Miroton

This is from waay back when we last made roast beef, and while the roast beef itself was really good, the miroton I made from the leftovers was totally out of this world. A miroton is basically made from thin slices of leftover beef baked in a stock in the oven with butter-melted onions. I added some mushrooms to the mix as well. Luckily I had quite a bit of gravy left over from the roast beef, which likely boosted the yumminess quotient by 200%. First I sweated a good quantity of onions in a pot very slowly with some butter for about 40 minutes. Meanwhile, I sliced and sautéed the mushrooms, and sliced the leftover beef thinly. When the onions were ready, I deglazed them with some red wine vinegar (also characteristic of a miroton), and added the gravy and mushrooms. I also added a healthy portion of wine and let it simmer for a while. I arranged the slices of beef in a shallow baking dish, and poured the sauce over them, so that they were all more or less covered. Then I sprinkled the top with breadcrumbs and baked it for an hour and a half or so. Roast beef will initially toughen if you recook it this way, so you need to bake the miroton for an hour or longer. This was serious, serious deliciousness: the kind where you lie awake at night remembering how good it was a month later. Mmm. Now I'm contemplating making a roast beef just for the miroton that is to follow.

Talk about mollycoddling!

A Japanese girl who's been studying english in Philly for the past 6 months called me up last night. I had invited her to a couple of parties chez nous, but I hadn't heard from her in months. She's going back to Japan next Monday. She said she has all this luggage, so she's thinking of calling a taxi to get to the airport. Sounds like a good idea, I said. Could I tell her how it's done? Umm, okay, hold on, let me look up the phone number of the taxi company... You just call and ask them to send a taxi to your address. They might want to know the airline and your destination, so you should have your itinerary in front of you, I said. After a short pause, she asked if I could call a taxi for her. Ummm, okaaaay, I suppose I could. (Although if you can't call a taxi for yourself after over six months of language school in another country, clearly there is something wrong.) I know and I sympathise with the difficulties in learning a language, and particularly for shy japanese people. But I would like to think that I would be too ashamed of myself to ask someone else to call a taxi for me after having studied the language intensively for six months. At the very least, I would offer to buy the person a coffee or something.