May 2014 - Slow-cooked beef with ras el hanout

You would think that in "The Baking Issue" I would find heaps of things I wanted to make but no. I really struggled to find something to make. Although I am not sure if it is because of the recipes or if it because I am lacking a bit of cooking mojo at the moment. In the end I decided on two recipes.

One of  those was Jamie Oliver's Wine-braised chicken with roasted grapes. I have made a savoury with sautéed grapes before and it was really good. I have all the ingredients to make it but I decided to make the other one as it is a slow-cooked dish and since it was the weekend it would be better to make that one. The chicken dish takes a lot less time and could easily be a week day meal. 

So I decided on the Slow-cooked beef with ras el hanout. To be honest, it wasn't my thing. I am not sure what the problem was. There was plenty of flavour and a nice bite to it with the chilli but I just didn't enjoy it. I haven't tried the leftovers, perhaps the flavours have developed more since. I will give it a try tomorrow night and see if it is any better. I hope so. I did only make half the recipe so at least I don't have a huge amount of leftovers. 

 Slow-cooked beef with ras el hanout

1 kg chuck steak, cut into 2.5 cm pieces

2 small onions, diced

2 garlic cloves, crushed

2 tbsp olive oil

2 tsp ras el hanout

2 small red chillis, deseeded & finely chopped

1/4 tsp salt & pepper

4 tomatoes, deseeded and flesh grated

1 1/2 preserved lemon quarters, rinsed, defleshed and finely chopped

2 tsp honey

handful of chopped coriander 

handful of chopped parsley

Preheat oven to 140C

Combine all ingredients in a casserole dish. Cover and cook for 3 1/2 hours or until meat is tender. 

Once cooked serve with some extra chopped herbs. 

Blogging

I know that I have said this before but I am going to start blogging more, although I am struggling to find something to make out of this month's delicious magazine. I have had a lot of ups and downs over the past year or so but things are improving and I want to start doing more things. Blogging is something that I have enjoyed in the past and I definitely think that it will help me going forward. So I hope that you will be on the look out for new posts over the next week and going forward.

Finally, I managed to get a "silver" award for the following photo in the novice section of a photography challenge site. I was so surprised and very happy.

Cooks Club - April 2014

So it is a little late to be encouraging you head on to participate since it closed about 30 minutes ago. However there is a much loved Taste recipe in that so hopefully we will get some additional pics from those who this is a regular meal in their house.

For the April I decided to take on the the Chicken Satay burgers they are raved about by the people on the forum so I decided that i just needed to join in the fun, They were incredibly easy to make. I didn't realise the sauce needed to cool so. It got put off a day.

I was really pleased with the result. the satay is fabulous and i am sure that it could be used in any number of dishes.

I infact used the leftover chick meat and fashioned them into meatballs, thinned the sauce down with some stock, added vegetable and I had another dinner and lunch meals. I was really impressed with how well this worked.