Joshua Kennon » julia child

Beef and Onions Braised in Beer by Julia Child

Joshua Kennon — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 14:35:45 +0000

The Julia Child beef and onions braised in beer recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking turned out very well. It reminds me of something you would serve for guests when you aren't worried about appearing sophisticated or worldly, but rather want something that is intensely satisfying and enjoyable. The recipe serves six people and cost us approximately $40 when you count all of the side dishes and ingredients. That's only $6.67 per person plus the preparation time.

Tonight, we decided to try the recipe immediately following the Julia Child Beef Bourguignon recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking (I wrote about our experience with that recipe a few months ago). The entree is called Carbonnades a la Flamande, which translates into Beef and Onions Braised in Beer. This followed the Chicken Simmered in Cream from yesterday, which has become our favorite Julia Child recipe (I haven’t yet discussed it here but plan to add it sometime in the future). Over the past year, it has become part of our routine to focus on not just being successful in business but living well. Much of the credit goes to Aaron, who I find toying with new ice cream flavors or espresso blends, while I’m reading either annual reports, 10Ks, or books. Of course, the fact that Ashly and Ian made their wonderful eggs benedict with a hollandaise sauce yesterday morning for breakfast means that I’m going to have to get back to the gym sometime soon.

Those who know me realize that I don’t particularly care for alcohol. In fact, I’ve never actually drank beer in my entire life and I can count on one hand the times I’ve had wine with dinner (most of the time when I do order it, the glass stays full next to the plate and is wasted). It’s just not my thing. But I love the flavor when used for cooking. The Julia Child Beef and Onions Braised in Beer was a perfect example of that.

Basically, you take lean beef, which you would often see in a roast, fresh pork fat, sliced onion, salt and pepper, cloves of mashed garlic, some brown sugar, a pilesner beer, and wine vinegar plus a few other small items. The instructions for preparing the recipe are found on page 317 of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (if you have a different edition, again, just look for Carbonnades a la Flamande). Julie recommends serving the dinner with parsley potatoes, buttered noodles, a green salad, and beer.

The one thing that has been made clear in the past year is that Julia Child deserved every bit of her reputation. At this point, every recipe that has her name on it we take in good faith. She was excellent in her field, one of the highest compliments anyone can be paid.

The verdict: I give it a 9.2 out of 10. It’s the type of food that leaves an aftertaste for several minutes, making you want to enjoy more. I can see how one would wake up on a certain day craving it because it is certainly something that is unique in flavor and texture. It also has far fewer calories than some of the other Julia Child recipes we’ve prepared, mostly due to the lack of a lot of butter or heavy cream!

It’s also one of the more affordable recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking. For everything, including the ingredients, side dishes, and beer, the total cost came to roughly $40. The recipe serves approximately six people, making each dinner serving roughly $6.67, a bargain when one considers that the same food at a nicer restaurant would cost anywhere from $20 to $40. It’s certainly not high brow, which impressed me because it showed Mrs. Child’s range and talent.

Eggs Benedict with Hollandaise Sauce for Breakfast

Joshua Kennon — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 01:00:30 +0000

Ashly and Ian made a magnificent Eggs Benedict for breakfast on Saturday, smothered in a Hollandaise sauce. We ate it too quickly to get a picture of our own, so I had to grab another one elsewhere. Their version of the Eggs Benedict looked even better than this and was perfectly proportioned.

During Ashly and Ian’s visit from Ohio this weekend, and as part of our weekend of gourmet dining, they made us eggs benedict with a hollandaise sauce on Saturday morning. The nutritional sacrifice was worth it (health food, this is most certainly not but 1,000 calories was a small price to pay).

The eggs benedict recipe consisted of two English muffins covered with poached eggs, Canadian bacon, and hollandaise sauce. Frankly, I don’t know the details of how they prepared it because I was still sleeping as a result of being up until nearly 6 in the morning reading the SEC filings of Sonic Restaurants (which I wrote about in a new article called Understanding Stock Repurchase Plans at Investing for Beginners at About.com, a division of The New York Times).

I began researching derivations of eggs benedict recipes and hollandaise sauce recipes and came across some interesting ones we will need to try:

Country Benedict: In some areas of the country, this derivation of eggs benedict is known as Eggs Beauregard. Instead of an English muffin with ham and hollandaise sauce, the country benedict has a biscuit, sausage patty, and country gravy (think biscuits and gravy). Instead of using a poached egg, the egg is fried however the customer, or diner, wants it.
Eggs Blackstone: I think you’d have to be in a specific mood for this one. It is prepared like regular eggs benedict but you substitute streaky bacon (the kind that comes from the pork belly and has more fat) for the ham and add a slice of fresh tomato.

Since we’ve made a lot of Julia Child recipes lately, I think maybe I’ll see if she has made any variation of eggs benedict. Given her past track record with the dinners around here, she certainly deserves making a recipe on faith.

Gourmet Chili with Red Wine

Joshua Kennon — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:20:00 +0000

The gourmet chili with red wine recipe cost between $65 and $75 in ingredients alone, but it doesn't need to be that expensive. The red wine added a great flavor and the peppers caused a slow, burning aftertaste that was quite satisfying.

Aaron said he wanted to make chili. I said fine (this went on for a few weeks – he really wanted to try to customize his own gourmet chili recipe). It ended up costing $65 to $70 for the ingredients alone, making me wonder why everything we do tends to be in excess. Now, this is a good trait in some regards (we obsessively built our first online business, which was a great foundation due to the stream of earnings it provided us to invest in other things), and the same goes when we start any project, from launching a new company to buying shares of our favorite businesses. So, the trait has served us well, but sometimes I think we tend to go a bit overboard.

How The Gourmet Chili Tastes

It was the oddest thing, because this particular gourmet chili spread out from the center of your tongue and you could taste it all the way around the edges of your mouth with nothing in the center, then there was a hot, slow burn in aftertaste due to the chili peppers. The red wine added a great flavor. It was unlike any other gourmet chili I’ve had so it’s difficult to describe, but it was certainly well received by most, with a few people calling it “amazing” and “unbelievable”.

The Ingredient List for the Gourmet Chili with Red Wine

Here’s a list of the unrefined ingredients for his gourmet chili recipe (see below). I’ll have to have Aaron provide instructions as to how he actually made it.

2 tbsp butter
1 yellow pepper
1 orange pepper
1/2 jalapeno
5 garlic cloves
1 red onion
4 strips of bacon
4 lbs hamburger
1/2 large can tomato juice
2 cans of diced tomatoes
1 can of red beans
2 cups red wine
chili seasoning
red pepper flakes
salt and pepper
oregano
red curry
tiny bit of cinnamon
tiny bit of ground cloves
ground white pepper
rosemary
mrs. dash – garlic
mrs. dash – onion

Rainbow Pancakes

Joshua Kennon — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:51:12 +0000

I came across these rainbow pancakes when reading the blogs and thought it was a really cool idea. Of course, the fact that it reminds me of either a Christian Bible Camp or a gay pride parade is funny. There's nothing like a little dichotomy with breakfast (although I suppose the dichotomy itself may be a construct of Western Civilization but I've got better things to think about right now - like figuring out whether a 3% expense cap for a fund is too high until we reach $15 million in assets).

I happened to be sitting at the dining room table, a cup of coffee in one hand, writing out plans for potentially launching a mutual fund this year (this time around, it’s a Parker Duofold rollerball in an amber check pattern from the recent shipment of fine writing instruments we received at Kennon Home Accessories and its retail store, Kennon & Company). As I was mulling over some ideas in my head, I happened to be reading the blogs, which is my customary morning routine that began back in the day when I had to consolidate a lot of information to share with my readers at Investing for Beginners at About.com. Somewhere after the op-ed page in The Wall Street Journal and seeing that General Electric was at $16.68 and Berkshire Hathaway Class B at $74.36 per share, I came across a page about a Christian mom that baked rainbow pancakes for her children.

First, this is really cool. The idea of a mom taking the time to do this for her children is awesome. As a grown adult, though, I had to laugh because the first thing I thought when I laid eyes on the rainbow pancakes was one of three things

This is the most Christian breakfast ever, complete with Noah and the Ark action figures, or
Toucan Sam has expanded from Fruit Loops to other breakfast foods. I need to get the Kellogg’s annual report again (last I knew, we owned a few hundred shares in our blue chip reserve portfolio so I could monitor it, along with a few dozen other companies), or
This is the gayest, most rainbow-fabulous breakfast that has ever been created. Like, rainbows and unicorns are going to burst out from the center when you put a fork in the stack of rainbow pancakes, a disco ball will lower from the ceiling, and you’re going to hear Daft Punk’s “One More Time” start blaring at 100 decibels.

This was funnier because Aaron came upstairs to talk to me about something and, upon seeing the rainbow pancakes, said he would have loved to have those as a kids because kids love color. So, in addition to our Julia Child Beef Bourguignon dinners, gourmet red wine chili, and chicken in cream sauce over rice (another Julia Child favorite), I think there’s a real possibility that there will be rainbow pancakes for breakfast one of these days just for the novelty of it. Maybe we can have my niece over because this seems like something Kelsey would want to do.

The original author of the rainbow pancakes is at a blog called i am mommy. She said she used this recipe to bake the rainbow pancakes, just added food coloring. She has a lot more great pictures at her site so if you are interested, head on over there and check it out for more details.

How to Make Money in Fable 2 – Or, How I Made My Fable 2 Character a Millionaire in a Few Days Without Cheating

Joshua Kennon — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 08:01:31 +0000

It’s remarkable that the same concepts that allowed me to be effectively retired by my mid-twenties allows me to frequently become rich in video games. That’s the nature of compounding. It is a law, exactly like gravity.

This weekend, Ashly and Ian drove in from Columbus to visit – they are thinking about relocating to this area next March so that she can work with us on the businesses and he can work as a nuclear engineer at a nearby facility. Right now, she’s a risk mitigation analyst at a well-known bank, so her skills would be a useful addition to the staff.

Anyway, as we were out having Chipotle and Coldstone, we stopped by a nearby video game store and went in just to see if anything was new. I came across a game called Fable 2 and, having seen the preview of the original fable on the XBOX 360 Live service, it interested me. Long story short, I picked up about $100 worth of games and merchandise, figuring I’d get to play them when I had time. Given the fact we’ve quintupled the number of e-commerce sites under our control in the past six months, that seemed like a long, long time away, frankly.

Um. No. As Aaron et. al., made the Julia Child beef bourguignon recipe, Ashly suggested I start playing the game (I’d grown hesitant when I realized it was rated M, which I incorrectly assumed was used only for grotesque violence). None of us had any idea what we were getting into when we turned on the console.

The Premise of Fable 2
The premise of Fable 2 is simple. As in life, every choice you make influences the quality of your soul and the outcome of your journey. Your choices are pretty much like those that every man and woman has when they are born – be good by giving money to orphans, helping those in distress, donating clothes, charging below-market rent to those in poverty, and working to rid the world of evil, or you can be evil by murdering innocent people, having unprotected sex and catching STD’s, terrorizing cities, gambling, stealing, sacrificing people … you name it.

When I say there are practically no limits, I mean it, even in details that are absent in other games such as growing fat if you eat too much food or your character’s sex life (e.g., you can raise a family, go the church (in the game, “The Temple of Light”), and become known as a prude, or you can have homosexual orgies, get drunk, and vomit in the town square after a night of pub games during which you amassed large gambling debts). Before I continue: For those who think games like this are offense, that’s irrational and unjustified. We, as humans, have these same choices in life. It’s called free will. Why is it okay for us to have the God-given right to self-determination in the physical world, but demand punishment for software studios that do the same in virtual ones? It’s a mental malfunction to think like that.

Sometimes You Just Have to Accept Who You Are – And I’m a Capitalist
The first three days I played Fable 2, I did nothing but work in the game, earn money to buy real estate and businesses, and then for the rest of the time, didn’t need to exert any effort because I was able to live off the dividends generated from these assets. It mirrored the precise course of action I followed in my own life beginning with my decision to become an investor when I was ten years old.

Here was my plan for becoming a millionaire without cheating …

Secrets to Making Money in Fable 2

1. When you first begin the game, get a job as a blacksmith.
The blacksmith job is the most difficult way to make money in Fable 2 but when you start out, it is the most readily available. Work your way up to a 5 star Blacksmith until you’ve earned roughly $50,0000 to $60,000. If you’re any good, you can do this in a couple of hours at the most and even then, it shouldn’t be that difficult.

2. Buy a few cheap houses and then the Pants! store
By purchasing a couple of intelligently selected houses and the Pants! store just off the city square, you can earn a base rate of $450 per 5 minutes in real world time. If you do this before you go to bed, you can wake up the next day, go to work, and come home 24 hours later to find that your character has amassed roughly $129,600. As in life, by using your earnings to first buy cash generating assets, you can save decades of work later.

3. Use the earnings to buy the pub, blacksmith shop, and some more houses.
The pub and the blacksmith shop will boost your earning capacity substantially, doubling or tripling the amount of gold you make every 5 minutes of real world time. At this point, you can proceed with the game and use your excess cash to buy additional real estate and businesses as money becomes available. The next store on my list would be the furniture shop so you can buy furniture to improve your rental units, increasing the rent you earn.

4. Viola! By the third of fourth day of playing the game, money will never again be an issue.
By following this recipe for making money in Fable 2, you shouldn’t have to work another day in the game. You can avoid the misery of spending hours upon hours pounding out swords, cutting woods, or pouring drinks. It’s very much like real life. If you spend your teenage years, twenties, and thirties buying up cash generating assets, you don’t need to worry because there’s a constant stream of cash that comes into your life with very little additional effort on your part.

This is no different than me owning stocks in high dividend companies or private businesses such as our e-commerce sites. In the time it took to write this blog entry, my character on Fable 2 made roughly $42,623. As we speak (so to speak), my money is earning dividends and interest, my companies are generating sales throughout the world, and the assets the businesses owns are appreciating. It’s just not that hard.

Maybe I enjoy Fable 2 so much because, like my character, I had to basically start with nothing other than what God gave me in terms of intelligence. I was the first to graduate from college in my family, the first to really own any stocks or other investments, the first to write a book, the first to move away from home (as in, halfway across the continent), the first to … okay, you get the idea. As a result of my past, the idea of anyone starting from scratch and building a fortune resonates powerfully within me.

On Tonight’s Menu: The Julia Child Beef Bourguignon Recipe

Joshua Kennon — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 19:44:29 +0000

Tonight, we will be making the Julia Child beef bourguignon recipe showcased in the film Julia & Julie.

Two of our best friends are visiting from Ohio this weekend and so we decided to try the now-famous Julia Child beef bourguignon recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. After seeing the movie Julie & Julia last Sunday with my mom, everyone thought it would be fun to give it a go.

We found that the Julia Child beef bourguignon recipe was being given away for free by the publisher of her magnum opus, so I thought I’d share them with you here. It sounds magnificent and, given that I’ve been away from New York for so long, I’m hoping it really does live up to expectations. (Although the Midwest is close to my heart, it lacks the culinary indulgences of the east and west coasts.)

This is going to be a welcome distraction from all of the site launches, the books, and the general business of growing a company from a start-up to empire. My parents are going to stop by later tonight to partake in the gastronomical experiment. If it’s as good as we think it will be, I’m going to rush out and buy a copy of the book. Giving this recipe away was a brilliant move by Knopf, the publishing house.

Click Here to Download the Julia Child Beef Bourguignon Recipe

*Please note that the publisher of Mastering the Art of French Cooking included two auxiliary recipes called for in the beef bourguignon recipe. These are the sauteed mushrooms and brown-braised onions, both of which they have included in the PDF download. Show your appreciation to them by purchasing a copy of Mrs. Child’s cookbook!

I’ll update this post later and let you all know how it went. My expectations are high. In the meantime, as dinner is prepared, I’ve got work to do.

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Update: We had the beef bourguignon with boiled, buttered red potatoes and green peas with iced tea and it was awesome. That woman knew exactly what she was doing. It really is a great accomplishment. We are going to figure out how to try several of the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I’ve already got a pretty good idea of what the next installment of dinner at Kennon Hall will be.