Even before Cablevision took away the Food Network from us, we watched a lot of the PBS food shows... Lidia's Italy, Jacques and Julia, Mexico: One Plate at a Time with Rick Bayless. These shows have a great mix of interesting foods and some travel. And of course Jacques and Julia has the great interplay between two great cooks.

On Lidia's Italy last week, she made braised beef with beer and spaetzle. (Here's an article on spaetzle if you don't know what it is). After watching the episode, Kevin and I looked at each other and said "we're making that this weekend." Of course we took our own liberties with the recipe... to be completely honest, we didn't even follow Lidia's recipe, we used her ideas with our own techniques.

Here's the beef at the beginning of its braising...

After more than three hours in the oven, we took the meat out of the pot, blended and strained the juices/sauce. We reduced the sauce for over an hour and shredded the meat back into the pot.

Then it was time to make the spaetzle. I used a recipe that I found online and added in a bunch of chopped up sage. Because we don't have a spaetzle maker, we tried to use our colander. Ultimately it worked, but it was a pain. (I've ordered a spaetzle maker!!)

We briefly boiled the spaetzle and then scooped it into the meat.

The spaetzle sucked up a lot of the liquid and helped thicken everything into a lovely stew. Delicious!!!!!