Provencal Daube (in progress)
Does this mark a return to (semi) regular blogging? Quite possibly– a reconfiguration of my working schedule, with a shift to the 9-5 may clear up precious minutes for more frequent updates.Immediately, I just needed to find an activity to distract me from monitoring the simmering progress of the dish pictured above, a recipe taken from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Meat Book.
Fearnley-Whittingstall insists that in cooking stews, “like boiling, simmering involves the rising of bubbles to the surface– but only just. The fewer the bubbles, and the longer the interval between them, the slower, and better, the simmer.”
All well and good, but I’m hoping to eat sometime this evening, preferably before 10 pm. Consequently, I keep tip-toeing over to the stove to inspect the surface of the stew, straining to see one or two bubbles in the brief period of time that I watch, while resisting the urge to intensify the heat, even a tiny amount.
I guess I can always rail at Hugh if it winds up being unsatisfactory. But it smells good, so far.
