Back to Jamie again, this time instead of just referring to his show or a recipe I actually (pretty much) followed a recipe from his Jamie's Dinners: The Essential Family Cookbook
First of all, it's super easy - great when you're tight on cooking time lIke I often am with my one year old, Scarlet, under foot. Secondly, it's healthy as it is, and you can easily make it even more so by adding more vegetables. Scarlet liked it too - so it's also great baby/family food!
The meat isn't browned prior to being mixed in with the other ingredients here, cutting out a step and cutting down on preparation time. Another bonus, his list of ingredients includes (wait for it) butternut squash. Are you thinking enough with the butternut squash? No problem, use a different squash, or add more carrots - you can tailor this stew easily. I skipped the wine, but certainly that would add a richness to the flavour here. I used vegetable broth - again, you could change things up and use beef broth instead. We don't actually eat a lot of red meat and so I tend to just have chicken or vegetable broth and stock around. I didn't use fresh here - but rather a carton of vegetable broth.
Jamie's recipe has the garlic added at the end, which is just fine, but I think next time I'll add it in to cook along with everything else.
Before I get right into the recipe here, one last comment - I thought his addition of fresh lemon zest, from a whole lemon, was brilliant! I hadn't thought of this on my own and it really added a great lift of freshness to the whole finished dish. From now on I will add this to all of my stews at the end. Okay, so here's the recipe in full.
Serves 4 (generously)
Ingredients:
- olive oil
- a knob of butter
- 1 onion, peeled and chopped
- a handful of fresh sage leaves
- 1 3/4 lb stewing steak or beef skirt, cut into 2 inch pieces (I estimated here)
- sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
- flour, to dust
- 2 parsnips, peeled and quatered
- 4 carrots, peeled and halved (I sliced mine up a bit more than he suggests)
- 1/2 a butternut squash, halved, deseeded and roughly diced
- 1 lb of small potatoes (I got a few different kinds of potatoes and roughly chopped them)
- 2 tablespoons (30 ml) tomato puree
- 1/2 bottle of red wine (or more stock/broth)
- 1 1/4 cups (300 ml) beef or vegetable stock
- zest of 1 lemon, finely grated
- a handful of rosemary, leaves picked
- 1 clove or garlic, peeled and finely chopped (I added two cloves)
Other suggestions for ingredients:
- Acorn or other type of squash
- yams or sweet potatoes
- turnips
- zucchini
- eggplant
Method:
Preheat the oven to 300⁰ F (150⁰ C) Put a little oil and the butter into an appropriately sized pot or casserole pan. Add your onion and all the sage leaves and fry for 3 to 4 minutes. Toss the meat in a little seasoned flour, then add it to the pan with all the vegetables, the tomato purée, wine and stock, and stir together. Season generously with pepper and a little salt. Bring to a boil, place a lid on top, then transfer to the oven and cook until the meat is tender. This will take 3 to 4 hours. You can check this by seeing if one of the pieces of meat falls apart easily. Once it's all cooked you can turn the oven down and keep it warm until you are ready to serve it.
When you are ready to serve the stew, mix the lemon zest, chopped rosemary and garlic together and sprinkle over the stew. As I mentioned above, this was really nice to add before serving, but I would also add garlic for the entire cooking process. I added a few extra sprigs of rosemary on top, unchopped. As he suggests, this would be good with warm bread, I think garlic bread would be extra good here - and a glass of red wine would add a nice touch to the taste buds.
Mmm, what a cozy meal!
this sounds soooo good! and i love the fact that the meat doesn't need to be browned first. will try this soon - perhaps with the butternut. ;-)
Posted by: miranda | 12/18/2009 at 10:08 PM