ELEVATED BEEF STEW: Perfect fare for a cold winter's night

Every year, at the first sign of snow, I start craving heartier food. A salad no longer suffices at suppertime; I want food I can sink my teeth into, meals that will make me feel cozy and warm—the culinary equivalent of an oversize cashmere sweater. For me, nothing quite does the job like beef stew. It’s comforting and delicious and practically fool proof since the longer you cook it, the better it becomes.

So when I stumbled upon a recipe for beef cheek stew in A Kitchen in France, A Year of Cooking in My Farmhouse, I knew I wanted to give her version a go. The cookbook, by food blogger Mimi Thorisson, is arranged by seasons and shot entirely by Thorisson’s photographer husband, Oddur. We see Mimi peeling apples in her kitchen, bicycling along a dirt path, and tucking into a plate of oxtail-macaroni gratin. She and her idyllic, familial life in Medoc, a Southwest region of France known mostly for its wine, are as much stars of this book as is her classic French cooking. These are the kinds of recipes a chic Parisian housewife might recreate for her Saturday dinner party. They are meals made to impress.

Even Thorrison’s beef stew, a comfort food if there ever was one, feels elevated, thanks to the addition of a bouquet garni (an aromatic bouquet of herbs tied together with a string), beef cheeks in lieu of stew chunks and an entire bottle of red wine. I had trouble finding beef cheeks and piment d’Espelette, so I subbed in two pounds of beautiful grass-fed beef and chopped the end of a spicy red pepper I dug out of the crisper (origin: unknown). I also omitted the 4 tomatoes in the recipe because my husband is, sadly, allergic to tomato.

A word of warning: This dish takes 2-3 hours to cook and about 20-30 minutes of prep time. We’d gone cross-country skiing that day and I didn’t have a chance to get going in the kitchen until 6 p.m. We didn’t sit down to eat until after 8:30p.m. and the stew could have benefited from another 30-45 minutes of simmering.

The cookbook suggests serving the stew with macaroni or potatoes. I went with mashed potatoes, which I don’t generally make, and which were a huge hit with my 10 year-old. I also roasted some Brussels sprouts to serve alongside the stew—I felt like it needed a little veg to balance out the heaviness of the meat and sauce—and paired a Pinot Noir from Oregon with the meal. Sometimes pinot noir can be a bit too light to stand up to a meaty dish like this—I typically like to drink it with salmon or chicken—but the Pinot Noir from the Sokol Blosser Winery in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, was plenty robust.


The stew was such a hit with my family we barely had any leftovers for the next day, which was a disappointment to me (I was hoping to get a night off cooking) and my husband (who had been planning to have it for breakfast). I guess that just means I’ll have to make it again—and double the recipe.