly (and desperately), I dumped three spoonfuls of the Sichuan baked beans into the pot, then added three spoonfuls of a prepared chile-garlic sauce. It smelled good and seemed to do the trick.

Despite my bean sauce mishap, this worked really well. Savory, spicy, a little sweet – the sauce was wonderful with rice and bitter greens, and the beef simply fell off the bone. And adding diced daikon near the end of cooking was remarkable – it soaked up the flavor of the sauce but retained a firm texture. Why do we not eat more daikon?

Red-Braised Beef with Daikon

Adapted from Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking by Fuchsia Dunlop

• 3 pounds short ribs or stewing beef
• 1″ piece of ginger, cut into a few thick slices
• 3 scallions, trimmed and cut into large pieces
• 3 Tbsp peanut oil
• 6 Tbsp Sichuan chile bean paste, or some combination of bean paste and chile-garlic sauce
• 1 quart stock (the recipe calls for beef, I used chicken)
• 4 Tbsp rice wine or sherry
• 2 tsp soy sauce
• 1 tsp whole Sichuan pepper
• 1 star anise
• 1 cao guo or cardamom pod
• 1 large daikon radish, diced

Bring a pot of water to a boil and blanch the beef in it for a minute. Remove the beef and cut it into 1-2″ chunks.

Heat the oil in a large heavy pot and add the bean paste. Stir fry until the oil turns red and it smells great, then add the beef, ginger, scallions, stock, wine, soy and spices. Bring to a boil, then turn down and cover. Simmer for 2 hours or more, until the beef is tender. If a great deal of liquid remains in the pot, take off the lid and turn up the heat to reduce it. Add the daikon a bit before the end – maybe 15 minutes?

You can serve the beef immediately, or refrigerate it, take some of the fat off and reheat the next day.

Another dinner inspired by my culinary hero David Tanis and his book Heart of the Artichoke. In the past I haven’t much gone for prunes in savory dishes (I was traumatized by a pork-prune empanada at an impressionable age), but since David was pushing it I finally decided it was time to give it another try. This lamb shank tagine converted us, completely.

We still had all four shanks from the lamb we bought from Martiny Suffolks last summer, and I wanted to be sure we ate them while the weather was still good for braising. My biggest error in the past with lamb shank has been not cooking it long enough, so I started early in the day to make sure it reached the fall-off-the-bone stage. The dish starts (as most tagines do) with onion cooked in butter, then adds garlic, fresh ginger, powdered ginger, coriander seed, cumin seed, saffron, and rather a lot of cayenne. Lamb shanks, prunes and sultanas nestle into the flavorings with a topping of chicken broth and tomato puree, then braise gently in the oven for over two hours. A final handful of prunes go in near the end, before taking the lid off the pot and simmering it at higher heat for a few minutes.

The house smelled incredible. The tagine was both savory and sweet, with a cayenne kick that was never quite too much. The lamb collapsed with a mere touch of a knife. The prunes melted into the gravy, giving it an incredible silken mouthfeel. To go with it, I cooked couscous with chicken broth, sauteed chard and spinach, and made a platter of borani: pan-fried eggplant slices topped with yogurt-garlic sauce. We licked our plates.

I really don’t know why Americans don’t eat rabbit. There’s definitely a factor of “oh, it’s too CUTE to eat” which is part of why we don’t eat much lamb as a nation, either. But it’s really hard to find rabbit in grocery stores – we asked once at our usual market and I think they could special order it frozen for us if we gave them enough notice, and it cost an arm and a leg. Weird.

So when a friend of ours, a local farmer, asked if we wanted to take one of the rabbits she’s been shooting to keep them out of her vegetables, we said Definitely. Even before we received the rabbit, I started looking through my British and Mediterranean cookbooks for possible recipes. We haven’t had much experience cooking wild game of any sort, so I wanted to get a feel for the most common treatments. Rabbit isn’t a strongly gamey meat, but it’s still liable to be stronger-tasting than, say, a farm-raised chicken, and the meat is very dense and low in fat, so it requires some care in preparation.

Braising seemed to be the way to go, although I did find some instructions on roasting (best for young bunnies), as well as some advice on barbecuing (just the rabbit saddles for that, apparently). We weren’t sure of the age and potential toughness of this rabbit, so I picked a really tasty-sounding braise from the beautiful cookbook Olives and Oranges involving lemon peel and fresh rosemary, which seemed like it would make anything delicious.

First we cut up the rabbit. It had been thoroughly cleaned already, so we just had to whack it into pieces. I was keeping an eye out for the bullet, but it must’ve gone with the head. I added salt and pepper, then seared the meat in olive oil in a heavy Dutch oven in several batches, setting the pieces aside until they were all nicely browned.

A little more olive oil went into the pan, then I added two smashed garlic cloves, four branches of rosemary, and one whole lemon’s worth of zest, cut in wide strips with a vegetable peeler. When the garlic began to turn golden, I added a cup of white wine (Domaine des Cassagnoles, as that was what we had handy), and scraped up the fond from the bottom of the pan.

The browned rabbit pieces went into the liquid, largest pieces first, and I added a bit of water to just barely cover the meat. When the liquid came back to a simmer, I put the lid on and stuck the whole thing in a 350° oven for an hour and twenty minutes, which gave me plenty of time to have a drink and chop some kale.

When the braise was done, I lifted the rabbit pieces out onto a platter, then boiled down the liquid on the stovetop until it was down to a cup or less (I pulled the rosemary stems out first). I also mashed the garlic a bit so it was more integrated into the sauce. I scraped the reduced liquid out onto the rabbit, and we were ready to eat.

We had the rabbit with some simple soft polenta and a pile of Tuscan kale sauteed in olive oil, with plenty of juices and lemon zest pieces on top. The lemon was fantastic, sweet and almost candied and dissolving in the mouth. We had two wines that we were trying, the Cassagnoles I had used for the braise and a lovely, funky French Cinsault that was recommended to us. The white went gorgeously with the lemon sauce, but not as much with the rabbit, which was dark and very much like turkey leg meat (except for the belly flap, which tasted exactly like duck – hey, it’s Turducken!). The Cinsault went perfectly with the rabbit but drowned the lemon sauce. So we alternated. It worked fine.

This is a great recipe for rabbit, but I think it would also be fabulous as a shorter braise with chicken, or a longer one for pork. Any excuse to eat all that lemon zest. So what should we do with our next bunny?

When we ordered our first (half) pig, we debated getting some of it cured by the butcher. In the end, partly because I am cheap frugal, we decided to get it all fresh, hams and side and all. I had been thinking we would cure some ourselves, but I’m beginning to suspect we’ll have eaten it all by the time I get serious about it. Oh, well, there’s always another pig.

But in the meantime, we have these nice big roasts of side pork, otherwise known as pork belly, the cut that is usually made into bacon. We’ve eaten it in restaurants a number of times, but this would be my first time cooking it. I decided to play it safe and make red-cooked pork belly, a classic Chinese preparation.

We’ve tried to get fresh pork belly before, at a local meat shop, but to my dismay they had already sliced it like bacon, even though it wasn’t cured. This time things worked out better, as you can see in the top picture. Isn’t that a beautiful piece of meat?

For my braising liquid, I used a combination of Molly Stevens’ recipe and our own “glazed gingery ribs” recipe. I combined chicken stock, water, brown sugar, red chile flakes, star anise, ginger, scallions and soy sauce in a Dutch oven and brought it to a simmer.

I whacked up the pork belly into large chunks and added them to the pot. I covered it up and let it simmer for about 2 hours, then removed the lid, turned up the heat and let the liquid reduce down to a cup or two (it took a while).

After the long simmer, the meat was very tender, but still capped with a fair amount of fat. The chunks were easy to remove, but this is certainly not a cut of meat for the fat-phobic. The sauce, even skimmed lightly of fat, was beautifully unctuous and silky in the mouth. We served the meat and sauce over white rice with baby bok choi and fresh pan-fried scallion-chive breads.

The next day, with the house still smelling of red-cooked pork, I shredded the leftover meat, mixed it with its own sauce and the leftover greens, and stuffed it into fresh hum bao. Fabulous.

This is the way I most like to cook: spending a great deal of time and energy to make something delicious, but then recycling the leftovers into something equally wonderful but different. Just because you’re working with leftovers doesn’t mean you can’t give them your full love and attention. And it doesn’t always have to mean sandwiches .

After the usual holiday diet of chocolate, too much coffee and a lot of salami and cheese, it’s always a good idea to have something solid in mind for dinner. I can hardly imagine a more perfect dish for Christmas day than long-braised leg of lamb. Get it going after breakfast, peek at it occasionally throughout the day, pull it out in time for dinner. The only downside is that it takes up oven space that you might want for, say, baking pie, but the braise can easily be moved to the stovetop (which is what we ended up doing).

The lamb braises in a wine-tomato-stock mixture, but then you get to fill in the space around it with whatever veg you like. The original recipe recommends turnips, onions and carrots; we left out the onions and threw in parsnip and fennel. The long, slow braising makes the vegetables incredibly tender while still retaining their shape, so they can be scooped out of the broth and served alongside the meat.

When the lamb is done, you can hardly get it out of the pan in one piece. The meat simply falls off the bone.

We ate the tender lamb and vegetables with buttered pasta, pouring the pan sauce over everything indiscriminately. A five-year-old Cabernet from Willis Hall went deliciously.

And sweet potato pie with bourbon to finish, of course.

Six-Hour Leg of Lamb

Adapted from Molly Stevens’ 7-Hour Lamb from All About Braising. Feeds four very nicely, with some leftovers.

• 1 lamb leg roast, bone-in (ours was about 4 lbs)
• salt and pepper
• 1 cup white wine
• 2 cups chicken stock
• 2 bay leaves
• leaves from several thyme sprigs
• 15 garlic cloves, smashed
• 1 cup canned tomatoes and juice
• 1 carrot
• half of an enormous turnip
• 1 parsnip
• 2 bulbs fennel

Peel the vegetables and chop into large chunks (they’ll dissolve if you make them too small). Season the lamb roast with salt and pepper.

Preheat the oven to 275°.

In a very large Dutch oven, heat a bit of olive oil until very hot. Sear the lamb on all sides until golden brown. Remove the meat to a platter.

Add wine to the pan and reduce, scraping up all the good lamb bits, until it’s about half its volume. Add stock, herbs, garlic, and tomatoes and simmer for a few minutes.

Put the lamb back into the liquid and scatter the veg around. Cover tightly and put the pot into the oven. After two hours, turn the meat and see how hard the liquid is boiling. If it seems to be bubbling too much, turn the heat down, or shift the pan to the stovetop and keep it at a very low simmer. Continue to turn and check the meat every two hours until it is falling apart when you touch it. This took six hours for us, but might be longer. The original recipe was for seven hour lamb, so it may depend on your oven.

Remove the lamb and vegetables to a platter, then reduce the liquid in the pan if desired (taste for salt and adjust if necessary) and serve, passing the sauce at the table.

We turned the leftovers into soup for lunch the next day, which worked beautifully, but sandwiches would also be great fun.

Here’s a lovely sauce to make you feel like it’s summer again, even though it may be more than a little snowy outside. Oven-roasted tomatoes and peppers, pureed with chipotles and spices, then simmered with onion until thick, make for a spicy rich sauce redolent of the flavors of late summer. Using the sauce to braise country-style pork ribs makes for some fabulous winter tacos.

We’ve just started to get into the half pig we bought recently. The chops we started with were fantastic, pan-seared and coated with a cider reduction. More recently I tried braising some blade steaks in a sauce of vinegar, mustard and beer, which was eye-rollingly good but one of the ugliest plates I’ve ever produced (the braised green cabbage on the side didn’t help matters). These ribs came somewhere in between, and while I didn’t get any pictures of the shredded pork tacos, trust me that they were extremely successful as well. However, don’t feel that you need to use this sauce with pork – it would be great used for enchiladas, or on eggs, or stirred into a pot of beans, or anywhere that could use a shot of spicy tomato goodness.

Roasted tomato-pepper sauce with chipotles

from (guess where?) All About Braising by Molly Stevens

• 3/4 lb tomatoes
• 1 red bell pepper
• 3 cloves garlic (we left this out of this batch, due to a friend’s allergy)
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1/4 tsp ground cloves
• 1 1/2 Tbsp cider vinegar
• 2 or 3 chipotles in adobo
• salt
• 1 tsp sugar (optional)
• 1 onion, diced

Turn on the broiler and set a rack about four inches below the heat. Place the tomatoes, pepper and garlic on a baking sheet and position under the flame. Broil, turning occasionally (and removing any vegetables that seem done) until everything is bubbly and slightly charred on all sides. Remove from the oven and let cool.

Core the tomatoes and peel off the skin, peel the garlic, and peel and seed the bell pepper. Drop them in a food processor.  Add the dried spices, vinegar, chipotles (with some of their sauce), and some salt, and process to a coarse puree. Taste, add salt and/or sugar as needed.

Fry the onion in olive oil until soft, then pour in the puree and simmer for about ten minutes. Use it for anything you like.

If braising pork in the sauce: take 2 or 3 pounds of  country-style ribs, season them with salt and pepper and sear them in batches in a skillet. When browned all over, lay them in a gratin dish and pour the sauce all over. Cover tightly with foil and put in the oven for an hour or so at 300°. Take off the foil and roast another 30 minutes at 350°. Serve as is, or take the meat out of the sauce to cool and shred it by hand, then combine it with the sauce again.

When you have a really high-quality ingredient, there’s always the risk of not using it to its full potential, or ruining it. Like accidentally burning a panful of hand-gathered wild mushrooms, or insufficiently brining, then overcooking, that free-range organic turkey you ordered specially for Thanksgiving. Or even just making something really boring with a fabulous piece of filet mignon. It’s depressing. So when I got the two shanks out from the half lamb we bought last spring, I felt some pressure to do them up right. After all, there are only two – I couldn’t start over if I messed them up!

Thank God for Molly Stevens. I (loosely) followed her recipe for Braised Lamb Shanks Provençal, and as usual with her recipes, it came out delicious. The meat fell off the bone into the unctuous, lemony sauce, and we muddled it all up on our plates with soft buttery polenta and sauteed spinach. These lamb shanks could not have asked for a better fate.

Lamb Shanks Provençal
adapted from All About Braising: The Art of Uncomplicated Cooking by Molly Stevens

• 2 lamb shanks
• 1/4 cup (or so) white flour
• 1 Tsp paprika
• salt and pepper
• olive oil
• 1 yellow onion, chopped
• 1 can diced tomatoes
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/2 cup white wine
• 1 cup (more or less) chicken stock
• 1 meyer lemon
• 1 bay leaf
• handful kalamata olives, roughly chopped
• handful fresh parsley leaves, chopped

Preheat the oven to 325°.

Mix the flour, paprika, salt and pepper in a deep plate or wide bowl. Dredge the lamb shanks in the seasoned flour. Heat a bit of olive oil in a large Dutch oven and brown the shanks on all sides. Remove them from the pan.

Add a bit more oil to the pan if necessary. Add the onion, tomatoes and garlic and cook until the onion is soft, 5-10 minutes. Add the white wine and simmer a few minutes. Add the stock and simmer a bit longer.

Use a vegetable peeler to take a couple good long strips of zest off the lemon. Add these to the pan along with the bay leaf. Nestle the shanks down into the vegetables and liquid. Cover tightly and stick the pan in the oven.

Cook for about 2 1/2 hours. Every 45 minutes or so, check the liquid level (and add a bit more stock or water if it seems to be getting low), and turn the shanks.

In the meantime, finish peeling the lemon and cut the membranes off the fruit, so you have tender segments of lemon. Set these aside.

When the lamb is falling off the bone, take the pan out of the oven and check the sauce consistency. If it’s still pretty liquidy, remove the shanks and boil down the sauce (you can try to defat it at this point, but it’s not easy). When it’s a nice thick texture, stir in the lemon segments, olives and parsley. Add the shanks back into the sauce and serve with some sort of starch: couscous, mashed potatoes or polenta would all be great.

Leftovers, if you have any, are spectacular.

At this point in the season, the rhubarb plants have peaked, attempted to bloom their heads off (and been thwarted by my Felcos), and are beginning to settle back into merely being a large green presence in the yard without actually attempting to overrun or squash anything. We’ve had rhubarb crisp, clafoutis, pie, compote, and muffins, and stowed away a large freezer bag of chopped stalks for later.

Despite all that, I’m nowhere near rhubarb burnout, and there are several recipes left that I want to try – for instance, I’ve still never roasted rhubarb. Or poached it in red wine. I have, however, braised it with green herbs, onion, tomato and saffron. Sound weird? It’s actually really, really good.

I found this recipe quite by accident, several years ago, in a library book called Silk Road Cooking (come to think of it, I should check it out again). Out of curiosity I tried it out, and liked it so much I immediately wrote it into my personal recipe notebook. My parents have made it several times, too. It’s piquant and savory and a great way to use up rhubarb. This is a perfect time of year to make it, too, when all the green herbs are hitting their stride.

The book attributes this dish to Kurdish nomads, living in the mountains where rhubarb grows wild. The smell as it cooks is very much like the Afghan soup called ash, redolent with dill and turmeric. There’s just a hint of heat, depending on what kind of chile you add.

The recipe is very specific about what herbs to use, but I would feel free to make substitutions or change quantities (make sure you use at least some dill, though, if possible). For this last batch, I happened to have tons of fresh mint, dill, parsley and cilantro, but I didn’t want to use up all my chives so I left them out. Dried herbs could work fine as well, since they are incorporated early and have plenty of time to stew.

The other ingredient that I’ve considered changing is the split peas. They give the braise a more colorful appearance – rather like corn - and a subtle nutty flavor, but I have trouble getting them to cook soft enough in the given cooking time, and find them a little distracting in texture. Next time I might substitute chickpeas, or leave them out altogether, depending on how I’m serving the braise.

Despite having both rhubarb and lime juice, this really isn’t too tart – the sweet onion and the herbs really cut the sour. But feel free to add extra sugar at the end if you think it needs it. Personally I like the tartness.

Kurdish Braised Rhubarb

adapted from Silk Road Cooking: A Vegetarian Journey
by Najmieh Batmanglij

• 4 Tbsp oil
• 1 sweet onion, thinly sliced
• 4 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
• 1 hot chile or 1/2 tsp chile paste (she specifies a red chile, but I sliced up a green serrano)
• 3 cups chopped parsley
• 1/2 cup chopped mint
• 1/2 cup chopped chives
• 1/2 cup choppped dill
• 1/2 cup chopped cilantro
• 2/3 cup yellow split peas (or canned chickpeas)
• salt and pepper
• 1/4 tsp turmeric
• 3 1/2 cups stock or water
• 1 fresh tomato, sliced
• pinch of saffron soaked in 2 Tbsp hot water
• juice of half a lime
• 2 Tbsp sugar
• 1 lb rhubarb, cut into 1 inch chunks

Saute the onion in the oil until soft, then add the garlic, chile and herbs. Add the split peas, salt, pepper and turmeric, saute for a few minutes. Add stock or water, bring to a boil, cover and simmer 20 min or until the split peas have softened. Check to make sure it’s not boiling dry; if so, add a little more water.

Add the tomato, the saffron and its soaking liquid, the lime juice and sugar. Bring back to a boil, then arrange the rhubarb on top, cover and simmer another 10-15 minutes, until the rhubarb is soft. Taste and adjust salt or sugar as necessary.

Serve over couscous or rice, or with plenty of bread – something to soak up all the tart herby sauce. Excellent with lamb or chicken. Leftovers could easily be turned into a soup.

This post is part of the Grow Your Own blog event – check out the roundup at Gardenopolis!

We’ve made good progress through our freezer full of cow, but there were a few packages of stew beef crying out (figuratively speaking) to be used. Jon decided to pull out an old recipe that we hadn’t done in ages, a slow-cooked beef daube with black pepper, orange peel and shiitake mushrooms. He did all the work, and all I did was buy the bread to go with. Oh, and I made sheets of pasta to wrap around the leftovers to make cannelloni.

The daube is not one of those spur of the moment meals. Jon got the meat marinating three days ahead of time, with wine and vegetables. He braised it the second day, and we ate it on the third.

It tastes a whole lot better than it looks (I know, it looks like cat food. C’est la vie.) The individual flavors meld into a dark, complex meatiness. We accompanied it with Breadfarm farmer bread and a spinach salad.

In  honor of all Jon’s hard work making the daube, we hauled out the bottle of wine I got him for his birthday – a cabernet franc from Cougar Crest winery. This is some kick-ass stuff, redolent with butterscotch and dark fruit. Wowie.

Peppery Beef Daube with Shiitakes

adapted from The San Francisco Chronicle Cookbook

• 2 pounds beef stew meat
• 1 onion
• 2 carrots
• 4 sprigs fresh thyme
• 1 sprig rosemary
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 Tbsp freshly ground black pepper
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 strip of orange peel
• 1/2 bottle fruity red wine
• 2 Tbsp minced salt pork
• oil
• 1 Tbsp flour
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 oz dried shiitake mushrooms, broken up if large, rinsed

Halve the onion and set one piece aside. Cut the remaining piece in half again and roughly chop the carrots. Put the two onion quarters and the carrots into a bowl along with the herbs, orange peel, and half the salt, pepper and garlic. Pour the wine over, mix, cover and refrigerate overnight (or at least 4 hours).

Put the salt pork in a heavy pan and cook until the fat is rendered out. Discard the crisp bits (or, it seems to me, eat them). Chop the reserved onion and garlic, and saute in the pork fat. Remove from the pan and set aside.

Drain the meat, reserving the marinade, and pat dry. Saute the meat in batches in the pork fat, then set aside.

Add the flour to the pan and cook, stirring, until it browns. Pour in the marinade and deglaze the pan, then add the meat, vegetables, the remaining salt and pepper, water and mushrooms. Bring almost to a boil, cover and set to a low simmer. Cook 2 ½ to 3 hours, until the meat is completely tender. Discard the herbs, orange peel and carrots (we left the carrots in, but it might be better without). You can serve right away, or refrigerate the daube overnight and serve the next day.

Good with pasta, polenta or bread.