Cookbook Challenge: Week 37, Hearty

Recipe: Beef Provencale
From: Darina Allen's Ballymaloe Cookery Course

The theme for this week's Cookbook Challenge is hearty, and to paraphrase Ange: almost everything I'm cooking at the moment could be classified as hearty. It's this damned weather - why oh why when Alastair and I left Wellington didn't we move to a tropical country? Or Queensland? (Oh yeah, because it's Queensland.)

For the theme this week I made beef provencale - well sort of. Normally when I make a beef stew I don't follow a recipe. I just throw in whatever vegetables I have (normally carrots and celery) along with copious amounts of onion and garlic, plus whatever spices and seasoning I feel like.



For this beef provencale I read the recipe, and then.... well let's just say I used it for inspiration purposes only. Marinating the meat? Didn't do that. Followed the instructions for cooking? Didn't do that. Used the same ingredients? Yep, didn't do that either.

Anyway, it's a beef stew. As long as it's cooked low and slow, it all turns out edible and delicious. I did add the anchovies, capers and vinegar near the end of the cooking, which gave it an interesting salty, sour element. And I made a large pot of garlic mashed potatoes to eat with the stew - definite hearty winter fare.

See previous Cookbook Challenge posts here.



Beef Provencale

From: Darina Allen's Ballymaloe Cookery Course

Serves 8

1.3kg lean stewing beef (I used gravy beef)

Marinade
2 tablespoons olive oil
300ml dry white or red wine
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1/2 teaspoon thyme, sage or annual marjoram
1 bay leaf
2 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
110g carrots, peeled thinly sliced
110g onions, peeled thinly sliced
Two sticks of celery, thinly sliced

450g bacon, cut into 1cm lardons
1 x 400g tin tomatoes, chopped
150ml homemade stock (I only had chicken, though the book says beef)
175g sliced mushrooms
10 anchovy fillets
2 tablespoons capers
3 tablespoons white or red wine vinegar
2 tablespoons freshly chopped flat leaf parsley
2 cloves garlic, mashed

Cut the beef into chunks about 3-4cm. Mix the marinade ingredients together and add the meat. Cover and place in the fridge overnight.

When ready to cook, remove the meat to a plate. Reserve the vegetables and the marinade.

Heat some oil in a frying pan and cook the bacon until crispy. Remove and then brown the marinated meat in batches.

In a large pot or casserole, add the fried bacon, browned meat, tinned tomatoes, reserved marinated liquid and vegetables, and stock. Bring to the boil and lower the heat to a simmer. Allow the meat to simmer on a gentle heat until the meat is tender - about 1.5-2 hours.

When the meat is tender, liquidise the anchovies, capers, parsley, wine vinegar and garlic. Add to the casserole with the sliced mushrooms. Simmer gently for about 10 minutes. Taste and add more salt and pepper if necessary. If necessary, thicken the sauce by whisking in a little roux (cornflour mixed into water).

Sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve with mashed potatoes.

Cheese party and Rogan Josh

Alastair and I are going on holiday soon (Tuesday in fact). We're going away for almost four weeks, so last weekend I organised a catch up dinner with Dany, Ben and Lisa.

Randomly, Lisa and I have a couple of running jokes relating to cheese. One is about a travelling cheese salesman, and another one is about a cheese party. When I sent Lisa an email about dinner, she asked whether it was going to be the fabled cheese party.

Yes it will be a cheese party, I told her, but only if you bring the cheese. And I made sure to tell her that one cheese does not make a cheese party. Neither does two cheeses. In fact, for a cheese party, you need at least FIVE cheeses.

Lo and behold........ I don't know why I was surprised when Benisa arrived on Saturday bearing five cheeses!



And not only were there five labelled cheeses (what's a party without a name tag?), check out the flags Lisa made - the cheeses are partying! Have you ever seen anything like it?



For dinner, we veered away from the cheese party as I had prepared an Indian feast. I made a rogan josh, chicken saag, daal, (store bought) roti and basmati rice. I was pretty pleased with how things turned out, particularly the rogan josh, which was the star.

The recipe for the rogan josh I copied out of a cookbook a long time ago and I neglected to note down the source. I think it may have been a Madhur Jaffrey cookbook - I will have to try and find it so I can try the other recipes in the book. On first read the recipe seems like a lot of fuss with lots of ingredients. Once you get started though, you'll find that it's not so bad, and is well worth the effort. With all the yoghurt, the end result is a pretty mild curry which is aromatic and flavoursome. I have made it before, and will definitely make it again!

Oh! Our holiday! We are off to Japan and Hong Kong - in Japan for almost 3 weeks and HK for 5 days on the way back. Ooooooh the excitement!



Rogan Josh

Adapted from....?

2 x 2.5cm chunks of fresh ginger, peeled and coarsely chopped
8 cloves garlic, peeled
4 tablespoons water plus 300ml water
10 tablespoons vegetable oil
900g boned lamb or beef
10 cardamon pods
2 bay leaves
6 cloves
10 peppercorns
2.5cm cinnamon stick
200g onions, peeled and finely chopped
1 teaspoon ground coriander
2 teaspoons ground cumin
4 teaspoons paprika
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 & 1/2 teaspoons salt
6 tablespoons natural yoghurt
1/2 teaspoon garam masala
Black pepper

Put the ginger, garlic and 4 tablespoons of water into a blender and blend into a smooth paste.

Heat the oil in a wide, heavy pot over medium-high heat. Brown the meat in several batches and set aside. Into the same hot oil, place the cardamom, bay leaves, cloves, peppercorns, and cinnamon. Stir it once and wait a few seconds for the cloves to swell and for the bay leaves to colour. Add the onions and fry for five minutes, or until the onions are medium-brown.

Add the ginger-garlic paste and cook for 30 seconds. Add the coriander, cumin, paprika, cayenne, and the salt, and fry for another 30 seconds.

Add the browned meat and any meat juices to the pot. Add 1 tablespoon of the yogurt and stir and fry for about 30 seconds until the yogurt is well blended. Add the remaining yogurt, a tablespoon at a time, in the same way. Cook for another 3-4 minutes.

Add the water and scrap down the sides and bottom of the pot. Increase the heat to high, and bring the contents of the pot to a boil. Cover the pot, turn the heat to low, and simmer for about an hour or until the meat is tender. Stir the pot occasionally.

When the meat is tender, remove the lid, increase the heat and boil off some of the liquid, stirring all the time, until the sauce is thickened (I skipped this step - mine had lots of gravy!)

Mix in the garam masala and black pepper just before serving.

Beef and roasted tomatoes in cucumber cups

These cucumber cups were another item that I took along to orphan's Christmas. It was good to have a slightly healthier item to the other things on offer.

I did feel a bit guilty at the wastage of the cucumber that was scooped out of the cups. It would have been good to have utilised the cucumber flesh in a salad. Alas, salad was not on our Christmas menu.

By the way, happy new year! I hope that you ushered in 2008 with good food and drink, but more importantly, with good company.



Beef and roasted tomatoes in cucumber cups

Inspired by a recipe for Thai beef salad in cucumber cups, seen in Kitchen Classics: Picnic hamper

Makes about 20

Marinade
2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
1 tablespoon hoisin sauce
1/4 cup soy sauce

Roasted tomatoes
250g punnet of cherry tomatoes, quartered
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
Sesame oil
Mirin

250g beef eye fillet
4 Lebanese cucumbers

Combine the marinade ingredients in a bowl. Put the beef eye fillet in a non-metallic bowl, pour in the marinade and refrigerate for 2 hours, or overnight. Allow the meat to return to room temperature before cooking.

Preheat the oven to 160 degree C. Place the tomato quarters in a baking dish and sprinkle with the sugar and salt. Bake for 40 minutes, or unitl the tomatoes begin to blacken at the edges and dry out. Remove from the heat and allow to cool. Place the roated tomatoes into a bowl, add a few drops of sesame oil and a dash of mirin and mix to combine.

Heat some oil in a frying pan over high heat and cook to your liking. Set aside to cool, then slice thinly.

Cut off the ends of the cucumbers and cut into 3cm thick slices (for decorative purposes you could peel strips of skin off the cucumber before cutting into slices). Using a melon baller, scoop out the flesh from each slice to make a "cup" about 1 cm thick.

Fill each cup with some beef and top with roasted tomatoes.

Steak!

I read a blog yesterday that had a tip on how to turn a cheap cut of steak into a more tender steak - see Jaden's Steamy Kitchen here.

If you can't be bothered going to the link, I'll paraphrase. The idea is that you take a thick piece of steak, coat it very liberally with salt, and then leave it for 15 minutes to an 1 hour. After the time has passed, rinse off all the salt, pat the meat dry, and then grill/fry as per normal.

And the science behind it: initially the salt draws out moisture from the meat. But after sitting for a while, some of the salty water gets sucked back into the meat, and that salt does something to the proteins that makes it more tender. Hello, tender steak!

Sounds too good to be true? I think an experiment is in order!

Today at the market, I bought some pieces of cheap rump steak. I salted two pieces as per the instructions on Steamy Kitchen with some crushed garlic and peppercorns. I used about 4 teaspoons of sea salt crystals, and crushed them into smaller crystals with garlic and peppercorns. In the interests of science, I left one piece as a control: no salt, only covered with crushed garlic and peppercorns (yay science!).

The control steak. Who loves garlic!


The two pieces of salted steak. Have I mentioned that we love garlic?

After 30 minutes, I pulled the steaks out of the fridge to rinse them. There was an obvious difference between the control and salted steaks. The salted steaks were glistening with moisture, and the control was dry. I rinsed the salt off the salted steaks, and the garlic and pepper off the control and patted them very dry.

To cook them, I probably should've used a pan, but I was lazy and stuck them in the George (Foreman Grill). After pulling them out of George, and resting them for 10 minutes, I was ready to submit the steaks to the test!



I salted the control steak just before eating, then took alternative bites of the control and then the salted steak. The salted steak WAS salty, and the garlic had penetrated all through the meat. MHMMM. Was it more tender? Yes, it was! I didn't think it was an astounding difference, but it WAS noticeably more tender. And on the plus side for the salted steak, the control didn't have much garlic flavour.

But, like I said, the salted steak was salty. It was just the right amount, but leaving it covered in salt for more than 30 minutes (or using more salt) would probably have been too much.

So the results are in (yes, I know I should've done a double blind test to be truly scientific): salting your steaks does seem to make them more tender and flavourful. It's worth a try if you like steak.