Beef Burgundy

My recipe for beef burgundy should come up if you click French. It might be listed as "beouf bourgogne."

I've decided to make this for lunch. It's 90 degrees and humid, but I've been dying for this for days. Hence, why I'm making it for lunch and not dinner. It's hot.

I have never made this dish with a good wine. I've never been able to justify buying a good bottle of wine and pouring it into a skillet. But now that I think about it, if I pay $6 for 2 bottles of cooking wine, I could probably find a nice American red that would work for the same cost.

I have some beef cubes from a local farm in the skillet. I cut them small, because 1. I have a small child and this saves interruptions to my meal later and 2. I believe meat should accent the meal, not be central to it.

I cooked the meat slowly with chives from my garden and a few drops olive oil. As the meat cooked, I added some red cooking wine. And topped the meat with four-color pepper, freshly ground.

I poured more wine, a whole lot of vegetable stock and whisked in two tablespoons flour. That was tricky because I let it get too hot before I added the flour so it was a booger to get the lumps out. My daughter peeled five carrots for me, so I chopped them and added them. I'll let them bubble for a bit on medium before I transfer the whole thing to the big stew pot.

The original recipe for beef burgundy calls for a bouquet garni, which wikipedia defines as such:
"There is no generic recipe for bouquet garni, but most recipes include parsley, thyme and bay leaf. Depending on the recipe, the bouquet garni may include basil, burnet, thyme, chervil, rosemary, peppercorns, savory and tarragon. Sometimes vegetables such as carrot, celery (leaves or stem), celeriac, leek, onion and parsley root are also included in the bouquet.

Sometimes, the bouquet is not bound with string, and its ingredients are filled into a small sachet, a net, or even a tea strainer instead. Traditionally, the aromatics are bound within leek leaves, though a coffee filter and butcher twine can be used instead of leek leaves."

Today, I'm using some herbs from my garden, probably parsley, oregano, a hint of basil and maybe some lemon thyme.

After the stew simmers a while (about three hours) I'll taste the broth and dilute/add wine as needed.

BTW: I've decided never to use cooking wine again. It's real wine or nothing from now on, because the cooking wine is too salty to get the balance of flavor and salt... it either tastes super salty or like nothing.