boeuf bourguignon: once more unto the breach

I'm serving boeuf bourguignon at my office tomorrow. The boss has very unsubtly rumbled that he expects me to start a-cookin' for the troops again, at least once a month, and while it boosts my ego to hear that someone out there appreciates my cooking, I'm currently dealing with a stress fracture and am not exactly in a financial position to be cooking piles of food for the masses. Granted, "the masses" now consist of only two other people aside from me, and I don't think we'll be so ecumenical as to invite the entire office to partake whenever I cook these meals. That'll save me a ton of money.

All the same, cooking for more than just me is going to put a strain on my bank account: I'm sending home $3100 a month, at a bad won-dollar exchange rate (1205 won to the dollar), which leaves me with only a few hundred bucks in my Korean account to make it through the next thirty days. I'm leaning fairly heavily on my credit card, which I don't want to do, but unless I pick up some extra work, this is how things will be for the next few months. I'm not too worried about piling up a lot of debt on the card; once the main scholastic debt is paid off, paying off the card won't take long at all. In the meantime, I'll see about implementing some cost-cutting strategies to keep the bills from piling up too high.

As for the beef Burgundy... wish me luck. The dish is absurdly easy to prepare—just a teeny bit of prep, then fire and forget—but we're about to find out whether I can prepare it at a consistent level of quality. It came out pretty damn good last time, and I've bought the same cut of meat (skirt steak) this time around, so here goes nuthin'. I have high hopes, assuming (1) the laws of physics remain consistent, and (2) I don't fuck things up too badly.

A reminder of what the BB should look like: