French Toast Beef

I am distracted by other things right now, namely music. A poor, homeless piano will be coming to live with us and I want nothing more than to give it a better world than the empty, lonely space it has been living in. So I am brushing up on all the tunes we might enjoy together soon.

However distracted I might be, dinner somehow still gets on the table around here. And since my mind is elsewhere, I am completely opened up to the possibility of happy accidents or complete disasters. To that point, when I started dinner, I noticed I had already used up all the homemade barbecue sauce on another dish earlier in the week, but it would have been so nice on the short ribs I was about to start. Darn. What else was in the cupboards? I found some curry paste and some port and threw it into the dutch oven with the meat. Fresh ginger would have been nice, but alas, there was none left. Hmmm...cinnamon? I DO love a hint of cinnamon with curry.

Distracted as I was, You-Tube-ing piano renditions of my favorite songs, I was a little heavy-handed with the cinnamon. Ooops. It was really no problem in the end, a good deal of the deep cinnamon earthiness cooked off after a 2+ hour braise in the oven. But a hint of something wonderful still subtly remained in the flavor. AND, the house smelled like heaven. Mi esposo walked in the kitchen door and wanted to know if I had made French Toast.

The "French Toast Beef", falling off the bone, was nestled into a whopping dollop of soft polenta. I like to fortify my polenta with heavy cream. (Mashed potatoes have got NOTHING on this dreamy starch!) The zucchini was about ready to bust the produce drawer in the fridge, so I cut a bunch of that up and just threw the veg into the Dutch oven, too...this is absent-minded cooking that actually works!

So, even when you are lost in a song, or a daydream, or a pet project, wonderful things are possible in the kitchen. And if you are given to frequent absent-mindedness, consider adding slow braises and roasts to your repertoire. You just stick them in the oven on a low heat with whatever you have on hand(even cinnamon works fine) and the next 2-3 hours are yours...to get lost in cloudland before you are coaxed back to the present by some divine aroma from the kitchen, reminding you to come back down and enjoy the moment.