I took a long break from blogging after finishing my Food & Fascism series. We started making our Epcot 2025 Food & Wine Festival choices right away, though, so I’m really behind. So far, my favorites were the Beef Bourguignon and the Flautas de Barbacoa.
This series is called Food Therapy because I’m not sure I want to get into the fascism that has taken over my country very much. Let me just say that despite the Trump Regime, I had a joyful holiday season. I filled my social media timelines with antifa content, hopefully driving away any remaining rats that might still be hiding there. And I am ready to protest and fight where I can.
In the meantime, I’m enjoying calming myself with food. And one of the most calming, healing, and satisfying meals we made was the Beef Bourguignon.
Here is the official picture from Epcot 2025:
Now, have a look at our Beef Bourguignon:
That’s right. Ours was way better! We used this recipe from delish and I have to say, I thought this dish was going to be really complicated and difficult, but it wasn’t! It was just beef stew on top of mashed potatoes. But really, really good beef stew. The best I’ve ever had beef stew! One of the things that made it so good was the cremini mushrooms and pearl onions. You sauté them in butter and put them on top of your plated stew. Soooo good. For leftovers, we just threw them in with the rest and it didn’t take anything away from seconds at all.
For some reason the delish recipe is now behind a paywall. No worries. From what I could tell, it’s the same recipe that Julia Child has in her Mastering the Art of French Cooking. You can find it here. (This recipe just says “white” mushrooms. Go for the creminis!)
It’s just fabulous. You should totally make it.
And our second favorite so far was the Flautas de Barbacoa from the Mexico booth. Here’s a picture of the one at Epcot:
It looks weird, if you ask me. All of the recipes we could find say that flautas are tubes. They should be rolled up. So that’s what we did. This also looks kind of like a flour tortilla, so that’s what we used because we couldn’t readily find corn, though they’re traditionally done with corn tortillas. We managed to find some really good salsa verde, the crumbly queso fresco, and Mexican crema at Publix. We did not use a radish.
We used this recipe from the Homesick Texan for the meat, but added the toppings based on the Epcot description. And we watched some YouTube videos on rolling and frying. Here’s what we got:
We made the first four as described by Epcot, with just meat in the tortilla. But in the rest, we added cheddar cheese to the inside. Honestly, I couldn’t tell the difference! These were really good. They were a lot of work, though, so I’m not sure I’d make them again.
Well, that’s all for now. Find some cat videos, or better yet, go to the store and get the ingredients to make something fantastic. Try to sample the news responsibly. I fear it’s going to get much worse before anything gets better.