77. Braised Short Ribs

This is a sad post, for many reasons. First off, this happened:

This is sad to me because they are both so smart and good-looking. I thought those two crazy kids were gonna make it, sex addiction or no.

You might know that Cleve and I are watching the entire 9-season run of The X-Files (finally hit season 8!) so details are still fresh in my mind. The sex addiction aspect of the Leoni-Duchovny story makes all The X-Files’ allusions to Agent Mulder’s legendary porn collection so meta (especially when you realize that Duchovny is the one who writes so many episodes where porn is mentioned). And the series totally goes into meta-overdrive in the Duchovny-penned (I wrote that ‘peened’ initially. LOL) and directed episode “Hollywood A.D.”, which revolves around the production of a film based on the exploits of Mulder and Scully. Scully is played by none other than Mrs. Fox Mulder herself, Tea Leoni. Yeah. There are some twee moments like this:

SCULLY: (on phone) You know, Mulder, speaking of Hollywood, I think that Tea Leoni has a little crush on you.MULDER: (on phone) Oh, yeah, right. Like Tea Leoni’s ever going to have a crush on me.

And the obligatory porn check!

SCENE 7(MULDER’s office. SCULLY is watching CHUCK BURKS examine the pottery piece with sophisticated laser equipment.)CHUCK BURKS: There’s music in the air, Agent Scully. See, everything that exists vibrates and therefore sings. The street, uh, your internal organs, electricity, everything. Here, I’ll show you. You see, this is my voice bouncing around in the red here. And all this yellow is ambient sound that we habitually tune out. It’s the hum of my hardware, Mulder’s porn tapes on pause, the sounds from the street– everything we hear but we don’t know we hear. I can hear it with this machine.

However, my favorite is the entire exchange between Garry Shandling and Mulder regarding Mulder’s junk:

GARRY SHANDLING: Hey, uh… Uh…

MULDER: Hi.

GARRY SHANDLING: How are you? Seriously, listen could I ask you something?

MULDER: Sure.

GARRY SHANDLING: Uh, do you dress to the left or to the right?

(Sound of SCULLY’s heels as she runs past them. MULDER glances down and laughs, embarrassed.)

MULDER: What do you… What do you mean?

(GARRY SHANDLING laughs briefly, then clears his throat. He is very serious. SCULLY runs past again.)

GARRY SHANDLING: Look, when I play a character I need to find his center, his, sort of, rudder, so to say and then everything comes from that.

(MULDER thinks about it uncomfortably and looks over to where SCULLY is sprinting past TEA LEONI yet again.)

MULDER: (thinks about it) Uh… I guess mostly to the left.

GARRYSHANDLING: “Mostly”?

MULDER: (clarifying) Most of the time.

GARRY SHANDLING: Most of the time. To the left.

MULDER: Mm-hmm.

GARRY SHANDLING: Wardrobe!

(GARRY SHANDLING walks away, leaving MULDER alone staring after him.)

Yeah. Narcissistic much?

All in all, “Hollywood A.D.” might be one of the most masturbatory vanity scripts I have ever seen–and this is also taking into consideration all of the heavy-handed faux-spiritual voice overs that are the hallmark of a DD X-File. In his defense, the above scene was a riff on a very funny episode of Larry Sanders.

So I don’t know why anyone was ever surprised by the whole sex addiction thing. Duchovny’s now on Californication where he plays an over-sexed writer or college professor or something. And I’m sure Californication‘s dialogue regularly revolves around Duchovny’s manhood regardless if he wrote the episode or not. Let’s not forget that this is the guy who did the junk in a cup photo shoot.

Anyway, I’m sad that the split happened. But on the bright side, ladies, Mulder’s back on the market. David, call me, we can work around your issues!

Read on if you want to hear about #77 Braised Short Ribs.

I know that none of that had nothing to do with beef short ribs. During that whole rant you might have been wondering, Where’s the beef? Sorry to disappoint you, but there is no beef. Just bison. Yep, for this dish I decided to use bison (from Arganica Food Club). But I’ll get to that later. First off, I did all the baking. BAKING!

This is the other reason why this is such a sad post. Something horrible just happened. Right now I went to upload my cooking photos from my camera to use in this post. My cake photos have disappeared. My cake photos that followed my cake-baking step by agonizing step are not on my camera. There is a whole series of photos that are not on my camera. THEY ARE NOT ON MY CAMERA! These were the only ones that survived:

Just these two steps. The most uninteresting steps–mixing and getting them out of the pans. So you can’t see that I shaved down the puffy middle mounds of the 2 layers with a bread knife so my cake would be flat and even. You can’t see how I used an ice cream scoop (with the little flipper) to dispense the icing onto the cake. You can’t see how I spread on the frosting to make a “crumb layer” before I put on the outer icing. You can’t see that there was a ‘crumb icing’ plate and a ‘clean icing plate.’ My icing didn’t have little bits of spice cake floating in it! You can’t see how I placed pecans and ginger snaps on the cake in a pretty design so it looked like the one in #77. This is terribly distressing to me. I don’t even have the photos of Brian looking dead under the bed, which I was going to use to illustrate just how tired I was after baking a cake and making biscuits from scratch (man was I tired). My one success in the field of baking and there isn’t any photographic proof. And I took sooooo many photos. I meticulously documented my cake crafting. And all for naught.

This is very disconcerting and I am depressed. I don’t know if I can go on with the rest of this post. I am despondent. This is bullshit.

Well, at least some of the biscuit photos survived (some of those disappeared as well). So I guess I’ll just talk about the Baking Powder Biscuits. I used a recipe that I found from The Splendid Table. It is law that I give you the opportunity to watch the following video:

This was simple, although time consuming and I managed to get flour EVERYWHERE.

They turned out OK, but not any better than a Pillsbury muffin that would come out of a tube. Not worth it. There are some things that are worth making from scratch and I can say that this isn’t one of them. However, Teresa Guidice’s Old World Pizza Dough from Skinny Italian is totally worth the trouble. I have people to vouch for me on that one.

Let’s get to the meat of #77, shall we?

Yes, I used bison in lieu of beef short ribs. My Arganica Farm Club membership was about to expire so I got a veggie crate and then used my $25 voucher on other things (like the trout from Baked Stuffed Bass). I knew that short ribs were coming up so I made the switch. Not a bad choice, I think. They were meaty, easily cut into pieces, and browned beautifully.

I decided to go the slow-cooker route because it’s damn hot here in Baltimore. Because I chose the crock pot over the oven method, I omitted the 1 cup of hot water called for in the recipe so it wouldn’t get too soupy.

Here is the timeline for #77.

At 2:30 I browned the ribs. At 3 pm I got the lid onto the ribs, onions, crumbled bouillon cube, and seasonings at ‘high.’ The game plan was to have the meal in the crock pot for 4 hours.

While the crock pot was doing its thing I finished up the baking. At 3:55 I finally finished frosting the cake. I then peeled the potatoes. 4:10 I put the peeled potatoes and frozen carrots into the crock pot with the meat. I didn’t have anything to do right away so I cleaned the kitchen a bit.

5:00 I put the partially defrosted Brussels sprouts in the mix.

7:00 I took out the vegetables and meat and put it on a platter to keep warm in the oven. I also put in the biscuits in the oven to warm.

7:10 Cleve drained the drippings into a sauce pan and made the gravy, which was way too thick and dark and oily. It looked like chocolate pudding with flecks of onion and beef. I had a picture of it, but it has vanished.

While the Gravy Master was at work, I made the salad and plated the meal. So here it is, #77.

7:30pm Dinner is Served!The photo ain’t bad and it’s the only photographic evidence of my spice cake. I am glad that at least there is some proof of its existence.

So how did #77 fare? Pretty well. This was super-easy in the crock pot.

The gravy was a fail, but it didn’t matter. The bison and the vegetables were so juicy and tender and well-seasoned. I’m not a huge fan of Brussels sprouts, because sometimes they’re a little overpowering, but they were good in this application. In a braised dish such as this, celery is typically used, but celery is so boring so the sprouts were a welcome change.

Also, the leftovers heated up well for lunch the next day.

I don’t think I need to elaborate any further on the baking portion of the day. In fact, I don’t think I need to elaborate any further on any other portion of this meal. I’m out.

Happy 4th of July everyone! Happy Birthday U.S.A.

Recipe from Dinner is Served 1972 Marjon Promotions