Steak and Potatoes, Deified

Yeah, you read that title right. The writers of the amazing cookbook The Best Recipe have managed to do to steak what some cultures do to rocks or Megan Fox: turn them into something you would happily worship.
On Saturday I made beef bourguignonne. I'm purposely not writing "boeuf" because this recipe wasn't the classic French recipe, or Julia Child's recipe. It was a riff on those that, as far as I can tell, reduces the stew to those ingredients which are essential for it to be called "bourguignonne." These ingredients are bacon, steak, onions, mushrooms and red wine. And, well, wow.
The reason this became a famous combination of flavors is because it makes you weak in the knees when you taste it. Seriously. It is a truly, truly fantastic dish. Be warned: it is very labor intensive, and requires at least two loads of dishes plus lots of hand washed pots and pans, but it is so, so worth it.
The recipe starts pretty much like any other stew recipe, with the exception of crisping the sliced bacon before the beef and aromatics. You then pour off and save most of the bacon grease to saute everything else in...I know.
So when the bacon is done, you have to brown the meat, and I will say this: Julia Child is absolutely right about drying the meat. I still don't have a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but that particular gem was tossed into the movie Julie and Julia, and it is really true. Every time I have cooked a stew, I have always assumed that "brown" meant "to cook it so it's gray on the outside and not pink." WRONG. The gray color comes from the liquid being exuded by the meat, and also from the pieces of meat being crammed right next to each other. You really do have to dry each piece of meat thoroughly and brown them in very small batches. This time, about one third of my stew meat was lovely and browned before I lost my patience and threw the rest of the undried meat into the pan at once. At least it was a lesson learned, right?
Then you remove the meat and saute the onions, then the garlic, and toss in a few tablespoons of flour until it is all a light tan color. At this point, you add the liquid. This recipe calls for a combination of red wine and chicken broth, and they explain that the beef broth sold commercially is both foul and will completely ruin a good stew. I picked a fairly decent full-bodied Argentina blend to use. I really wanted the earthy, chocolate flavors that come through in Argentina wine, but I didn't want a wine with lots of jam, so I got a blend instead of a straight Malbec.
You then add the meat, bring it all back to a boil and stick it in the oven for a few hours, and while that's simmering you brown the mushrooms and pearl onions in the rest of the bacon grease to be put in during the last half-hour of cooking.
So at this point I turned my attention to the potatoes. The potatoes were deified not by a cookbook, but by my mother.
For my mother, there is no middle ground in the kitchen. What she does well, she does really, really, wickedly well, and mashed potatoes top this list (well, right next to her incredible brownies.) It's actually pretty simple, and it's all in the butter and the sour cream. Seriously. I boiled eight medium-sized potatoes until they were falling apart, drained them and threw them on top of a stick and a half of butter, then scooped in about ten ounces of sour cream (the full-fat kind, folks. There's no room for compromise here.) I whipped the whole thing with an electric mixer, added a bit of half and half and a whole lot of salt and pepper, and had the most incredible mashed potatoes ever made (except the ones my mother makes.)
The best thing about these potatoes was how perfectly they went with the stew. The stew was seriously moan-worthy, with the most incredibly deep, rich sauce, meltingly tender meat, slightly chewy and flavorful mushrooms, and those all-important pearl onions that provide a crisp bite to foil all the richness. The potatoes, on the other hand, were light, airy, rich and smooth, giving the stew a creaminess and picking up on all the flavors of the stew without losing the textural contrast. But you have to serve the stew over the potatoes, otherwise you just don't get the incredibly matched textures.
At some point, I will try Julia Child's boeuf bourguignonne, but I'm pretty happy with this one for now.