Braised Beef Shank served with Linguine

Bonjour.

So lately I've been cooking lots of pasta, but I wanted to stray away from the typical sauce + noodles combination after cooking everything I've made recently. I also cooked a rigatoni all'amatriciana which was pretty good that I'll probably end up making a blog post about next time I make it.

So, last week I was at Fresh Market and any time they have meat on sale I try to get it. Paying full price for their meat is kind of ridiculous. They actually have skirt steak for 12 dollars a pound. Kill me now. So imagine my face when I saw they had beautiful looking beef shank for 5 dollars a pound! With a giant bone filled with delicious bone marrow just waiting to be scooped out! So maybe it's not that amazing of a deal because the bone probably weighs half a pound on its own, but that's flavor man. FLAVOR.

I approached this dish with no recipe, so my measurements might be kinda wonky, but who needs a recipe for cookin a big piece of meat. (that's the fun!!) I decided to serve this dish on pasta because when cream is added to the cooking liquid at the end, it becomes a pretty sick sauce. It makes it nice and thick, so at the end you have a tomato-ey, beef-y, cream-y, delicious-ly easy dinner. Although, mashed potatoes are equally as good, but I just didn't have any potatoes. Heh.

INGREDIENTS LIST:

• one beef shank, preferably one and a half pound or something like that
• two carrots
• two stalks of celery
• an onion
• three cloves of garlic
• beef stock
• red wine
• tomato sauce
• splash of cream

Ok this is going to be a really fast recipe, you can time me if you wish.

1. Preheat your oven to 375
2. Sear the beef on both sides in a well coated pan of olive oil on a higher setting.
3. Turn down the temperature a bit and pour all the vegetables in the pan and cook until they're slightly soft.
4. Make a well in the middle of the pan and place your beef back in there. Add a combination of 1:1:.5 of liquids, so thats about a cup of beef stock, a cup of red wine, and a half cup of tomato sauce.
5. Cook in the oven, covered, until it's fork cuttingly tender. About two hours.

This is a really simple dish and something that's okay to just walk away from for a while. Make a dish like this when you have homework to do or an awesome dog to play with.