Braised Beef Ribs with Wine à la awesome

I think I just outdid myself.  Tonight’s meal was a reward for a difficult week.  The butcher twisted my rubber arm into buying some gorgeous beef ribs.  They were cut Flaken-style and were the size of my head so it was pretty hard to resist.

After browning the ribs I sweated off some traditional aromatics (celery, carrots, onion and garlic).  The braising liquid was composed of some beef stock, red wine and a can of diced tomatoes.  I added some paprika, thyme, oregano and bay leaves as well.

After a couple of hours the meat was falling apart so out it came.  I strained out the solids and thickened up the liquid with a splash of balsamic vinegar.  Absolutely incredible.  Unfortunately, in my food lust I neglected to take a picture.  I’m not going to lie, I’ll be thinking about this meal for a long time.

To top it all off, I decided to open up arguably the best bottle of wine I’ve had in years – Dry Creek Vineyards 2000 cabernet sauvignon.  Apparently holding on to a wine for 10 years leads to awesomeness.

Anyhow, another great meal in the bag.  I really do love seasonal cooking.

Thoughts on being an Engaged Citizen

Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to be one of 240 attendees at ChangeCampTO.  The intent of the conference was to bring creative people together to create a grassroots movement to improve citizen engagement.  The event attracted an incredible diversity of people from seemingly all walks of life.

As Mark Kuznicki commented in his opening remarks, the recent explosion of social networking tools and touchpoints is unprecedented.  Our ability to converse and connect with each other has taken a leap not seen since the invention of the printing press.  The collective objective of the people in the conference was to find a way to use these tools to transform civic apathy into action.

The deliverable from the conference was meant to be a “ChangeCamp-in-a-Box” – basically a recipe book that anyone could use to begin the conversations around civic engagement in their community.  The ideas for these recipes were segmented around issues of time and space (same time/same place, different time/same place, etc).

My group was tasked with devising a mechanism for getting people together and engaged in the same time and same place.  Despite the fact that this is the most “traditional” of meeting styles and that a lively discussion ensued we still struggled to decide what our kit would contain.  How do you get people to the meeting?  Do you want to attract everyone or a discrete group?  What do you do with everyone once they’re there?  How do you measure progress?

I’ll save the substance of our idea for another post.  The issue I was left thinking about was that while our idea was interesting I’m not clear on how it can be translated into action.  Am I really going to run around my community engaging my neighbours in a discourse about the upcoming municipal election?  Perhaps I should – but somehow that approach doesn’t sit well with me.  My dislike of “going it alone” is what drove me to go to ChangeCamp in the first place.

So the central issue that ChangeCamp then highlights is: how do you tap into the energy of all the creative people that were assembled and enable them to succeed?  I think it’s unfair to leave the burden of answering this question solely on Kuznicki’s shoulders.  Why should he be responsible for working out the next step?  If we claim to be engaged then that’s how we should act – not simply wait on the sidelines for someone else to have a good idea.  Nevertheless, the challenge remains to maintain and grow some of the cohesiveness that was found at yesterday’s conference.  I, for one, am looking forward to the challenge.