PRIME RIB & JUNIPER BERRIES

I FIRST DID THIS DISH FOR A GOURMET DINNER, but the most memorable time I served it was the Sunday before my son, Brian, joined the Army. Carey, daughter number two, made it home for spring break from law school; and our oldest, Kim, and her husband, Todd, made the drive in from nearby Poetry. It was a bittersweet evening. Our President and his Cabinet were telling the Butcher of Baghdad that they were going to send our sons and daughters over to root him out, and I was sitting across the table from quite possibly one of them.

Actually, I agreed Saddam needed to go and cheered when he did, but on a visceral level I resented the fact that a man who avoided the war I went to (as did his Democrat predecessor) found it so easy to ask our kids to do what he hadn’t.

(An update: As I write this update in October of 2006, I'm proud to say that my son did what his country asked and went to Iraq as a combat medic in the First Cav. Never mind that we should never have asked that of anyone, he came back a decorated hero--two Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and an Army Commendation Medal. As I write this, he's stationed at Fort Gordon, getting ready to undergo surgery to fix his rotator cuff, which was severly damaged by an IED. His old unit is heading back to Iraq later this month. He's not going with them, thank God. And, by the way, Carey is doing us proud as a lawyer and Kim and Todd have given us two grandkids--Riley and Ian. We have a lot to be thankful for.)

But forgive my foray away from food. This is about Prime Rib, one of the best ways to harden your arteries that God put on earth.

This meal was really a family affair. I made the Prime Rib, Brian made his salad dressing; Maureen got the cake from Central Market (one of the seven wonders of the culinary world); and the other three pulled KP afterwards. The dinner took most of the evening and the jokes and stories flowed freely—many of them about my brother-in-law, the children’s only maternal uncle and my wife’s sole sibling, Father Mike.

Stories involving him are legion and invariably funny. Like the time he showed up for dinner at our house with a half-dozen young men, who had just recently fled from South Vietnam, in tow. What was to have been a pot roast dinner, quickly turned into a stew as I tried to sort out buried emotions listening to a familiar, but never understood, foreign babble and watching soldier-aged young men eating my stew. At times I wasn’t sure if I should be reaching for my butter knife or a weapon.

Then there was the time he took the kids on a riverboat outing and his nieces needed to use the restroom. To ensure their safety, he asked all of the women in the restroom to leave, ushered in my daughters, and then barricaded the door with his body. That was also the day that my son continually complained about his feet hurting. Although his uncle dismissed his complaints as whining, one of his sisters finally noticed that her Uncle Mike had put Brian’s shoes on the wrong feet.

And finally, there are the numerous stories about his driving habits. He nearly demolished a rental car on a driving tour of Ireland with his mother and my daughter, Kim. The roads were too narrow he claimed. My daughter said he managed to bounce the car off every wall he encountered.

He broke off the outside mirrors of nearly every car he owned while backing out of the rectory garage. The door was two inches narrower than the standard-sized door he claimed. Then there was the time he ran over his mother’s foot while she was standing at the side of the driveway waiting for him to back out of the too-small garage. When she screamed, he stopped: right on her foot. It took considerably more screaming on her part to get him to move the car forward again.

This is a dish that Father Mike has enjoyed on several occasions.

Prime Rib with Juniper Berries:The Recipe

Serves eight

Ingredients

A four-rib standing rib roast (about 8 pounds) Let stand at room temperature for 2 hours

2-4 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons white peppercorns

2 tablespoons green peppercorns

2 tablespoons juniper berries

2 tablespoons fresh thyme

2 tablespoons flour

3 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons brown sugar

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

1½ teaspoon salt

2/3 cup dry red wine

2 cups beef broth

1½ tablespoons cornstarch

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

1 tablespoon water

First: Preheat the oven to 250°F. Heat the olive oil in the roasting pan on top of the stove until nearly smoking. Pat the beef dry and brown on all sides, about three to five minutes on a side. Remove to a cutting board.

Second: With a sharp carving knife almost completely separate the rib bones from the meat, leaving them barely attached at the bottom and exposing the back side of the meat.

Third: Crush the peppercorns, juniper berries and fresh thyme in a pestle or, better yet, grind them in a coffee grinder. Combine with the flour, butter, Dijon mustard, brown sugar and salt to make a paste.

Fourth: Spread the meat with the paste, making sure the bone-side meat is well covered as well. Tie the rib bones back to the meat and return to the roasting pan, rib sides down.

Fifth: Slip the roast into the oven and let it slowly cook until it reaches an internal temperature of 110°F, approximately 30 minutes per pound.

Sixth: Increase the oven temperature to 500°F and continue cooking until the internal temperature of the meat reaches 135°F, about 30 more minutes.

Seventh: Remove from the oven and let stand for 20 minutes on a cutting board, loosely covered with aluminum foil. The temperature will rise to 140°F.

Eighth: Skim most of the fat from the drippings in the pan. Deglaze the pan with the wine, simmering the wine to reduce it by half. Transfer the liquid to a saucepan or a saucier. Add beef broth and simmer for five minutes.

Ninth: Dissolve the cornstarch in the Worcestershire sauce and water and add to wine/beef broth mixture, whisking to combine. Boil for a minute or two more until thickened. Season with salt and pepper and keep warm on the stove.

And finally: Remove the string from roast. Cut off the rib bones, and carve the meat into ½ inch slabs. Arrange on a warm serving platter. Cut rack into individual ribs and arrange them on the platter for those of us who like to gnaw on the bones (the closer the bone etc.). Garnish with sprigs of fresh thyme.