From time to time, I’ll watch Food Network. Usually, I watch Giada or Ina — sometimes Chopped (usually, while I’m blogging) but rarely anything else.  Sunday morning we watched $10 Dinners.  I find the host to be quite grating – but Sunday’s episode had several recipes that sounded quite lovely.  The episode was called Winter in Provance and had two recipes: Daube a la Provencale and an Orange Olive Oil Cake.  We decided to make this for our Sunday dinner.  I made the entree and MS made the dessert.

I followed this super easy recipe — except for letting it marinate for 6 hours. That’s just crap.  I started cooking this thing at 13h00 and wouldn’t have had enough time to marinate it more than just 2 hours (assuming I wanted to eat dinner on Sunday night).  The final product was so good – and will definitely make it into my recipe box.  The meat was so tender and flavorful.

I also ran out of red wine vinegar, so I just added some extra red wine and tossed in 3 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar.  It seemed to work well.  This beef dish is not like a traditional stew — it doesn’t have a thick base, but a watery broth base.  The addition of macaroni works surprisingly well.  I thought about swapping out the noodles for potatoes (boiled or mashed), but I was afraid this would make it too much like a standard/traditional stew. I’m happy I followed the recipe.

We did dramatically (from a flavor standpoint) change the dessert recipe.  Since we were in Palm Springs just a couple weeks ago and harvested a couple dozen lemons, we decided to change the orange component to lemons.  It worked marvelously.

This is the first recipe I’ve made from $10 Dinners.  I haven’t done any research on this show, nor have I ever watched a full episode (I didn’t even watch the full version of this episode).  But I do have one question – how the hell can this woman make these meals for less than $10?  I had most of the items (except the wine or the meat) and it still cost me more than $10.  The meat alone was $10.68.  Where is this woman chopping: Kansas? Is she slaughtering the cow herself?  I don’t get it.  It reminds me of Rachel Ray’s 30 Minute Meals — no way in hell those meals take 30 minutes.  I stopped watching Rachel about 6 years ago because she just annoyed me so much.

Do you watch $10 Meals?  Can you pull these meals together for less than $10?  What about that Rachel Ray — can you do her meals in 30 Minutes?  Don’t you just love a great stew on a cold winter day?  What is your favorite cold weather recipe – something that cooks all day and fills the house with heat and amazing smells?  Share your favorite recipe with us all.