Skiing; Mom, 51; Beef Bourguignon

When the conditions are right, is there anything better than snow skiing? What a luxurious sport—I mean, you’re whisked up—gestured, really—the mountain on the chairlift, and the only effort exerted there is that of poling yourself forward through the line, and then you get to just coast your way downhill in whichever fashion suits you best—fast, slow, loopey-doopey, whatever. I was just in Lake Tahoe for a couple days and I honestly don’t think it could have been better. The first day was cold but with lots of fresh snow, and the second day was cloudless, sunny, and 50 degrees—I have raccoon-eyes to show for it. And the actual skiing… Oh, man, my brother and I got most of an afternoon to hop around and we totally resorted to teenaged versions of ourselves. Not even stopping to prepare, just taking off from the top of the lift and making a beeline down the hill with our poles tucked into our armpits. At one point I wish I could have viewed it aerially. There was a group of five or six beginning skiers led by a beefy Australian guy who yelled “Turn!” every three seconds; they were slowly plowing themselves to the bottom, using the whole width, snaking down the run like something in a Chinese New Year Parade, but very focused-like. With my brother in the lead (he weighs 50 pounds more than me, he always wins the race) it was only a matter of the opportunity presenting itself: the unsuspecting skiers had to be aligned just so, with a gap opening up at the curve in the line, where the midpoint was on the outer edge of the run, and the people in front and behind leaving room for a lightening bolt in a red North Face jacket to come burning through, followed a few seconds later by me.

And Lake Tahoe is such an amazing place. You get to the top of the mountain and can see on one side the lake, where the elevation at the surface is over 6,000 feet, and then to the other side the patchwork farmland of Nevada and Carson City, where the elevation is 4,600. It really throws your balance off, because the lake side looks so much higher than the other. Here’s a shot of the lake from the gondola:

My Mom was a great skier. Not the graceful, deft skier that you might watch rapturously from the lift, though she did do it beautifully. She was more the kind that could get down any kind of run with integrity. I am not like this. I am the start-stop, plow-through-the-rough, slide-perpendicularly-down-the-steep-stuff type of skier (though on the broad, flat-ish blue-square runs I think I’m usually better looking than most; I like the big, easy strokes and this is—in life, even—where I really excel). Mom could get through anything with just enough grace and calm to make you wonder for a second if she had been a pro when she was younger.

Today, March 8, would have been her fifty-first birthday. One of my favorite things to think about when I think about her now, now that I’m finally able to remember her not as she was for the last few months before she died—which was miniature, frail, bald, pale, nauseous, tired all the time, not at all herself—is what I’ll call here her “asshole face.” It sounds terrible in this context, I know, but you have to believe me: it was the funniest thing. She reserved this face mostly for when she was imitating some cocky, stupid asshole. She would stretch out her lips downward to make her chin all pock-marked, scrunch up her eyebrows into an upside-down “V,” bulge out her eyeballs, flare her nostrils so that my thumbs could fit inside them, and then say some drawn-out syllable like “DRRRRRR” or “GUHHHH." Oh god, it seriously was the greatest thing. I'm not doing it justice. She knew that it had currency with my brother and me. Sometimes, when we used to play tennis or ski or even go bowling—she was very competitive, and didn’t grapple in the slightest with beating either of her teenaged sons at whatever sport we were trying to get good at—she would make this face just as she was going in for the kill. Say, she’d go racing past us with her poles tucked up in her armpits, skiing really, really fast and I would turn towards her while she was passing me, and she would turn back in response, and in that split second she would make the asshole face. It was almost crippling because it broke my concentration so badly, I would have tears streaming down my face, sometimes I’d pee my snow-pants, and then she’d go on, gracefully, of course, to win whatever the race happened to be that day.

And fifty-one years old. God. What is there to say? I still miss her so much, which seems like such an obvious form of self-torture when I say it out loud . . . Words fail here. It seems more shocking this year than last, and last year would have been her fiftieth, which was really something to consider. Death has this uncanny way of throwing obvious things in stark relief all the sudden. Like the fact that my mom won’t ever know me as any older than twenty-three, and that I’ll never know her as any older than forty-seven—she’ll be forever immortalized in my memory as a middle-aged woman. Also: nothing is ever the same, and yet nothing changes. People say this kind of thing all the time, but every once in a while the saying creeps up on me and has a sobering effect. Would I be in a different place right now were my mom still around? Who knows. I know my Dad better, and my brother better, and I am more nostalgic about my extended family than I probably would have been otherwise (more nostalgic, and yet this nostalgia provides no impetus for me to get to know them any better), and maybe my having been thrust into adulthood was in the end a good thing. And yet I am still stealth in my ways; that probably wouldn't have changed. Were my mom still around, I would still be the same kind of stranger to her that I always was.

Anyway, to commemorate her birthday, over the past four years I had initiated a tradition of preparing one of her signature dishes, beef bourguignon, for a group of friends. (Spoiler alert: I am not a vegetarian, but this is the topic of another blog post.) I had the mom birthday party for the first two years after she died and I enjoyed it very much. I took the day off from work and spent it shopping and cooking, which are the types of activities that make me very happy and relaxed, keep me occupied, and most importantly on this day, result in a whole night surrounded by my closest friends. Then two years ago my Dad invited me out to Reno/Tahoe, where my brother lives, to go skiing with him and my brother and my sister-in-law. I offered to make the beef bourguignon. Then it happened again this year—we went skiing, and on the night of mom’s birthday, I made the beef bourguignon. Now it looks Dad has hijacked my tradition. I won’t complain.

So yes, I made the beef bourguignon tonight. It’s a tedious, but not difficult dish, and it’s not really my Mom’s recipe—she got it from her friend, the famed Idaho chef Suzie Pearson. But because I feel we’d made enough slight modifications over the years—and also because the occasion calls for it—for the purposes of this blog the beef belongs to her.

A few caveats: this is fatty, though I’ve cut back on much of the butter and oil from the original recipe, and what’s below is the real deal. As an attempt to “authenticate” this recipe, I have made my own beef stock, my own consommé, even tried to weasel my way out of the bouillon cubes. It’s simply not as good. So if you’re going to go to the trouble of making this, I suggest you just follow the recipe.

Pam’s Beef Bourguignon

4-pound chuck roast, trimmed of as much fat as possible and cut into 1-inch cubes
1/4-cup vegetable oil
1/2-cup butter, separated
4 carrots, roughly chopped
4 celery stalks, roughly chopped
1 large or 1-1/2 medium onion, roughly chopped
1/3-cup flour
3 large garlic cloves
2 bouillon cubes*
3 heaping tablespoons dried parsley
2 bay leaves
2 cups burgundy**, separated
1 can beef consommé
1 can beef broth (15-oz)
1 heaping tablespoon ground black pepper
1 pound white button mushrooms, stems trimmed, and left whole
1 bag frozen pearl onions (Birdseye brand), defrosted and drained of excess liquid
1 tablespoon sugar

* I find these things morally reprehensible, too, but in this recipe, there really is no way around them. I have tried.
** The original recipe calls for Gallo hearty red burgundy, which is nothing you would actually want to drink. So, per the cooking advice my own mother has given me—one wants to cook with something that one can drink at the same time—I use a French pinot noir instead, which is a really good, cost-effective step up.

1. Using copious amounts of paper towels, squeeze as much liquid as possible from every single goddamn cube of beef. This is the most tedious thing you will have to do, so you might as well put on some good music and fantasize about your career as a covers singer.
2. Melt the vegetable and 1/4 cup butter in a large Dutch oven (a really big one) until the foaming subsides, and then brown the beef in batches. Place it on paper towel lined plates to drain of excess oil.
3. Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
4. While browning the meat, combine the carrots, celery, and onion in food processor and puree. (The celery is my addition, and my mom used to just dice the onion and then run the carrots through the grater of the food processor. Then I showed her how I could brunoise once I started working at the restaurant, which made a lovely looking stew. I think, though, that the flavor is best when it’s blitzed to a grainy paste, and that’s what we’re doing here. It’s also really easy.)
5. Add the carrot mixture to the Dutch oven and cook for five minutes or so, until it begins to reduce. Then add the flour, and cook for five to seven minutes more, until further reduced.
6. While the carrot mixture is cooking, combine the garlic, bouillon, bay leaves, 1 cup of the wine, consommé, beef broth, and black pepper in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, and then simmer.
7. When the carrot mixture is ready, add 1 cup of the burgundy and cook until the wine is reduced by half. Then tip the meat back into the Dutch oven, stirring to combine, and then the wine mixture. Bring to a boil, and then cover and move to the preheated oven. Cook for two hours.
8. When the beef comes out of the oven, heat 1/4 cup butter in a large frying pan and sauté the whole mushrooms until browned all over, about ten to fifteen minutes. Then add them to the beef mixture. In the same pan, caramelize the pearl onions with the sugar, another ten to fifteen minutes, and add them to the beef. Serve this dish hot, with buttery mashed potatoes.