Slow Cooked: 200 exciting, new recipes for your slow cooker (6 page)

SERVES 4–6 AS IT IS A PROPER RIB-STICKING DISH

25g beef dripping or 1 tablespoon vegetable oil

700g potatoes

1 × 340g tin corned beef, chopped

1 large onion, cut in half moons

4 sprigs of fresh thyme or 1 teaspoon dried thyme

2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce

300ml water

black pepper

Start by cutting the dripping in half. Cube it and scatter half of it over the bottom of the crock. If you don’t have any dripping, brush the crock with the vegetable oil instead.

Peel the potatoes and slice them thinly. Put two layers into the bottom of the crock, then add half the corned beef and half the onion. Add 2 sprigs of fresh thyme or ½ teaspoon dried thyme and season with black pepper. Drizzle half the Worcestershire sauce over it all.

Add another layer of sliced potatoes and the other half of the corned beef and onions. Add the rest of the fresh or dried thyme and the Worcestershire sauce. Layer the last of the potatoes on top of the corned beef and pour the water over it all.

Scatter the remaining dripping or brush another teaspoon of vegetable oil over the top of the potatoes and put the lid on the slow cooker. Cook the stovies on high for 7–8 hours. The corned beef should melt down to make a thick, rich gravy and the potatoes should be soft and tender and about to break down completely.

Serve in deep bowls. It makes a great one-pot meal, but I love some cabbage or spring greens on the side of it. Maybe a few peas as well. Plastic plate and fork optional.

When I first moved to London, I lived in a crowded shared house where we all passed like ships in the night, except on Monday nights. Monday night was goulash night. Originally taken from a Lindsey Bareham recipe in the
Evening Standard
, we took it in turns to make a huge pot of paprika-rich stew and then sit down together around the kitchen table. The amount of cheap red wine consumed with it tended to make Tuesday mornings hangover morning, but I still love goulash and make it quite often.

It works fabulously well in the slow cooker. If you can make it the day before and leave the flavours to infuse, it is even better. Don’t skimp on the sour cream though.

SERVES 2 WITH LEFTOVERS OR 4 WITHOUT

500g stewing steak or beef brisket, cubed

1 tablespoon plain flour

1 onion, chopped

2 cloves of garlic, finely diced

1 red pepper or 75g char-grilled red peppers from a jar

1 × 400g tin chopped tomatoes

2 tablespoons smoked paprika, preferably sweet

1 teaspoon caraway seeds

¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper

1 × 400g tin plum tomatoes

500ml hot beef stock or water

150ml sour cream, to serve

25g chopped fresh parsley, to serve

salt and pepper

Season the meat well and toss it in the plain flour. Put it in the slow-cooker crock with the onion and garlic.

Chop the red pepper into small pieces and combine in a bowl with the chopped tomatoes. Blitz them together with a hand blender until they form a smooth purée. Add the smoked paprika, caraway seeds and cayenne pepper and blend well together.

Pour the tomato and pepper purée into the slow-cooker crock and stir it all together well to coat the meat and the onions. Add in the plum tomatoes and pour the water or beef stock in. Make sure the meat is just covered — you may not need all the water.

Put the lid on the slow cooker and cook the goulash on low for 8–10 hours or until the meat is soft and tender and the sauce has thickened. Serve with a hefty dollop of sour cream and fresh parsley scattered over it with steamed rice or mashed potato on the side.

I associate this gorgeous Greek dish with my dad, who always brings sachets of stifado mix back from his Greek holidays and adds them to a little parcel of strange and wonderful items he sends me as a present. They are a bit like getting an orange in your Christmas stocking! I love making stifado from them, so imagine my excitement when I realised I could make the dish from scratch and have it more often than once a year. Full of tender beef, this stew is special with its use of spices and whole caramelised shallots.

SERVES 4 WITH LEFTOVERS

300g shallots, peeled and left whole

25ml olive oil

500g stewing steak

1 teaspoon fennel seeds

60ml vermouth

2 onions, diced

2 stalks of celery, diced

1 carrot, diced

3 cloves of garlic, diced

1 cinnamon stick or piece of cinnamon bark

4 cloves

½ nutmeg, grated

4 allspice berries

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 large sprig of fresh rosemary

2 bay leaves

4 tablespoons tomato purée

1 × 400g tin chopped tomatoes

200ml water

60ml red wine vinegar

salt and pepper

Start by preparing your shallots. Peel them by pouring boiling water over them and leaving them to sit for 10 minutes. The skins will slip off, leaving the tip and root intact. Heat the olive oil in a frying or sauté pan on the hob and add the shallots. Cook them over a medium heat until golden and becoming slightly sticky on all sides. This should take about 5–7 minutes.

I quite often seal the meat for this dish since I have the pan out anyway. If you do this, give it about a minute and a half each side over a medium heat until browned. You might need to do it in two batches or the pan gets overcrowded and the meat steams instead of browning.

Put the shallots and the meat into the slow cooker, adding any leftover sticky browned bits from the pan and the remaining olive oil as well. Use the same pan to fry the fennel seeds until they smell aromatic. Take them off the heat and crush them using a pestle and mortar and then pour the vermouth over them to infuse. This will give the aniseed kick you’d usually get from ouzo if you were in Greece, where it doesn’t cost £15 a bottle.

Add the diced onion, celery, carrot and garlic and toss in the cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, allspice, oregano, rosemary and bay leaves. Season well.

Stir in the tomato purée and pour the chopped tomatoes over it all. Add the water, vinegar and the infused vermouth, including the seeds. It’s OK if the meat isn’t all covered with liquid — you want quite a thick sauce here.

Put the lid on the slow cooker and cook the stifado on low for 8–9 hours. Serve with orzo for an approximation of Greek
hilopites
, a type of egg pasta, or some rosemary roast potatoes.

Imagine how happy life would be if you could combine a beef and ale stew with a sandwich? Well, the good news is that those crafty Belgians have already done it with carbonnade. Tender chunks of beef are cooked in one of their excellent beers and lots of tangy wholegrain mustard, before being topped with slices of mustard-smothered bread then baked. All with a name that sounds much more stylish than a stew sandwich.

I’ve made an Irish reworked version before with Guinness and Veda bread, which worked really well. Provided you don’t use a light lager or sliced white, you can tailor this deep, dark stew to what you have at home too. I’m sure I’ve just insulted many Belgians with my suggestion of stout, so I’ll try to redeem myself with the instruction that you should use the best beer or ale you can afford. Many supermarkets run offers on Chimay and Leffe Brune, which are both perfect here, but as long as it’s dark and good enough to drink, it will be great!

SERVES 4–6 WITH LEFTOVERS

500g stewing steak or beef brisket, cubed

1 teaspoon mustard powder

1 teaspoon sea salt

1 teaspoon black pepper

3 tablespoons plain flour

2 onions (preferably Caramelised Onions, see
here
)

1 carrot, diced

2 large flat mushrooms, sliced

1 heaped teaspoon brown sugar

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

1 bay leaf

3 sprigs of fresh thyme or 1 teaspoon dried thyme

350ml ale or stout

4 tablespoons wholegrain mustard

1 tablespoon room-temperature butter

1 demi baguette

chopped fresh parsley, to serve

Put the cubed meat into the slow cooker and add the mustard powder, salt, pepper and the flour. Toss well with your hands to evenly coat the meat. Add in the caramelised onions and the carrot and mushroom.

Season with the sugar, vinegar, bay leaf and thyme and pour the beer over it all. The meat should be at least two-thirds submerged. Stir half the wholegrain mustard through it all. Put the lid on the slow cooker and cook the stew on low for 6 hours.

After 6 hours, beat the butter and the remaining wholegrain mustard together. Cut the demi baguette into 4cm rounds, discarding the small end slices. Spread the mustard and butter on one side of the bread and put the rounds under the grill until the edges start to crisp up and the butter and mustard mixture darkens.

Lift the lid off the crock and carefully set the buttery, mustard-coated bread on top of the simmering stew, butter side up, pressing the rounds down a bit so the gravy soaks into the base of them.

Replace the lid and cook for another 2 hours. Serve this one-pot dish in bowls scattered with fresh parsley.

Few things are better for being slow cooked than oxtail. This knobbly-looking cut becomes meltingly soft and sticky after hours of low heat. A little goes a long way because the meat is rich and packed with flavour from being cooked on the bone. A smidgen of dark chocolate melted through before serving makes this something really special indeed. I only remember oxtail being served as soup when I was a kid, but this is so much better.

Don’t be shy about trying a new cut of meat. I also just like an excuse for more Guinness in my life, if I’m honest. Few other things go so incredibly well with chocolate.

SERVES 4

750g oxtail

2 tablespoons plain flour

2 onions, diced

4 cloves of garlic, chopped

1 × 400g tin chopped tomatoes

½ teaspoon ground cloves

½ teaspoon ground allspice

1 tablespoon tomato purée

500ml Guinness or other stout

2 star anise

100ml cold water (if needed)

4 squares of dark chocolate, approximately 25g

salt and pepper

If you can, get the butcher to cut the oxtail chunks in half as pieces will fit better in the slow cooker, but if you can only get it in whole chunks, don’t worry. You might just need a little bit more liquid to cover it completely.

Season the flour with salt and pepper and toss the oxtail in it. Put the meat into the slow cooker along with the onion, garlic and chopped tomatoes. Scatter the clove and the allspice over it all and stir well to combine. Dollop in the tomato purée.

Pour the Guinness over it all (if you prefer not to use alcohol here, you could substitute it with beef stock). Bob the star anise into the stew and if any oxtail is poking too far out of the Guinness, add the cold water.

Put the lid on the slow cooker and cook the oxtail on low for 12 hours. It will be soft and tender and falling off the bone by this stage. Oxtail is quite a fatty cut of meat and this will have made the most wonderful gravy.

Remove the star anise and as many of the bones as you can with a spoon to make it easier to eat, then chop the squares of chocolate in half and stir them through to create a slightly bittersweet note that just brings the whole dish together.

Serve with steamed rice or mashed potato to soak up as much of the malty, meaty gravy as you can.

As a child, you could pick anything you wanted for your birthday tea in our house. My brother Mister North memorably asked for a mint Viennetta once. I, without fail, asked for mince and potatoes.

Hands down my favourite meal as a child, I still adore a plate of this ultimate comfort food, bonding with a friend’s future husband when I discovered he served his with suet dumplings on the side too (see
here
). But like Proust and his madeleine, I had never been able to get my mince to taste like those birthday teas until I got my slow cooker, but now it’s utterly foolproof. There may not be birthday cake afterwards, but it’s my idea of perfection all the same.

Cooking mince in the slow cooker without pan frying it first will give quite a different and looser texture as it falls apart rather than forms little nuggets of meat. I really like this smooth finish to the meat, but if you prefer it more rugged, you could seal the meat in a pan for about 5 minutes first.

SERVES 2–4 WITH ENOUGH FOR SECONDS OR TO MAKE COTTAGE PIE

500g beef mince

2 tablespoons plain flour

200ml hot beef stock

1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

1 teaspoon tomato purée

½ teaspoon soy sauce

drop or 2 of gravy browning

salt and pepper

Put the mince into the slow-cooker crock, sprinkle the flour over it and stir well to evenly coat all the meat. Season.

Make sure your beef stock is heated. I tend to use Bovril here made with boiling water (1 teaspoon Bovril to 200ml boiling water), but if you are using fresh, warm it through. Add the Worcestershire sauce, tomato purée, soy and gravy browning and mix it all to combine.

Pour this stock mixture over the mince and stir it well. Put the lid on the slow cooker and cook on low for 8 hours. The mince will thicken and create a rich gravy. It may look like it has separated slightly, but all it needs is a good stir and it’s ready to serve.

Note:
If the idea appeals to you, simply make some suet dumplings by mixing 100g self-raising flour with 50g beef suet, a pinch of salt, pepper and mustard powder and 60ml cold water to make a thick, stiff dough. Bring together and roll into eight dumplings. Add them to the mince (or a stew) at least an hour before the end of cooking and enjoy!

I used to be wary of offal. Put off by the very nature of it, I’d also had it overcooked a few times and disliked the grainy texture it develops that way. The only offal I really loved when I was a kid was tongue and then, when I became vegetarian, I was squeamish about all the wobbly bits of the animal. When I started eating meat again, I was convinced I wouldn’t like offal and so never learned to cook it.