Category: Beef

31st December 2020

Tournedos Rossini

This exquisite dish lends its name from Italian composer Gioachino Rossini who lived in Paris for two long periods in his life.

It is not only exquisite but also extravagant as it combines three nobel and expensive ingredients — beef filet, foie gras and truffle.

18th November 2019

Beef pear with trumpet of the death mushrooms

My butcher usually keeps two special cuts aside when he gets a new carcass — the poire and the merlan — and I have the right of first refusal. I hardy ever refuse.

These are very fine cuts, one is oblong and looks like a fish (merlan being a whiting) and the poire looks like a big pear. They come from near the topside, in English butchery terms. For French butchers, they are near the tranche. It is lean and delicate meat and not so well known because there is just about a pound of it on an entire cow.

20th January 2019

Winter soup with lentils

There is nothing better than a soup to chase the winter cold and this beef and lentils soup does the trick very well.

16th March 2015

Beef and oyster pie with ginger

Beef and oyster pie is an old English recipe that stems from the times that oysters were so plentiful that they were cheap enough for the poor to eat. Beef was not cheap but the meat used was not a prime cut. Many recipes use a pint of British ale in the broth. Beef and oyster sauce is a common dish in Asia, and almost […]

4th August 2014

Beef and chervil soup with pasta

This is a very pleasant and nutritious soup for when you are trying to lose weight after spending some nice holidays. I found some interesting beef shank at the supermarket – my butcher’s is closed for a few weeks – and started by making a beef broth. The next day I removed the (little) fat from the stock and added vegetables, chervil and pasta. The […]

24th June 2014

A rice dish with eggplant, beef and raisins

A long time ago, I left my parents house to study at university in the big city of Amsterdam. My mother gave me a book of recipes as I had already showed signs that I would not be eating pizzas and French fries all the time but actually do some cooking. In my first student room – a rented room with a family in the […]

8th April 2014

Beef and barley soup with an Asian touch

It is Monday and the butcher’s is closed because they open on Sunday morning. Go figure. I had abandoned buying meat at the supermarket because it is better from the butcher and, surprisingly, often even cheaper. However, when I saw a kilo of beef at the supermarket at 5 euros, with the mention “Limousin” for the provenance, I fell for the offer. At first I […]

30th January 2014

My French oxtail soup

Here we have a culinary and national identity conundrum. Let’s start by saying that oxtail soup is a hearty winter dish using relatively cheap ingredients. Personally, I always associate oxtail soup with England, so my French version replaced the porto with a Banyuls and added some root vegetables that do not enter in the original recipe. But what is the original recipe?

3rd January 2014

Pasta with meat sauce

Sometimes you want something simple and pasta with meat sauce is a kind of comfort food for colder days. I do not like to buy pasta sauce in tins or jars and I did not want to go into the trouble of making a real Bolognese sauce because with the bacon (and mushrooms) it adds up to a rather filling and a bit fat sauce. […]