Have you ever had beer cheek confit?
Kelly Rossiter
Weekday Vegetarian: 5 Vegetarian Dishes and Beef Cheek Confit
Here are 5 weekday vegetarian meal suggestions for the upcoming week:
2. Scrambled Eggs with Stinging Nettles
3. Spaghettini with Garlic, Parsley and Olive Oil
4. Jerusalem Artichoke Fritters
Those of you who are regular readers will know that I have been writing a Weekday Vegetarian post each week that gives you five vegetarian suggestions and a recipe for a meat dish. I have started a Weekday Vegetarian column in TreeHugger in addition to my work here on Planet Green. That's an awful lot of cooking, so I have enlisted the help of Rebecca Vandevelde who has started cooking a meal a week for us. She makes two different things and then my husband and I share and get to taste both things.
We've only done it once so far, but I think it will be a lot of fun. Rebecca is a fantastic and adventuresome cook and she exposes us to things we might not have tried on our own. Not only that it is delightful to arrive home and discover my dinner, with little more to do than heat it up. It's like having a personal chef and I like it.
Having said that, I wasn't sure if I was going to share this recipe with readers or not. The Beef Cheek Confit was really delicious and just melted in the mouth, but honestly, I've never cooked anything in four cups of lard before. But then my husband and I went out last night for a dinner event with Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan Sun and a new book called Every Day in Tuscany, which I wrote about yesterday. We had a fantastic dinner with a warm mushroom salad, a Black Truffle and Ricotta Agnolotti with Brown Butter and Asparagus and Braised Veal Cheeks which were so tender you didn't need a knife. That sold me, so here is the recipe. Rebecca served these with caramelized turnips and a tangy barbeque sauce.
Beef Cheek Confit
1/4 c soy sauce
1/4 c brown sugar
6 cloves
1/2 tsp five spice powder
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1. Put the soy sauce, sugar, cloves, five spice powder, and garlic in a gallon sized freezer bag and shake to the combine. Add the beef cheeks and seal the bag, squeezing out as much air as you can. Let this cure in the fridge for 2-3 days.
2.To make the confit, just melt the rendered beef fat it a heavy bottomed pot with a lid that's just big enough to hold the beef cheeks and fat. Put this into an oven preheated to 200 degrees F and cook until a fork easily passes through the meat (about 4-6 hours). Remove the pot from the oven and allow it to come to room temperature, then refrigerate the beef cheek covered in the fat until you are ready to use it (it will last several weeks this way). On the day you want to eat the confit, take it out of the fridge and gently heat just enough to liquify the fat so you can get the beef cheeks out.
Difficulty Level: Easy
From the website No Recipes, courtesy of Rebecca Vandevelde