Tag Archives: beef

Beef and Polenta Pies

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Last weekend we had lunch at The Old Cheese Factory at Reidsdale.  There was a cool wind, but we sat outside because we had two dogs with us.  Matthew had a nice time talking to the owners Robert and his son Gary about growing apples, asparagus and other gardening stuff. They make their own cider, ginger beer, apple juice, elderberry wine, elderflower sparkling wine and other beverages.  We tasted most of the above and found them all delicious.  The cider is dry, just the way I like it. The Old Cheese Factory serves simple lunches at weekends (best to book) and they also run bread-making, cheese-making and sausage-making classes taught by local artisans from Braidwood.

Matthew and I had the Ploughman’s lunch with a glass of apple cider.  Catherine more sensibly chose a hot dish, described as a beef and eggplant pie with red wine and polenta and a glass of apple juice.  She said the pie was delicious – a variation on a shepherd’s pie.  I decided to make something similar using mushrooms instead of eggplants and the result made a tasty family meal.

Beef and Polenta Pies

Beef filling:
1 Tbs olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed
250g mushrooms
500g lean minced beef
1 Tbs tomato paste
1 tsp sugar
1/4 cup sherry or red wine
1 beef stock cube
2 tsp dried mixed herbs or oregano
1 tsp ground cumin
1 cup water
Extra half cup of water mixed with 3 tsp cornflour
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
Polenta topping:
2 cups milk
1 cup water
3/4 tsp salt or garlic salt
1 cup instant polenta
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
2 Tbs butter
1 egg, beaten
1/4 cup grated Parmesan, extra

Heat oil in a large frying pan.  Cook onion and garlic over a moderate heat until softened but not browned.  Wipe mushrooms and cut in halves or chunky slices – you don’t want them to get lost in the filling.  Add to the pan with the mince and keep stirring for about 5 minutes or until the meat has browned a bit.  Add remaining ingredients except cornflour mixture and simmer for 15-20 minutes or until meat is tender.  Add cornflour mixture and stir till thickened.  Adjust seasoning – you may not need any salt if stock cube is salty.  Spray six 1 cup souffle or ramekin dishes with oil and divide filling among them.

Bring milk, water and salt to the boil in a medium saucepan.  Add polenta and stir constantly for 3-5 mins until polenta thickens and pulls away from sides of pan.  Add parmesan, butter and egg and remove from heat.

Preheat oven to 180°C. Place 2-3 Tbs of polenta on top of meat filling – whatever fits – and spread with a knife to cover completely.  You will probably have some polenta left over.  Sprinkle with extra cheese.  Place pies on a baking tray and bake for about 25 mins or until golden brown. Serve immediately with a salad or green vegetable.

Note: Unbaked pies can be stored in the fridge, loosely covered, for a day or so. For larger appetites make in four larger dishes, or if preferred use one large dish.

Serves 4-6

Chilean Empanadas

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We lived in Santiago from 1992 to 1995 and our daughter has since married a Chilean doctor, so Chile is like a second home for us. Lots of fantastic amigos live there, as well as our “consuegros” – our daughter’s in-laws. Spanish has a name for that relationship which is lacking in English. We love the people and the country. The pisco sours and the empanadas. The wines and the seafood. And so much more…

They mostly eat two kinds of empanadas in Chile – cheese ones which are deep fried and meat ones which are baked. The baked ones are called empanadas de pino and are quite big – like a Cornish pasty or an Aussie meat pie. Most Chileans buy their empanadas because they sell them everywhere. Despite the fact that around 35,000 Chileans now live in Australia I’ve never seen them for sale here, so I make my own.

I like to make the pastry and the filling the day before. Assembling the empanadas takes a good hour and the filling is much easier to work with when it’s cold.

Traditional Chilean empanada pastry contains lard and hot water and you have to knead it like bread dough. It can be quite tough and I prefer something lighter. You can speed things up by using bought pastry – either shortcrust or puff pastry will do – and make them any size you like. I prefer what I would call large “finger food” size. The filling is like a spaghetti bolognese sauce without the tomatoes and with the addition of raisins, olives and hard boiled eggs – the three ingredients which give Chilean empanadas their distinctive flavour.

Pastry:
500g Plain flour
250g butter, cut into small pieces
1/3 cup sour cream
4-5 Tbs cold water
1 tsp salt
Filling:
2 large or 3 medium onions, chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 Tbs olive oil
500g good quality minced beef
2 Tbs tomato paste
4 tsp oregano leaves
2 tsp cumin
1 tsp chilli powder – or more, to taste
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt, or to taste and freshly ground black pepper
¼ cup sherry or red wine
½ cup seedless raisins
1 cup water
About 36 black olives, stoned
5 hard boiled eggs, cut into 8
1 egg, beaten with 1 Tbs water

Filling: heat oil in a large pan and cook the onions and garlic gently until soft. Add meat and cook, stirring, until browned all over. All remaining ingredients except for the olives and eggs and simmer for about 15-20 mins or until thick. Cool throughly, preferably overnight.

Pastry: if your food processor is not very big you may need to make this in two batches. Place flour, salt and butter in food processor and process until fine crumbs. Add sour cream and with the motor running add water through the feed chute. As soon as mixture forms into a ball stop the motor and tip it out. Pat into a neat ball, wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight or for at least an hour.

Preheat oven to 170°C. On a floured surface roll out half the pastry quite thinly, as you would for a quiche. Cut as many circles 10 cm (4″) in diameter as you can, then repeat with the other half of the pastry. Gather the trimmings into a ball, roll out and cut more circles. You should get 35-40 if you have rolled the pastry thinly enough. If filling seems very thick add a tablespoon or so of water. Place about a tablespoon of filling on each pastry circle, plus one olive and an eighth of a hard boiled egg. If you make larger empanadas, use a quarter of an egg for each and maybe 2 olives. You may have some meat filling leftover. It’s nice for lunch on toast.

Dampen pastry edges very slightly on one side with the beaten egg mixture, fold over, seal with fingers then crimp with a fork. Make sure you seal them well so they don’t burst open in the oven. Place on baking trays lined with baking paper, brush with beaten egg mixture and bake for about 30 minutes or until golden brown. Serve warm. Can be made ahead and kept in the fridge or freezer then briefly reheated to serve. If doing that then don’t brown them too much in the first cooking.

Makes 35-40

Beef Carpaccio

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We recently hosted a birthday dinner for our son-in-law, Sacha.  We started off with smoked salmon served on Baba Ganoush – a Middle Eastern eggplant dip recipe – garnished with home-made pesto and dried pink peppercorns. These can be bought from The Essential Ingredient and are not the same as the ones in brine.  They’re slightly sweet and fragrant, rather than peppery and go really well with any salmon dish.  They also look pretty as you can see from the photo.

For the second course I served Winter Beef Carpaccio from Michael Moore’s cook book Moore to Food – thinly sliced beef fillet, garnished with roasted onions and mushrooms, goat’s cheese and micro-herbs and drizzled with roasted black pepper oil. Sacha is a fan of carpaccio and ceviche, which both use raw fish or meat as the main ingredient, so I knew this dish would appeal to him.  Passionfruit Cheesecake made a refreshing end to the meal.

Roast Fillet of Beef with Fresh Herb Dressing

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Last week my friend Ferne asked me what we were having for Christmas lunch.  I said we were having a cold buffet and mentioned a recipe for roast beef with a fresh herb dressing that I was thinking of doing from an old Women’s Weekly cookbook.   It’s perfect for a summer buffet.

I haven’t made it for quite some time but said I would dig it out.  Ferne said if you find it, please send it to me.  I have about 30 Women’s Weekly cookbooks – they were all the rage in the 70s and 80s – and typically it was in the last one I opened, called Celebration Cookbook.  Here is my slightly adapted version.

Roast Beef with Fresh Herb Dressing

1 whole beef eye fillet, weighing 1.5-1.8kg, trimmed of fat and sinew
 1 Tbs whole black peppercorns, coarsely crushed
30g butter
2 Tbs vegetable oil
Whole flat parsley leaves to garnish
Dressing:
1 Tbs chopped parsley
1 Tbs chopped fresh chives
3 green (spring) onions, thinly sliced on the diagonal
2 tsp chopped fresh tarragon or 1 tsp dried
1 Tbs capers, chopped if large
2 tsp drained canned green peppercorns
1 tsp hot English mustard
1/2 cup tarragon or white wine vinegar
1/2 cup vegetable oil or olive oil
1 tsp sugar

Preheat oven to 180°C.  Trim beef, tie into a neat shape with string. Roll in peppercorns and press them in.  Heat butter and oil in a roasting pan.  Add beef and cook briefly all over until sealed.   Place beef in the oven and bake for about 25-30 minutes for medium-rare, or until cooked to liking.  A meat thermometer is useful for getting it right and should read 55°C for medium-rare.  Remove from the oven, cool to room temperature, remove string.  Slice beef thinly and arrange on serving dish in overlapping rows.  Top with dressing, garnish with parsley leaves.  Serve remaining dressing separately.

Dressing: Place all ingredients in a jam jar with a lid and shake vigorously.

Serves 10-12 as part of a buffet.

Note: Beef can be cooked and dressing made the day before serving.  Store both in the fridge well covered.

Curry in a Slow Cooker

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When it comes to cooking I’m always looking for short cuts.  Not because I don’t like it – quite the opposite – but I just don’t seem to have as much time to devote to the kitchen as my paternal grandmother Jessie did.  I know she managed without a washing machine or a dishwasher and kept her own chickens.  But most of her supplies were delivered to the door (actually I don’t think she could drive) and she didn’t do emails, Facebook or a blog.

I’ve always been a great fan of slow cookers.  Perfect for days when you want to come home and find something ready for dinner which has been looking after itself for hours.  You hardly even have to stir the food – just once in a while to see how it’s going.

I’ve had my slow cooker – which is called a Crock Pot – for over 30 years and wouldn’t part with it for quids. If you keep your eyes open you can sometimes pick one up for a song in a secondhand shop. I often convert recipes intended for conventional cooking and make them in the slow cooker.  The main rule is to cut down drastically on the amount of liquid – start with very little – you can always add more.

This beef korma is adapted from a recipe by Michael Pandya in his Complete Indian Cookbook first published in 1980.  My grandmother Jessie, who gave me my first cooking lessons when I was eleven, always put a teaspoon of salt into anything sweet and a teaspoon of sugar into anything savoury, to bring out the flavour, so I always do the same.

Beef Korma

2 large onions
4 Tbs ghee or vegetable oil
50g blanched almonds
50g fresh ginger, peeled
1 tsp salt
1 Tbs coriander seeds, ground in a mortar and pestle, or use ready-ground
1 Tbs cumin seeds, ground in a mortar and pestle, or use ready-ground
8 whole cloves, ground in a mortar and pestle, or use 1/2 tsp ground
8 black peppercorns, ground in a mortar and pestle, or use 1/2 tsp ground
1-2 tsp chilli powder, to taste
1 tsp sugar
2 tsp ground turmeric
2 tsp garam masala
1 kg stewing beef, such as chuck steak, trimmed and cut into 2-3cm cubes
1 cup thick plain yoghurt
1 cup water
Fresh coriander, chopped and 2 Tbs extra plain yoghurt, to garnish

Peel onions, halve then slice.  Fry gently in a large frying pan in half the oil.  When soft place in the slow cooker.  In a food processor, process remaining ingredients except meat, yoghurt, water and coriander.  Add remaining oil to frying pan and when hot fry the meat, stirring constantly, until browned.  If your pan is not sufficiently hot it’s better to brown the meat in two batches.  Add the spice mixture and stir to coat thoroughly.  Keep cooking and stirring until the spices smell fragrant.  Place meat in slow cooker with yoghurt and half the water.  Turn the slow cooker on high, cover and cook for 4 hours or until meat is tender, adding the remaining water if necessary and stirring from time to time.  If preferred you can cook for about 7 hours on low.  If you have to go out it’s a good idea to turn it to low as it can look after itself for hours at that temperature.  Before serving, taste to see if it needs more salt.

Garnish with a swirl of yoghurt and the coriander and serve with steamed rice, Indian bread and maybe an Indian chutney or pickle.  A side dish of Cucumber Raita (cucumber and plain yoghurt) goes well.  There are plenty of recipes online.

Serves 8-10