Tag: red wine

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Beef & Red Wine Casserole

Cooked a really nice beef and red wine casserole today. I find the key with any casserole is time.

I took some diced braising steak from Waitrose and in small batches browned it in a pan. The key here is to brown the meat to add colour and flavour to the final dish. If you try and brown too much in one go, you will be stewing the meat rather than browning. After browning the last batch, remove the final batch of beef and add diced onion, swede and carrot to the pan. You can add other vegetables depending on taste.

Saute the vegetables for a few minutes before adding back the beef. Stir and add some red wine. Now you could use a whole bottle of red wine, I used a small ¼ bottle of red wine. If you prefer ale then this would be the time to add the ale.

I then added some beef stock, I used the new Knorr Rich Beef Stock Pot to make the stock. Bring to the simmer and then place in the oven.

After cooking for at least two hours, topping up with stock if needed, I then added some pan fried pancetta and mushrooms. I let that cook for another 30 minutes before adding some home made dumplings made with suet and self-raising flour. This with a lid on the casserole dish was cooked for another 30 minutes.

Serve.

Was really nice and full of flavour.

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Chicken with Lentils

This is my simple and quick way of cooking a wonderful French peasant style dish of chicken, pork, sausage and lentils.

Place some chicken thighs and drumsticks in a roasting pan, add some chunks of pork belly. You could use a jointed chicken if you wanted. Drizzle with olive oil and place in a hot oven and roast for about 25-30 minutes.

Cook some large pork sausages in the oven, as these take less time, put them in a little later.

In a large pan, soften some pancetta, diced onions and peppers. Once soft, add a knob of butter and some flour, stir well. Now add herbs, wine and stock. Cook for about ten minutes.

In a hot frying pan, cook some chopped mushrooms.

Prepare the dish.

Take the cooked liquid, add the roast chicken and pork. Slice the sauages and add them and the mushrooms to the pan. I used tinned Puy Lentils, but you could use cooked lentils or a tin of another kind. Mix well and heat through.

Serve with crusty bread.

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Chorizo Frito al Vino

I do like this dish which is simply the spicy Spanish sausage, sautéed in red wine.

I have started using Tesco’s Cooking Chorizo which is not as hard (or as chewy) as the traditional dried chorizo which you can buy from most supermarkets.

Just a note you are buying the whole sausage and not the thinly salami style sliced version.

My method is to cut the chorizo into slices about quarter of an inch thick. Fry in a large frying pan until sealed on both sides and just starting to go a little crispy. At this point I add the red wine (Spanish red wine is best, but I am sure you can use any good red wine).

Cook the chorizo for a few more minutes.

Serve as part of a tapas or with salad. The red wine with the chorizo makes a wonderfully spicy sauce which you can dunk warm soft bread into.

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Chorizo Frito al Vino




I do like this dish which is simply the spicy Spanish sausage, sautéed in red wine.

I have started using Tesco’s Cooking Chorizo which is not as hard (or as chewy) as the traditional dried chorizo which you can buy from most supermarkets.

Just a note you are buying the whole sausage and not the thinly salami style sliced version.

Chorizo

My method is to cut the chorizo into slices about quarter of an inch thick. Fry in a large frying pan until sealed on both sides and just starting to go a little crispy. At this point I add the red wine (Spanish red wine is best, but I am sure you can use any good red wine).

Cook the chorizo for a few more minutes.

Serve as part of a tapas or with salad. The red wine with the chorizo makes a wonderfully spicy sauce which you can dunk warm soft bread into.

Photo source.

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Beef in Red Wine

In a previous post I mentioned a dish I had cooked, beef in red wine, however I did not post the recipe. This post was quite popular by people searching for a beef in red wine, so as promised here is the recipe.

Take some stewing steak, and in a hot pan, add a little oil (no need for olive oil as the flavour will be cooked out). The aggresively brown the beef. Only brown a little at a time, browning in batches and ensure that the pan is hot so that the beef does brown and doesn’t stew – as you don’t want it to stew at this time.

Once you have browned all the beef, remove the final batch of beef and add some chopped vegetables to the pan. I used carrot and onions. You could also add celery (yuck) or swede or parsnips or other root vegetables.

Once the vegetables have browned add some plain flour (just a spoonful) and stir.

Once it starts to stick add the red wine and some beef stock, this should deglaze the pan.

Place everything into a casserole dish, lid on and cook in the oven (not too hot) for a couple of hours, adding more stock if the dish starts to dry out.

In a frying pan cook some chopped bacon (I used pancetta) and cook off, then remove the bacon and add some button mushrooms and some freshly chopped parsley. Cook for a minute or two, in the main to soak up the bacon flavour.

Add the bacon and mushrooms about thirty minutes before you serve.

Serve with crusty bread, mash or roasted potatoes with some fresh steamed green vegetables.

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Beef in Red Wine

Tonight I had a meal I had cooked and put in the freezer just for these kinds of nights when I come back late from work and really don’t feel like cooking. I had let it defrost and then heated it in the oven (rather than the microwave) and served it with some gnocchi. Gnocchi was decided upon because it only takes two minutes to cook (yes it was from a packet, I don’t have the patience (or the skill) to cook it from scratch, especially on a week day evening.

Originally it had taken a few hours to cook, time I had then, but on an evening tonight would have been impossible.

The art of cooking something like braising steak or stewing steak is long slow cooking, cook it too fast or not long enough, you will get something very tough and chewy and rather tastless.

The beef I cooked was tender, melt in the mouth tender, and a very rich sauce.

Excellent.

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Epicure Organic Puy Lentils

Today I roasted some pancetta covered organic chicken thighs on a bed of onions, red pepper, mushrooms and courgettes. This was splashed with some olive oil and seasoned with black pepper.

Whilst this was in the oven, I softened in a frying pan, some finely chopped onion with pancetta. When the onion was nicely soft, I added some red wine and beef stock before simmering it down. Beef stock over chicken stock just because of the colour rather than flavour. I then reduced and reduced this.

When I was happy with the sauce I whisked in some butter (with a fork as it happens rather than a whisk) and then added a tin of Epicure Organic Puy Lentils. I needed to add a bit more stock at this point.

I was really impressed with the Epicure Organic Puy Lentils and will certainly be buying them again, I guess it would be potentially tastier to use dried lentils, but I personally was quite happy with the tin.

So I put the lentils on the plate, placed the chicken on top and surrounded it with the roasted vegetables. I served this along with carrots and green beans.

Really tasty.

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Risotto disaster…

Last night I decided to cook a risotto to go with the shellfish I was cooking. I have done this in the past usually using white wine, lemon, rocket and parmesan to flavour the risotto. Alas I had no white wine, no lemon and no rocket, though I did have a block of parmesan to hand. Little piece of advice here, never buy pre-grated parmesan this is usually  grated from dried out pieces of old parmesan or so an old Italian friend of mine once said. Though as it is usually cheaper than the solid stuff I am inclined to believe her! So there I was cooking this risotto and wondering how I should flavour it. Well I had mushrooms and they always work well in risotto, I had some red wine, and I had some chicken stock. There we go, good to go, or so I thought.

Basically it didn’t work quite as well as I hoped. Firstly it came out a grey lilac colour rather than the rich red brown I was expecting. Well that was down to the red wine, lack of dark stock and the mushrooms. Secondly it was rather bland, it had no bite. I think it could have done with a splash of balsamic vinegar.

Most of it was eaten so either we were hungry or it wasn’t half as bad as it looked.

Having said that, the scallops wrapped in pancetta were delicious.