A dish sure to impress, warm, savory and sweet, all at once.

You need something nice enough to impress guests and delicious enough that they’ll remember it rather than be bored by more ‘traditional’ guest meals. The answer? Go old-school. Grab a hunk of beef and cook it with ginger, cider, and pears to give it a delicious, warm taste that they won’t forget, but that hasn't been done a million times over.

Ingredients:

3 lbs beef chuck roast, trimmed of excess fat

Kosher salt

Fresh ground black pepper

2 Tbsp neutral-tasting oil. Ex vegetable, canola, or grapeseed

5 yellow onions, thickly sliced

1 tsp dried thyme, crushed

2 tsp ground ginger

1 ½ Tbsp all-purpose flour

1 cup sparkling hard cider, pear, or apple (although pear is preferred)

½ cup low-sodium chicken broth

3 ripe (but still firm) Bosc, Bartlett, or Anjou pears

¾ tsp cider vinegar

¼ cup chopped fresh parsley

Tools Needed:

Knife, cutting board, kitchen twine, Dutch oven, large bowl, slotted spoon, paring knife, peeling knife.

Start off by grabbing your pears. You’re going to peel the skin off, core them and then chop them into 1-inch pieces.

Next, grab your beef and set it on a cutting board. Dry it with paper towels and then tie it into a uniform shape with kitchen twine at 2-inch intervals. So your best bet is to start off by wrapping one long strand around the length of the brisket to get the ‘mid line’ and then going at 2-inch intervals up that, so you end up with something similar to a corset around your brisket. Now season liberally with salt and pepper.

Take your Dutch oven over to the stove, put it on medium-high heat, and warm 1 tbsp of your oil until it’s shimmering. Add the beef to the pot and cook until it’s deeply browned on the bottom. This should take 3-4 minutes, so set a timer and walk away. You don’t want to bother the meat during this process so that you get an even crust on that side. When the time is up, and it’s reached a deep brown, turn it and repeat this for the other three sides. Remove the brisket from the pot and set it aside in a bowl.

Keep the pot on medium-high and add the remaining oil, and warm until it’s shimmering. Add your onions and an additional 1 tsp of salt and cook, stirring and scraping the bottom of the pot occasionally until your onions are softening and releasing liquid. (This should be roughly 4 minutes.) Turn the heat down to medium-low and keep cooking for an additional 15 minutes, stirring and scraping the bottom of the pot; turn the heat down as needed so that your onions are simmering and not burning. Seriously, “burn” does not taste good in this recipe. Add the thyme, ginger, and flour and continue to cook, stirring until the onions are sticky and golden, roughly 5 minutes. Add your cider, broth, and ½ tsp salt. Stir and scrape the bottom of the pot to loosen and dissolve any browned bits.

While that’s going, open up your oven, and move a rack to the lower middle, then preheat the oven to 300*F.

Add the beef back into the pot, and make a slight ‘nest’ in the onions for it. The onions and aus-jus in progress should cover ¾ of the meat. Put the lid on the pot, place it into the oven and allow it to cook for 1 hour and 35 minutes. After that, you’ll add in the pears, stirring them very slightly into the onions. Return the pot to the oven and continue to cook covered until the beef is extremely tender. This should be roughly 2 hours and 15 minutes more.

Transfer your beef to a cutting board, and using a large slotted spoon, move the onions and pears onto a serving platter; cover loosely with foil to keep warm.

Pour the liquid from the Dutch oven into a measuring cup and let it rest for 10 minutes, or until all of the fat rises to the surface. Tilt the cup to the side and use a soup spoon to skim off the fat and dispose of it. (Or, if you’re like us, drizzle it over your dog’s food.) Add the vinegar and most of the parsley to the liquid and stir to combine. Taste and adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper if needed.

Finally, cut the twine off of your brisket and cut it against the grain into ½ inch thick slices. Place the meat on the platter with the onions and pears, pour the juices over the meat and serve.

If you’re not sure what to have as a side dish, we’d have to suggest roasted sweet potatoes and a fresh loaf of crusty bread.

Now that you’ve tried it, what do you think? Delicious, right? Let us know over on our Facebook page. We’d love to hear from you.

The Second Best Use for Guinness

So Saint Patrick's Day is over. You're probably pretty tired of corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, and soda bread - and you're likely also tired of seeing recipes containing them.

But you know, there's one Saint Patrick's Day staple no one ever seems to get tired of. Guinness. And if you've already had your fill of Guinness for a while, but still have a couple bottles left in the fridge, there's only one thing left to do with them.

Bake.

That's probably not what you were thinking, but that's okay. We've got you covered.

Double Chocolate Guinness Cupcakes, anyone?

Double Chocolate Guinness Cupcakes in a red liner on a white plate

Ingredients:

1 ~15 ounce box chocolate cake mix (every brand is a little different; just try to stay in the 15 ounce ballpark)

1 4 ounce package chocolate pudding mix

1 11.25 ounce bottle Guinness Stout

3 large eggs

1/2 cup vegetable oil or melted unsalted butter

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Tools:

Mixing bowl, mixer or whisk, measuring cups, sauce pan, spoon, cupcake pan, cupcake liners

Instructions:

Grab a bottle opener and crack open that bottle Guinness. Take a taste. No, seriously, you really should taste it. You do not want to ruin an entire batch of chocolate cupcakes with skunked beer. That's just disappointing.

Pour your Guinness into a sauce pan. We know, it seems like a bunch of extra work and an extra pan to clean. But the result is worth it. Turn the burner on medium-low and let the Guinness simmer. It will smell strongly like a brewery in the kitchen; you might consider opening a window to keep the family from complaining. It will also foam and threaten to make a great big mess, but this is normal. Give it a gentle stir to break up the foam and keep it from boiling over. Allow it to simmer for 20 minutes or so - your goal here is to reduce the Guinness down to about 1 cup. You started with not quite 12 ounces, so you have only a little ways to go here. Don't worry too much about the measurement until you can see a visible difference from your starting point in the pan.

Once you can see a difference between the amount of beer you started with and the amount of (reduced) beer you now have, remove it from the heat and allow it to come back to something around room temperature. Please do not immediately pour boiling hot beer into a measuring cup - it may crack or shatter the cup, and it will likely waste the Guinness. Both of these are terrible things.

While you're waiting for your Guinness to cool back down, start the oven preheating to 350 degrees.

Pour your cake mix and your pudding mix into your mixing bowl. Add in your vanilla extract, oil or melted butter and your eggs. (If you're using butter and you've just melted it, please also allow it to come back up a little closer to room temperature before pouring it in with the eggs. Otherwise the butter will scramble the eggs and you’ll have to start over.) You can give it a little stir at this point, but don't expect it to combine neatly or fully. There isn't near enough liquid, and we've added extra dry ingredients with the pudding mix.

Take your cupcake pan and place a liner in each of the wells. You'll make a little over a dozen large cupcakes with the amount of batter you'll have. We ended up with 14 and a half (because we lost some batter in transfer from the bowl to the pan) generous sized cupcakes - plan on 15 or 16.

By now, your Guinness should be back down to a more workable temperature. Measure out one cup of your reduced beer. If you have extra, that's okay - just set it aside and use it later to braise or baste some meats. If you've reduced it down further than needed and don't quite have a full cup, that's okay too - you can add a little water back.

Add your cup of Guinness to the other cake ingredients and stir well for about two minutes. If you're using an electric mixer, be aware that the batter will climb up the beaters while you mix. It's a very heavy batter for a cake, and it's also rather sticky - both of these are results of adding in that box of pudding mix. If you're worried about the batter hitting the body of the mixer, just pause and scrape it back down once in a while.

Be attentive and be careful not to over mix the batter - if you mix too long, it will go from thick and fluffy to dense and flat and chewy - and no one wants cupcakes that bounce. Mix until everything is combined, but quit when you stop seeing lumps or variations in color.

Transfer your batter from the mixing bowl to your cupcake liners. Again, this is some sticky stuff. You will likely find yourself needing an extra spoon to make it let go of the first one, and you might want to recruit someone else as extra hands if possible. Those cupcake liners, despite the blob of batter that should hold them down, will attempt to follow the spoon at least once. That's how we lost a cupcake worth of batter - the liner decided gravity wasn't going to hold it back, and suddenly the batter was on the counter and not in the cupcake pan. It was a mournful moment for all - especially the family dogs, who usually get the things that escape pans and plates, but were denied this time.

Once you have your cupcakes liners about 2/3rds full, pop them in the oven for 20 minutes or so. Toothpick test after 20 minutes to make sure they're done (sometimes they need an extra minute or two), and assuming they're fully baked, allow them to cool.

The beer flavor doesn't take over the cupcake, so expect a mostly chocolate flavor with some malty tones to back it up. Frost with whatever you'd like (we like just some simple whipped cream on top) and enjoy!

If you do decide to make this, or something similar, let us know over on our Facebook! We’d love to see what you get up to!

And if you’re in Dallas, and any of your appliances are acting a little... tipsy... don't blame the Guinness. Or the fumes. You cooked most of the alcohol out of it. Instead, give us a call - we'll shape them back up for you. You can reach us at our website or via ((214) 599-0055).