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| Quick Post-Work Supper! |
I
haven’t done much baking in the last few weeks, resulting in a marked paucity
of posts…but in my defence, it has been a very busy period! The two main events
have been starting work and moving house, and between the two they have left me
very little time for anything else. There will hopefully be more baking soon,
but for the time being I’m sticking to cooking food that can be quickly
re-heated when I finally stumble through my front door after a long day at work
(I was on call last week – 13 hour days!).
Last
week I made a quick curry following the instructions off a back of the jar of
curry paste. This week I’m being a little more adventurous, so I do actually
have some ‘baking’ to share (if you count putting some meat and veg into a pot
and sticking it in the oven!). I part of my Saturday avoiding the numerous bags
I was supposed to be unpacking to scour the internet for a suitable recipe. My
requirements were relatively simple: not too expensive, not too tricky, and
which can be reheated quickly on subsequent evenings. This ruled out a few of
my favourite meals – lasagne, quiche etc. which all take around the 30minute
mark to reheat. Maybe that’s not a bad thing though, as it meant that I ended
up selecting a recipe I wouldn’t usually consider: slow cooked beef stew.
The
recipe itself is dead simple – chuck the ingredients in a pot and stick them in
the oven. The one thing that could have been a sticking point was the time
required, which totalled 3 hours of cooking time. Given that most of my Sunday
was also devoted to unpacking and sorting through my belongings, this wasn’t as
much of a problem as it might sometimes be. Having gathered the ingredients, I
set to work, and was very pleased with the results.
The
stew itself has a lovely flavour – beef mingled with smoky paprika and chilli,
and a great undercurrent of rich tomato. The slow cooked meat was wonderfully
tender and very tasty, which always surprises me with beef (I’m not a big fan
usually!). It does well reheated in the microwave too, keeping all it’s
flavour. I’ve been eating it with chapatti and peas, and as a make-ahead meal,
I think it’s pretty good. Certainly something I look forward to heating up and
tucking into at the end of a long, tiring day in the hospital!
Smoky Beef Stew from the BBC Good Food website
(NB. I made half this amount, because as much as I liked it,
I don’t really want to eat the same meal every night for a week! Next time I
might make the full amount and freeze half.)
Ingredients:
·
1kg stewing beef , cut into large chunks
·
2 onions ,
chopped
·
800g (2 cans) chopped tomatoes
·
2 tsp each sweet paprika ,
ground cumin and mild chilli powder
·
2 tbsp red or white wine vinegar
·
2 tbsp caster sugar
·
400g can butter beans , rinsed and drained
Method:
1. Heat
oven to 160C/ 140C fan/gas 3. Mix the beef, onions, tomatoes, spices, vinegar
and sugar in a casserole dish. Cover and bake for 2½ hrs. Stir in the beans and
bake for 30 mins more (with the lid off if the casserole is a little wet or lid
on if good consistency), until the beef is tender.
2. Cool,
then freeze in 6-8 portions in small food bags or plastic
containers. Defrost in microwave or overnight in fridge, then
heat in the morning and transfer to a thermos container, or heat in the
microwave at lunchtime.
