"Roasting"

It's not been an easy last couple of days.  Katherine and I had been planning for a while to go designer clothes-and-bags shopping at the Mall at Short Hills. Evelyn had other ideas, keeping us awake late into the night, and making it impossible for us to get up early enough to make the trip worthwhile. So it was time to cheer ourselves up with some more gourmet cooking.

As Katherine said in her last post, our next cookbook is called All About Roasting: A New Approach to a Classic Art (a gift from Jimmy and Sidny): 

We have already had a couple of successes with this book (which, face it, is pretty much guaranteed to be a winner given its topic).  Most notably, there is this recipe for Chicken pieces smeared all over (including under the skin) with dijon mustard, then marinated for a while, and finally roasted with wine and cream.  It's absolutely delicious, and looks pretty good too:

The rules of the game dictate that we can't do that recipe from the book tonight, since all the recipes we try have to be new ones.

So instead, we chose to do 'One-Hour Rosemary Rib Roast'.  OK, I chose it.  Katherine wanted a lean, thinly sliced beef roast; I wanted a fatty, thick cut one.  I won that one!  I bought the standing rib roast from the local Amish Market on Friday, and prepared it by cutting away the bones, and then tying them back on with a layer of rosemary above and below the meat (and seasoning heavily).
The roast then sits in the fridge overnight.  OK, in the interests of honesty, I admit that this photo was taken today; I had to retie it after realising I had tied the bones back on the wrong way round:

The roast went in the oven on Saturday at about 8.45 p.m. (after another difficult day with the little one, necessitating yet another late dinner).  Almost immediately, you could smell the fragrant rosemary singeing (singing?).  In the meantime, I worked on coriander-garlic fried potatoes (from this book, which will feature in a later post when we get around to it), and a beef stock from this book (as usual with TK, very complicated).  The potatoes are to go with the roast; the stock is for who-knows-what.  We'll keep you posted.

The thing that worried me most about the roast was the fact that we don't have an instant-read thermometer, only one which you plunge in and then wait for its needle to move slowly to its resting point.  I mean, the one we use for Evelyn is better (but for obvious reasons, I'm not going to use that!).  So I checked after one hour, and it looked like this (and the thermometer showed a promising 120º).
It was time to leave it to rest.  And time to fry up the potatoes: 

This is how it looked, plated up:

That was my plate (the outside pieces were medium rare, as Katherine likes; these were nice and rare, as I like).  Katherine made one of her famous salads to accompany the dish.

All in all, another winner.  Although the truth is that the potatoes were as good as the meat, and played just as large a role in making the meal good.  The Chateau Liversan 2006 played a part too...