When I think of game day snacks lots of cheesy, spicy, comfort foods come to mind.  But who says we can't get a little gourmet on everyone? 

I got the idea of taking the basic baby backs to the next level for my party goers after coming across a great recipe from a friend. Sure, everyone loves a slow cooked, sweet and savory rack of ribs, but i opted for braised short ribs over a potatoes and apples "risotto style" filler. 

The beauty about this recipe is that it can be made the night before.  The longer beef is cooked (at a slow and steady pace) the more tender it becomes, especially a slow cooked short rib.  The juices from the yummy apples also tenderize the meat so serving it next day makes it 10 times more juicy. Listed below are the ingredients you will need: 

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I know, a) I said that I would continue talking about food and wine pairings and I’ll get back to that and b) this isn’t exactly a topical Christmas dish. However, this is something that came up this week and I thought II‘d pass it along. You see, I keep trying to come up with stuff for Ms Cocktail. That’s why you’ll notice that most of my dishes do not have beef or pork in them. Ms Cocktail doesn’t eat them. She’s not a true vegetarian but it does kind of limit what I can make her for dinner. It also doesn’t help that like many people, we are often faced with a time crunch and can’t make really complicated, time consuming meals.

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A couple of weeks back Giants Fan #1, the assistant winemaker at the winery I work at, mentioned that a mutual acquaintance of ours, Alan who writes for CellarBlog, was looking for holiday recipes that pair with local wines. We bandied it about and thought that it would be nice to showcase our Bordeaux blend which we call Tre Sorelle. The idea was to pair it with a nice Beef Wellington. After digging through my recipes and notes, I decided that while a Beef Wellington is nice, this would be a better way to showcase our beautiful wine.

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After our trip to the Northern Rhone, we decided that we needed to take a day to just chill around the chateau and catch up on some of the wine we had purchased. However, we had noticed a little shop down the road called “La Grotte Aux Fromages” or “The Cheese Cave” in English. Considering that we had a love affair with the local cheeses that rivaled our passion for wine (well, maybe not quite so much) I felt that we were honor bound to pay this place a visit.

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Several years back, Ms Cocktail and I decided that we would treat ourselves to a vacation in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. It turned out to be a very special time for us. Not only did we partake of the general debauchery of the season, but we also discovered the true culinary passion that exists in this wonderful city. Ever since then, we have had our own little Mardi Gras celebration back here in Virginia. It usually amounts to nothing more than a nice home cooked meal and a bottle of wine.

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Ms Cocktail is kind of funny sometimes. Not funny ha ha, but funny strange. You see, she loves rice in all of its forms. Short grain, long grain, Basmati, Jasmine, even Forbidden rice, she loves it. Except for wild rice. With wild rice she is like a six year old, turning her nose up at it, showing disdain even at the mention of it.

That all changed when she had the wild rice in this recipe.

The rice itself can be made up to two days ahead of time and kept in the refrigerator. Then all you need to do is to sauté the vegetables and rice at the very end to warm it up.

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This is something that while part of this particular recipe, it is also something that you should know how to make as both brown butter and it’s cousin black butter, are remarkably versatile and useful in various dishes. Coloring the butter adds a richness to the flavor that isn’t there at the beginning.

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It was my friend Chef Phil Young that introduced me to a wonderful tool in the kitchen several years ago, a mandolin. It is essentially as flat board with a blade about half way down it that can be adjusted to varying thicknesses. What this allows you to do is to take any reasonably solid food object and shave it to a thickness of your liking. It is a tool that will make preparing these vegetables very easy and quite interesting. They are also something that you will find remarkably useful in other dishes as well.

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This recipe uses the Roasted Tomatoes and the Roasted Shallots from previous posts. It can be made up to a week in advance and besides being used in GPMMFM it can also be used to top steaks and fish. When storing in the refrigerator, pour a thin layer of olive oil on the top to help keep it from drying out. Reheat before serving.

By the way, this is a fondue in the way that fondue means “melted”. In this case, the tomatoes and shallots appear to have melted together in this savory condiment.

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This is yet something else that can be prepared ahead of time. You are roasting the shallots to caramelize the sugars inside without actually browning them. The hardest thing about working with shallots is that when you purchase them, very often there are two or three bulbs inside the paper shell. So when counting them, you need to count not how many you bought, but how many are actually there. Except for this dish where you want the entire bulb to be counted as one.

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