Slow Cooker Beef dinner with fall apart delicious chunks of beef and perfectly cooked potatoes and carrots in a rich sauce of bacon, tomato, red wine ( I used shiraz), soy sauce and beef stock, thickened with a little flour.
My husband likes to buy big pieces of grass fed beef and butcher it himself. We sort it into meal size pieces and freeze it. He selects and buys very, very good meat, until last time. The last lot was tough. We could not eat it as grilled steak. I thawed all of those pieces and planned to make something requiring a long cooking process.
I decided to make Slow Cooker Beef Bourguinon as I had all the ingredients available. Although I go out shopping each week now, I don’t want to go out for “top up” shops. I based this recipe on a slow cooker Beef Bourguinon recipe on Therecipecritic.com but made several changes to suit our taste. It made a delicious dinner for two nights.
This is far less complex than an authentic Bœuf Bourguignon, a French beef stew, but achieves the rich gravy and fall apart loveliness of the classic recipe. I have made this on the stove top in a Dutch oven but prefer the slow cooker result as all the flavours mix and mingle. It only requires a few steps and then everything is in the slow cooker and only requires stirring occasionally. I think this tastes as good as the stove top, four hour, attention intensive Julia Child recipe I used to make. The set and forget method is very attractive, too. Traditionally, the stew would include pearl onions but I didn’t have any on this occasion. I love the addition of soy sauce, too.
SLOW COOKER BEEF BOURGUIGNON
INGREDIENTS
750 gm beef, cubed ( stewing steak or any tough beef )
375gm packet bacon
1 cp red wine, traditionally burgundy, I used shiraz
2 cps beef stock
3 cloves diced garlic
2 tbspn tomato paste
¼ cp low salt soy sauce
¼ cp plain flour
5 carrots peeled and cut into chunks
750gm unpeeled potato, cut into chunks
METHOD
- Cook the diced bacon until lightly coloured in a little oil. Scrape into the slow cooker set on HIGH.
2. Sear the meat in the same pan, add to the slow cooker.
3. Add the chopped vegetables. Make the sauce by pouring the wine into the pan used for searing the meat, when it’s bubbling add the stock, tomato paste, garlic and soy sauce. Mix the flour with enough water to make a watery paste and whisk into the other liquid and keep stirring. Let cook for a few minutes.
4. Add the sauce to the slow cooker, give everything a good stir, put on the lid. Give it a stir every hour or so. Inhale and enjoy the process. Cook for 5 hours, test the meat.
5. Serve scattered with parsley, which I forgot. Enjoy!
I like to make recipes to serve four or more, giving me leftovers to freeze. This means I can take these out of the freezer to thaw then heat while green vegetables steam if we’ve been out all day.
In fact, we enjoyed this for dinner again the next night. SO good on a very cold night after a busy day. This time I remembered the parsley.
Date Loaf
Do you like old fashion loaf pan cakes? I was going to meet a friend at a cafe this week when suddenly a gale blew up with very heavy rain. A quick phone call and we decided she’d come here, instead. There was no cake, no fresh biscuits but I knew I had fresh dates, flour, brown sugar, bicarb soda and butter. Decided to make a Date Loaf. Chop, chop dates in the melted butter and brown sugar, add the bicarb and the flour and into a baking paper lined loaf dish and into the oven.
By the time my visitor arrived, dried off and had a coffee set in front of her the loaf was done. Let it cool a little on a rack, then sliced and served. Later we ate more slices, this time adding butter, the usual way to eat date loaf. The rest went rather quickly the next morning when we were playing mahjong.
Interesting how popular these all fashioned cakes are and how quick and easy they are to make.
BOOK REVIEWS
THE SHIFTING LANDSCAPE
During hibernation I read lots of book reviews. I went online and reserved anything that appealed from the library. The first of these reserved books to arrive when things began to return to normal was Katherine Kovacic’s ” The Shifting Landscape”
Alex Clayton, an art dealer, is employed to travel to a farm in the Victorian Western Districts to value the family’s art collection. The rest of this thriller involves murder, art theft and kidnapping. Traveling with her always is her wolfhound Hogarth.
Involved in the drama, especially after valuing one of the paintings at more than a million dollars, is Alex’s art restorer friend who helps her solve the mystery.
I really enjoyed the reference to many painters and paintings, her description of the old farmhouse which had been in the family for several generations, the small local town and the well written story, full of mystery. I really enjoyed this fast moving, easy to read book. Great on a wet day.
THE HIDDEN
Written by Mary Chamberlain, this book club book is set during the Nazi occupation on the Channel Islands. It is inspired by two women, a German Jewish refuge, who is betrayed and murdered and another woman who had been earmarked for Himmler’s Lebensborn¹ breeding program. Himmler planned to breed typical Aryan children to develop the master race.
The hideous crimes against the main characters are all based on fact and are extremely distressing. This fictional account is based on the war crimes committed at SS run labour camps, in particular Sylt, on occupied Guernsey
This was a difficult book to read at times, but it was also something I knew very little about, so I am glad I persisted.
¹ Founded in 1935, Lebensborn was a SS Nazi association in Germany with the goal of raising the birth rate of Aryan children born of people classified as ‘racially pure” and “healthy” based in Nazi ideology.
After that book review I’d like to tell you that on this day in 1945, in San Francisco, the United Nations Charter was signed by 50 nations.
