Mexican Beef Stew
Posted on | March 1, 2010 | No Comments
I have recently been inspired in eating food that will blow your pants off! I have always loved Mexican food but sometimes i feel like i want a change from the Nachos and Fajitas. This weekend i made a lovely Mexican Stew, It is a tomato based stew that will take a couple of hours to cook, its stewing beef, passata, with herbs, red wine vinegar and chipotle chillies.
The exciting part of this dish is the chillies, chipotle chillies are smoked dried jalapenos, they have a great flavour to them but unfortunately i am having a little trouble finding them at the moment, so i made do with a scotch bonnet instead!
The full recipe can be found on the Good Food website but if you dont want to search for it, here it is.
Ingredients
- 1-3 dried chipotle chillies, (see cook’s note)
- 4 tbsp vegetable oil
- 1kg chuck or braising steak, cut into 5 cm cubes
- 1 large Onion, finely chopped
- 2 cloves Garlic, finely chopped
- 350ml passata
- 1 tbsp red wine vinegar
- 1 tsp Oregano, leaves, chopped
- 1 Bay leaf
- boiled rice, to serve
Method
1. Pour the hot water over the chillies in a bowl and leave to soak for 30 minutes or until soft, turning them over halfway so they soak on both sides. Drain, then cut off the stems and slit the chillies open. Remove the seeds and veins before chopping the chillies finely.
2. Heat half the oil in a large saucepan or flameproof casserole over a high heat until hot. Brown half the meat for 8-10 minutes over a high heat, then remove and repeat with the remaining oil and meat. Add the onion and garlic and cook for 2 more minutes.
4. Return all the meat to the pan and pour in the passata. Add the vinegar, oregano, chopped chilli and bay leaf, and season to taste.
5. Cover and simmer on top of the stove stirring occasionally for 1 hour 30 minutes or until the beef is tender and the tomato juices well reduced. Serve with boiled rice.
Aga Cookery Course
Posted on | May 28, 2009 | No Comments
Agas might be the epitome of the middle class and an anathema to environmentalists but using one to cook with can be serious challenge. Because they are always on, there is very little that can be done to control the temperature. They are great for cooking drop scones on the hob or slow cooking casserole overnight to use one to it full advantage requires training.
That is what is being done on a new cookery course. If you sign up for the two day course you will learn to use your Aga to cook a wide variety of dishes including, a Full English Aga break, fastpistachio meringues, blackberry and apple crumble, fish en papiotte, Aga yoghurt, jointing a chicken, lemon curd, chicken curry, broccoli and goat’s cheese tart, Aga rice, flatbread, fruity tray bakes, roast beef with onion gravy and Yorkshire pudding, drop scones and Focaccia.
The course is in Woschester vale of Evsham with much of the ingredients being sourced locally and the course claims to be the only course with multiple Agas. Five at the last count and a Rayburn. With all this ironmongery radiating heat you would think that it would be like cooking in a steamship boiler room, however clever design ensures that the heat is extracted into the atmosphere.
Other innovations in the school include a CCTV systems to record and transmit images flat screen monitors to the rest of the class.
CO2 Laser Cooker
Posted on | May 26, 2009 | No Comments
CO2 Lasers are more noted for their use in laser marking on cooking utensils than for their use in actually cooking food however, if you were thinking about using a laser beam to cook your food you might be too late. A patent for a laser powered cooker has been released. It uses a CO2 laser which produces an intense but invisible beam is split and using a beam splitter and directed by mirrors toward the food.
Why would you need a laser cooker apart from the fact that it is cool. It is claimed that the food should cook the food in seconds but I doubt this as the food is not in general localised with respect to the beam. Where the beam is incident, the surface of the food would be cooked instantly, however, the heat transferred into the food is by conduction and this depends on the thermal conductivity of the material. This is also seen in a microwave oven where the microwave have penetrated the food but have been absorbed before they reach the centre leaving it cold until the heat conducts into the food.
Price is also an issue as a CO2 laser system costing around $5000 for even a small laser, this cooker would be a very niche market. The safety of a 100W CO2 laser which emits an invisible beam might also be questionable in the dometic enivironment. If you went to check the chicken it might be the last thing you saw before being blinded and/or burned.
Display Energy Certificates
Posted on | May 21, 2009 | No Comments
If you are thinking about buying a new cooker then as well as the features it has such as its capacity you should consider how efficient it is. By law many appliances have to dispay energy certificates. These tell you about how much energy your cooker uses in kWhr/yr and places the appliance in a category from A-G where A is the most efficient and G is the least efficient.
By their very nature, a lot of energy is required to heat food and cooker represent one of the most energy consuming devices in our home. An average cooker uses around 8000 W of energy. Compare this to around 1500 W for a kettle and only 400 W for a television. To put this into context, the human body releases around 100 W of energy when sitting around relaxing. However, taken against this, the time for which the oven or cooker is used is not generally more than a couple of hours a day. Whereas your fridge is on all the time.
Also taken into account is the size of the oven cavity. A larger cavity is going to have a higher energy usage but should not be rated at a higher level than a smaller oven.
What is the importance of this for the consumer? A more efficient cooker will ultimately save you money in the long run and indirectly reduce emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere, as less energy is required to be generated at the power stations or burned in gas consumption.
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