This winter we have prepared quite a few slow cooking dishes, mainly with some sort of meat. Especially after we started to patronize Intermarché, which sells cheap cuts of meat for very reasonable price, sometimes as low as 6 euros per kilo. The downside is that one has to buy the meat in large quantities, but on the other hand there is no point of spending hours making dishes for just one meal. And slowly cooked dishes make excellent weekday lunches. Our last project was Pot-au-Feu this past weekend following this recipe, only substituting beef for pork. Pot-au-Feu is supposed to be  “the quintessence of French family cuisine, it is the most celebrated dish in France. It honours the tables of the rich and poor alike.”Wikipedia. Unlike all other slow cooking dishes we’ve made, this was not much of a success. I don’t know what went wrong but the dry marinade was nowhere to be tasted in the final product, and the stew reminded me of a regular beef soup I had when growing up, a bit better quality though.

There is one thing this project shares with all the previous ones, though. It took way longer — several hours! — to cook than the recipe (any recipe) indicated for the meat to be done properly, “to fall off bones”. At the time we noticed that the stew will take several more hours, we were already very hungry, and ordered pizza, and moved the Pot-au-Feu to next day’s dinner. So we have eaten quite a few pizzas this winter!