Pantry Collective

Apparently, I am a big fan of beef bourguignon, since I actually have another recipe here for it. This one is quite a bit better, though. The sauce is thicker and more flavorful, and doesn’t rely on canned mushroom soup for flavor. I saw the recipe over at Ezra Pound Cake last week and knew I had to make this yummy winter stew again.

I left out the bacon (intentionally) and the pearl onions (unintentionally). I just never have bacon on hand and really didn’t want to buy it just for this dish. And I am one of those people who doesn’t love bacon flavoring in everything, although I know many people do. I’m sure it adds a lot of flavor to the dish, but I promise, if you leave it out it is totally fine. The pearl onions, on the other hand, were forgotten about until it was already served. Oops! I might throw them in when reheating the leftovers.

That’s fresh baked No-Knead Bread on the plate, along with creamy mashed potatoes and roasted asparagus (two accompaniments I repeated from the first recipe). Yum!

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Last year for Friendsgiving (more on this soon), Amie and I decided to try making a pie I had seen in a local bakery. Amazingly, there were no recipes for a red wine poached pear pie on the internet, so we had to make it up as we went along. We basically cobbled together a couple of different recipes for poached pears and fruit pies and hoped for the best.

The result was awesome. The house smelled great while the pears were poaching. After we removed the fruit and added it to the pie, we continued reducing the wine until it formed a sweet, delicious syrup, which was later drizzled generously over the pie and accompanying ice cream.

I put this pie to the test earlier this year at Piefest 9. I hoped the enticing combination of wine and pie would put us over the top, but as Evan notes, a well-made apple pie really IS hard to beat. Still, our pie was devoured and we received many lovely compliments. It’s a nice break from the usual pie, and the red wine reduction makes a great topping for ice cream (or anything else!) long after the pie is gone.

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