What’s the beef? Bring home the beef?

I am horrible with idioms.  Somehow I managed to be born in Massachusetts, attend college in Connecticut and spend the past four years in New York City without gaining the slightest knowledge of expressions.  My English department co-workers mock me ceaselessly and my English-Language-Learning students show off by correcting me.

Idiom learned today: What’s YOUR beef?  — This is something you might say to someone who is starting an argument for an unknown reason.  Got it.

The other thing I am learning today is how to COOK beef.  This is my first attempt.

I enjoy cooking meat for Zach because he is a responsive audience and I am a compliment whore.  Well, not only that.  More to the point, I have been trying to cook as many new recipes as often as possible and having been a vegetarian for twelve years means that almost every recipe in the world of meat, poultry and fish is new to me.

We have a date planned tomorrow night and since I am at home this summer, I figured why not pick a challenge, take it slow and do it up right.  In my brainstorming I came across Silvana Danielo and Maria Ida Simone’s recipe for a beef stew and knew I had found my angle.

I excitedly mentioned my plan to some of my friends.  The vegetarians are generally nonplussed by my meat-cooking habits and my meat-eating friends were nonplussed by my choice of Beef Stew in the summer.  It doesn’t make any sense, but I wanted to feed Zach something hearty.

Back to the stew. I have tweaked Danielo and Simone’s recipe by cutting out the cloves, instead throwing in whole cloves of garlic, adding far more than the recommended amount of sage and a little extra wine. They say it tastes best on day two or three.  So, here I am, cooking it today for our date tomorrow night.

Our apartment smells delicious.  Does that make me a bad vegetarian?

I’ll report back on the results.

P.s. Zach makes the world’s best vegetarian tacos.  More on that later.