PW's Short Ribs In Tomato Sauce

That PW. She takes awesome photographs. She surprised herself by marrying a rancher. She helps deliver the cattle babies. She grows veggies and flowers. She keeps basset hounds. She remodeled her guest house, plank by plank. She keeps the house, apparently with no help. She washes. She cleans manure off boots. She homeschools her children, all four of them. She writes one of America's most popular blogs. She recently published a cookbook and a children's story book. She keeps her handsome 'rugged and virile' Malboro Man happy. She does more but I can't keep count. She's one of those people who gets 48 hours out of her 24-hour day.

She cooks too, did I tell you, not for the photographs as many food bloggers do, but to feed her brood so they grow big, strong and happy. She has at least three hands, because she can cook and take photos of herself stirring and whipping. She's funny and she laughs at herself and everything. To me, PW's draw is her fun and funny attitude towards cooking. She's a seriously good cook but she's doesn't cook seriously. So what if the souffle failed--Charlie the basset hound has risen from the (almost) dead. So what if dinner's burnt--the fire in the field has been put out and her virile man (check him out, he does look like a Malboro ad man) is home. That's what's so endearing about PW. She really is about the life in her years, not the years in her life. She's a superwoman. I want to live on her ranch too. But I can't so the least I can do is try to cook like her.

Short ribs in tomato sauce is delicious and easy to cook although it does take a long time, four terribly long hours. But it's not so bad because you don't have to stir or check on it because it stews slowly in the oven. If you have a Dutch oven, great. But I don't so I used a glass casserole dish. As PW advised, it's best to cook this dish early the day before so that the fat can be removed after chilling in the fridge. As with all stews, the meat tastes best when allowed to cool down and reheated the next day. Prolonged simmering softens the meat but doesn't let the flavor of the sauce seep in. Cooling and resting will draw the flavors of the sauce into the meat. This recipe is similar to the one that most of us do with lamb shanks except this one is simpler, without celery or carrots. If you like the tomatoes to look red like PW's, cook the stew a shorter time and serve on the same day. Mine went into the fridge for two days and the color deepened but so did the flavor and taste. It was really yum. I can imagine restaurants charging a bar of gold for a dinner of short ribs in tomato sauce. The best thing about short ribs is that it's not as unhealthy as oxtail (which is a top favorite in my  family) and it is cheaper too. You must try this.

PW's Short Ribs In Tomato Sauce (serves 6-8)
1.5 kg short ribs, in small pieces
1 medium brown onion, chopped
4-5 cloves garlic, chopped
1 can 28 oz tomatoes (whole or chopped)
1 can 10 oz tomato sauce (I used 2 heaped T tomato paste + water)
1 cup red wine
1/4 t dried thyme
1/4 t dried chili flakes (omit if little kids are eating)
salt & freshly ground black pepper to taste
oil for frying

Garnish: grated parmesan and chopped Italian parsley
500 gm dried pasta

1. Preheat oven to 150 C. Season the ribs with 1 full teaspoon of salt and some freshly ground black pepper. Put a little bit of oil in a fry pan and brown the ribs in 2 to 3 batches.



2. In an oven-proof pot, fry the onion and garlic in a little bit of olive oil until transparent. Add the ribs, the tomatoes, the tomato sauce/paste, the wine and the seasoning. If the ribs aren't fully immersed in the sauce, add some water and stir through. Cover the pot and place on middle rack of oven. Cook for 4 hours without removing the lid. Taste and season if necessary.

3. When thoroughly cooled (I left the pot in the oven to cool), place the pot into the fridge to chill so that the hardened fat can be skimmed off. Reheat and serve hot over fettucine or rice or with toasted baguettes. Garnish with some grated parmesan and chopped parsley.

Beef & Mushroom (& Red Wine) Pie

Beef & Mushroom red wine pie with potato pastry.

Have always loved meat pies, probably because when I was growing up, there was only one western restaurant in town and their pies were to us what pizzas are to kids now.

I balk at making pies because there's so much work, especially since I don't like store-bought pastry. I've told you before about the pastry course I took years ago that made me suspect all pastries. Commercial pastry is made with pastry margarine, a white and waxy fat that doesn't melt easily and so make the crustiest and shortest pastry because it melts only under high heat which separates the layers of dough, unlike butter which melts when kneaded, resulting in tough dough if not properly handled (my English teacher would give that sentence an 'F'). Just think what that hard margarine does in your blood vessels. Plus, if you've made pastry before, you'll know how much fat goes into it to make it short and flaky.

I've never made potato pastry and was surprised at how deliciously short and light it tasted, partly due to the self-raising flour. The potatoes also gave the pastry extra flavor. However, the pastry was soft and crumbly and I couldn't turn the pies out so potato pastry should be used for making pot pies only. If the potato pastry is rolled too thick, the texture can taste rather cake-like so make it about 1/2 cm thin. Since this is not short crust pastry, the texture is soft and crumbly but not very crusty.

As for the meat filling, I halved the wine and it was still too much because the wine flavor was over-whelming and the meat filling tasted very tart. I had to add quite a bit of sugar. I wanted to use ground beef because I knew my mom and in laws would prefer that to beef chunks. Ground beef also cooks much faster. But the ground beef exuded too much oil when fried so I ran to the supermarket to get some beef blade to add to the ground beef. Despite cutting the beef into small 2 cm cubes and cooking until it was very tender, Wey said he found the chunks too stringy for his teeth and preferred ground beef so next time, I will get beef blade and mince the beef myself.

The recipe below is a combination of the beef and red wine pie and beef and mushroom pie recipes in Exclusively Food a wonderful website that I just found and now visit regularly for updates.


Beef & Mushroom Pie (makes 6 large or 8 medium individual pies)
1 kg beef chuck or blade or mince
2 T veg oil
2 cloves garlic
1 T plain flour
1 1/2 T tomato paste
1 T Worchestershire sauce
1/2 t dried thyme (or 1 t fresh, minced)
125 ml (1/2 cup) red wine (2 cups for red wine pies)
500 ml (2 cups) beef stock
1 cup water
1 T sugar (optional)
2 bay leaves
500 gm white cap mushrooms (I added shiitake mushrooms; cheaper), coarsely chopped
salt (about 1 t or more) & freshly ground black pepper to taste
2 T cornflour + 1 T water

egg wash: 1 egg, half the white removed & beaten well

1. In a heavy saucepan, add a small amount of oil and brown the beef in very small batches. If you fry too much at once, the beef will sweat and will not brown. I used a heavy nonstick pan (Circulon, love it) and didn't add oil to the mince and used very little oil for the chunks. Set aside. Spoon off the excess oil.

2. Add 1 T oil to the same pan, add the onion and fry until softened. Add the garlic and flour (I didn't add the flour now because I intended to use a pressure cooker) and the beef and remaining ingredients except the mushrooms. Cover and let simmer 1 1/2 hours to 2 hours (30 minutes in presssure cooker) until beef is tender. If there is too much liquid, remove cover to reduce it. However, I found that upon cooking and standing, the liquid will dry up. Pies are best when wet with sauce so do make sure the stew is really slushy. You may have to add more water if not cooking in a pressure cooker. Season.

If using mince, add the mushrooms at the same time as the beef and simmer about 30 minutes.

3. Add the mushrooms and cook another 30 minutes. Taste and season if necessary. If using pressure cooker, stir in the flour and cook 5 minutes. Thicken the stew with the cornflour water. When cool, chill the filling overnight for easier handling and for the flavor to develop.

4. Remove the bay leaves and divide mixture into individual ramekins (to the brim), or you can line the ramekins or greased baking pans with short crust pastry (not potato pastry; too soft) with the pastry overhanging the rims by about 1 cm.

5. Roll pastry tops out between sheets of pastry paper. I found the potato pastry very soft, almost like mashed potatoes, and preferred roll and then press it thin in my hands like making pizza bases. Cover the pie tops with the pastry, trim and mark rim with a fork (go here for great step by step photos).

6. Brush pastry with beaten egg and snip a cross on top to let steam out. Bake at 200 C for 25 to 30 minutes until pastry is golden.

Potato Pastry 
200 gm self-raising flour
200 gm mashed potato, cooled
150 gm salted butter

--Sift flour into a large bowl, rub in the butter, add the mash and mix lightly until just blended. Chill 1/2 hour before using.
--This amount is enough for pot pies only. For enclosed pie (pie with a base and top), you need short crust pastry for the base.

Saltimbocca Alla Romano

Pork saltimbocca alla romano.

The photos aren't pretty (it was too dark) but this is a really really delicious dish! I can't believe I've lived this long and never eaten saltimbocca even though Italian food is one of my top 3 cuisines.

Yi brought some prociutto/parma ham back from Melbourne and they turned out very salty and the flavor was too heavy for my taste. Good prociutto should be smooth, delicately flavored, almost having a floral scent and not 'dead' salty. That's prociutto according to me but then I've never been to Italy. Talking of which, my fav prociutto is not from Italy but from Spain. It doesn't have to be jambon Iberico (which is really NOT over-rated; it really is great) but any serrano ham's excellent, I've found. Anyway, I checked the price label and sure enough, it had a Safeway logo. Never buy your ham from supermarkets, I've often told my kids. The regular sandwich ham is fine but for anything else, you must hit the delis. I love these delis in Melbourne and Brisbane.

Wey found that the Safeway prociutto tasted better cooked and we had some on a caesar salad but there was plenty more to go. Then I remembered a cookbook, Rome: Authentic Recipes Celebrating The Foods Of The World by Maureen B. Fant, which had a recipe for a prociutto-lined veal called saltimbocca alla romana, a Roman specialty. The prociutto flavored the meat with its saltiness and savory sweetness while the sage, butter and wine combination gave the meat a most wonderful flavor and aroma, so Italian I imagined I was somewhere in Tuscany. This is a perfect way to use up prociutto that's not good enough for eating plain. This dish is so simple to cook that NO ONE can go wrong with it.

Since veal can hardly be found here, I settled for pork loin. You can use a beef tenderloin or chicken too if pork is not your meat. I can see myself serving this as an appetiser next time I have a dinner party. I can see the saltimbocca rolled and cut, topped with a cube of crusty bread toasted in olive oil and garlic, elegantly served as canapes with toothpicks holding them together. And to cut the saltiness, some cubes of rock melon too. Ohhh. With a white wine and my family's high approval of the dish last night, I really felt la dolce vita, except for a little pain in my heart.

Pork/Veal/Chicken Saltimbocca
12 pieces meat escalopes of your choice
8-10 (more if your escalopes are large pieces) thinly sliced prociutto
12 or more fresh sage leaves
freshly ground black pepper
about 4 T plain flour
2 T unsalted butter
4 oz dry white wine

wooden toothpicks

1. Slice the meat into thin pieces of 1/4" or 1/2 cm thick and pound it with a meat mallet to tenderize.

2. Lay a piece of prociutto over the meat, trim to size with scissors and lay a piece or two of sage leaves on top of the prociutto, securing with a wooden toothpick. The leftover cut pieces of procuitto can be used the same way, just patch them together on the meat.

3. When ready to cook, melt 1 tablespoon of butter in a pan. Lightly coat the pieces of meat all over with the flour, shake off excess, and place 6 pieces of escalopes prociutto side down into the buttered pan. Cook over medium heat for 2 minutes, then turn over to cook another 4-5 minutes at low heat. You can grind some black pepper over now or later when the meat's on the plate. There's really no need to salt the meat because the prociutto will be salty enough. Remove the cooked saltimbocca onto a serving plate. Repeat with remaining escalopes.

4. Add the wine to the pan, increase the heat to medium high and deglaze the pan by loosening the brown bits with a ladle. Let the liquid evaporate into half the original amount and drizzle (because there's not much) it over the saltimbocca.

I served them with golden olive oil roasted potatoes but bread is good too.

Update: Lunchguy, a chef based in Bangkok,has some invaluable tips for cooking this dish. The prociutto can be sandwiched between two slices of meat (pls refer to comments for details) and he suggests seedless white grapes as garnishing, a perfect choice. I love!

Gyu The Cow

Update: I have been informed that Wagyu imported into this country are those of Grades 6 to 9, 9 being the most marbled and priciest. It is recommended that Grade 6 (which may be graded as 7 by other wholesalers, making it hard to compare the price) be eaten as steaks while Grade 8 and 9 Wagyu are very marbled and don't give a bite so they are best eaten shabu-shabu or sukiyaki style.

'Wa' means Japanese, 'gyu' means beef in Japanese. Wagyu is beef from special Japanese breeds of cow which are now not only reared in Japan but also in Australia and the USA. Prized and craved for their marbled fat, which is due to genetics and the special feed and treatment, Wagyu has more mono-saturated fat than regular beef, meaning it is 'healthier' to eat than regular beef. Wagyu is the most expensive beef in the world, Kobe Wagyu (Wagyu from cows raised in Kobe) being the most famous.

The wholesaler only sells Australian Wagyu in 5 kg blocks, so three of us shared one block. At a discounted rate of RM150/US$50 per kg for Grade 6+ Wagyu, I got 8 pieces for RM330, Rm41.25/US$11.50 per piece, very cheap by restaurant standards. I waited until Kid No 1 and 2 came back on holidays to cook the Wagyu, (Kid No 3 had by then cooked 2 pieces of the steaks for his own consumption) which I have eaten in Japan and Shanghai but never cooked before. Since my Wagyu was cut into steaks, I figured that was the best way to cook Wagyu. I was wrong.

Wey recommended pan-frying rather than grilling steaks, based on his experience. He said somehow pan-fried steaks taste better. I believe the guy, so I pan-fried the 3/4" wagyu steaks for 5-6 minutes on each side for my mom and niece who didn't like rare steaks. The remaining steaks were again sprinkled with a pinch of salt just before frying and black pepper was freshly cracked over them during frying. I fried them about 4 minutes each side and they were rare, a little too rare but we didn't bother to cook them again because they tasted so good. Just before serving, they were given a small splash of red wine and sherry. I also made black pepper sauce, an Asian favorite.

We agree that Wagyu is best cooked rare to medium rare than well-done and medium. When cooked to medium-well, the beef tasted like good ordinary beef, only more tender. When done rare, each bite released juice that was buttery and smooth, after which you taste that bite of flavorful, tender meat. We ate very fast, not talking, finishing all the steaks first, clearing our palates with a great Spanish red wine in between bites, then dutifully ate the sides: taters and salad. Which actually was the right way because the meat was so good nothing else on the table was worth eating. Juicy, tender, flavorful and buttery-smooth is the only way I can describe Wagyu.

I obsessed about Waygu all night after that, thinking about ways in which this wonderful meat can be cooked to its best gastronomic potential. I felt that Wagyu shouldn't be eaten in a large chunk. First of all, because it was a big piece of steak, it got cold before I could chew half of it. With so much (cold) fat in it, I felt rather uncomfortable by the time I got to the last bite. Second, the seared part of the meat, the surfaces, were very flavorful but cooked as a steak, the surface area was limited. I remembered the thin slices--about 1/6" or 1/3 cm thick--of Wagyu in a Korean restaurant in Shanghai and how flavorful and delicious they were, grilled over a fire at our table and served with a flavored salt dip. That was one way to maximize the grilled surfaces of Wagyu, and I wished I had more Wagyu to experiment on.

The next day, I searched for my copy of 'The Man Who Ate Everything' by my food idol, Jerry Steingarten, because I remembered he ate everything and wrote about it. I wish I'd kept the food articles in all those Vogue magazines that I used to buy when Steingarten was the food writer. It wasn't for the silly fashion that I bought Vogue: I would read Steingarten's pages, savoring every sentence, before I looked at other pages.

Steingarten too had no idea what to do with his Wagyu so like me, he also made steaks out of them, and like me, he wasn't sure if that was the best way to eat Wagyu. But his job paid obscenely for him to find that sort of thing out, so he flew to Osaka, Japan to eat the best Wagyu dinner in a restaurant called Devon Steak (I know, ironic).

At Devon Steak, Steingarten ate Wagyu 2 ways: raw slices ("tasted more like tuna than beef") and teppanyakied strips, eaten with dips of soy, garlic, honey, miso and a spicy house dip. Steingarten declared that it was the best beef he had ever eaten.

That confirmed my suspicions, that Wagyu is to be cut into thin strips (but not paper thin unless it's for shabu shabu or sukiyaki, which was how we ate Wagyu in Tokyo and my memories of that meal is that I couldn't taste the beef because it was cut so thin and there was so little to go around...) or even cubes, sauteed on all sides not only to get the meat juice caramelized, as Steingarten put it, but also to sear the wondrous streaks of fat so that the flavor of the buttery fat is released. Cooked as steaks, the fat inside do not get seared which is a pity.

What I will do the next time I get my hands on a slab of Wagyu is to:

1. Have the Wagyu cut into 2" steaks. Thaw the steaks in a cool place for about 2 hours. Surprisingly, very little blood will seep out, maybe because there is more fat and less meat compared to regular beef.

2. Rub salt all over just before cooking, pan-fry them on a very hot griddle/grill plate until they are browned and crisp, turning once only, then slice them into strips or small cubes on the grill plate so that all sides can get seared, then sprinkle some freshly cracked pepper over, and finally douse them with brandy like they did at Devon Steak, count a few seconds for the alcohol to evaporate, then serve immediately. Mmmm. Heaven.

3. The fat can be left on the steak or cut off and sauteed separately. Be brave and taste some if not all, because Wagyu fat is the softest, sweetest fat you'll ever eat. Reminded me of foie gras.


I didn't use butter to fry the Wagyu, so I decided to put a thin pat of butter on the cooked steak, which was totally unnecessary.


Meltingly soft, tender, flavorful and sweet Wagyu.


Coated by a black pepper sauce, this piece of Wagyu was wasted because I couldn't taste the full flavor of the meat with all that cream, pepper, shallots and wine.