Veal with Herbes de Provence

As my four daughters were growing up, we started a tradition of each girl choosing the menu for the sabbath closest to her birthday. Gradually this expanded into choosing the menu for other sabbaths coinciding with their return from summer camp or the last sabbath before leaving for college, etc. The most frequent request for a main dish was this veal stew. It's simple to prepare, but demands high quality veal. Serve with challah, broccoli and rice and finish the meal with banana chocolate-chip cake, and you'll have a birthday shabbat at your house.

Ingredients:

Roll veal in a mixture of flour and paprika. Heat olive oil in a large pot, brown veal in small enough batches so that the meat is uniformly browned, not burnt, and not crowded. Remove veal, brown garlic. Add wine and scrape the brown bits from the bottom of the pot, stir, and cook on high until a uniform sauce forms. Turn down to a low simmer, add the veal back to the pot. Sprinkle the veal with all the spices, using fresh herbs and pepper and salt to your own taste. Bake at 300° F. for 2 1/2 hours, or until the veal is quite tender. Serve with a side dish such as broccoli and rice, broccoli and wild rice, rice and wild rice, or potato kugel. You can add mushrooms, but sauté the mushrooms separately, and do not dilute the sauce with excess moisture from the mushrooms.

My daughter, Leah, and her husband, Ben, prepare this recipe with cubes of skinless, boneless chicken breasts. It is also delicious.

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