today's lunch

Boeuf bourguignon with Spaetzle! Yes!

It all came together nicely and received high praise from the troops.  Below is a shot of the Spaetzle being reheated right before it was served for lunch:

A belated shot of the boeuf bourguignon and Spaetzle in my bowl:

A shot of a sample bowl I'd eaten last night, just to make sure everything tasted the way it was supposed to:

It all tasted awesome, but as I mentioned before, I messed up in the prepping of the Spaetzle, so let me relate what happened.  Essentially, I got hasty and tried to do several things at the same time, which is the royal road to disaster.  I cranked the stove's heat up as high as it would go; I dumped in a bunch of oil in the hopes of deep-frying the first batch of Spaetzle; I piled the pasta into the pan, thinking I could fry up a bunch of the Spaetzle in one fell swoop.  Haste makes waste, as they say:  by using soybean oil to fry the Spaetzle, I imparted a weird taste to that portion of the pasta; by piling the pasta into the pan, I ensured that, instead of frying, the pasta would merely get steamed, thus resulting in softer, gooier mini-dumplings, which was the opposite of the crispy result I was looking for.  And by cranking the temperature up high, I made sure that the bottom layer of Spaetzle got nice and burned, which meant that the Spaetzle above the burned layer didn't cook much at all.

So I started over, throwing out the bad batch and switching to a different pan.  I eschewed the soybean oil in favor of a tiny amount of butter (which the recipe recommended, anyway); I put in only a modest amount of Spaetzle so as not to crowd the pan, and I pan-fried the pasta in small batches on medium-high instead of on high.  This is what I should have done in the first place, and my patience paid off.  Luckily, the recipe's yield was huge, so despite having thrown away maybe a third or a fourth of the pasta, I still had plenty of Spaetzle to take to the office.

By the end of lunch, there was enough beef and pasta to box up and bag up for my American coworker to take home to his wife, the professional chef.  I wonder what the Missus will think of this meeting of mainstream French and German/Alsatian cuisine.  Will be curious to find out her reaction.  Otherwise, my boss and coworkers ate large portions of the meal.  I was the only one to have seconds, but that's partly because my first bowl was rather small in size.  Round Two was a much larger portion.  All in all, another hit.  If I had it all to do over again, I'd alter the Spaetzle recipe to be more flour-heavy and less eggy.  As for the boeuf bourguignon... I was pretty faithful to the recipe from La cuisine française la plus facile du monde, so without bragging, I can say that that part of the meal came out perfectly, with no credit to my cooking skills, and I will continue to use skirt steak—sold my my building's grocery—as the beef of choice for this dish.