Pie for Dinner

For a post about alcohol alternatives, I do realize the beer in the background is hypocritical.

 

I have been trying to cut out alcohol from recipes as of late. This has lead to some interesting discoveries, like reduced pomegranate juice as a sauce for steak. The inspiration for this recipe is for a steak and guiness pie, but was alter to accommodate the alcohol and the fact we did not have any steak in the freezer, just a pork tenderloin. I do realize a different cut of pork would have been better suited for the long cooking time and that is what I recommend for the recipe below. I suggest pork shoulder or a pork roast cut up.

 

Pork Pot Pie

 

Ingredients:

 

1 ½ lb pork, diced

2 tbsp Flour

Olive oil

1 onion, chopped

1 carrot, peeled & chopped

4 sticks celery, chopped

½ sweet potato, diced

1 tsp dried thyme

½ tsp dried rosemary

1 bay leaf

2 ½ cups chicken stock

28 oz can tomatoes

1 sheet of puff pastry

1 egg, beaten

 

Method:

Season pork, and toss with flour. Heat olive oil over medium heat, brown meat in batches, set aside. Add onion, frying for 1 minute, add carrot, celery, sweet potato and spices. Cook for 4 to 5 minutes. Add stock and tomatoes, bring to boil, stir and simmer for 2 hours. Season to taste.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Transfer stew to ceramic pot or mini ramekins. Roll out pastry, cut into circles to fit dish. Brush rim of pot with beaten egg, then place pastry over top, crimping at edges. Score top, or try for a design if feeling artsy. Bake in oven for 45 minutes.

Great with a side salad.

Moroccan Out

An email from the library inspired this past Sunday’s dinner of a Moroccan Beef Tagine, or basically a beef stew with a hard hit of eastern spices. This stew blends together spice and sweetness that when topped over the nutty flavour of couscous was all kinds of tasty. The recipe is from Jamie Oliver’s Food Escapes, a recent addition to the Jamie Oliver collection where he travelled to Morocco, Stockholm, Venice, France, Greece and Spain in search of inspiration. I would say overall I was not overwhelmed with a plethora of recipes I want to try from the book, but there were a few that caught my eye. I am glad it was free from the library though and a lot of the recipes can be found online at Jamie Oliver’s website.

Now for the alterations:

If there is one herb that is not welcomed into this household it has to be fresh coriander. The somewhat soapy taste of the herb can add a fresh vibrancy to a meal but does not please everyone’s pallet. All of that to say I left out the coriander in this recipe. Substituting some fresh flat leaf parsley may also add that nice fresh hit.

This recipe calls for prunes. We did not have prunes, and to be honest I am not sure what part of the store they are sold in. We do however have a boat load of raisins, not enough for big boat but enough to fill a dingy. So to replace the sweet flavour the prunes would be adding I threw in some raisins instead.

Lastly the recipe called for a table spoon of ras el hanout spice, which the cookbook describes as a mixture of anywhere from 10 to 100 spices ranging from tumeric to smoked paprika. The mix of spices, outside of this foreign mixture of unknown substances, was more than enough to coat the beef and had extra to dump into the stew once all the liquid was added.

Recipe: Jamie Oliver’s Beef Tagine

Slow Braise and Short Days

With the winter solstice just past the days will be getting longer and we can look forward to all the fresh fruit and vegetables that come with the spring and summer season. In the meantime we will have to make due with the wide array of root vegetables readily available this time of year. One of my favourite cook books I received last year was Michael Smith’s Chef atHome. His simple recipes are easy to follow and have a good base of knowledge that you can apply to other recipes. It was from this cookbook that I started checking on his website quite frequently and one of his recipes of the day last week was Beef Stew. This incited a craving for the slow braised beef and rich red wine and tomato sauce that accompany it. It also has a wide variety of vegetables, of which we have been lacking lately.

Recipe @ http://chefmichaelsmith.com/Recipe/beef-stew/

 I altered this recipe in a few a ways. First I removed all of the vegetables that Katie isn’t a fan of: Peas, Parsnip and pickled baby onions. Second, I found that the sauce did not thicken naturally over the cooking time, so at the end I mixed 2 tbsp corn starch with ¼ cup red wine and added this to the stew to have a thick gravy like sauce.