Roast Beef (I think)

I really like Roast Beef. I grow up not having it, I don’t think my mum ever cooked it for me, but when I go to the likes of a sandwich shop, a roast beef and horseradish sandwich is one of my favorites. My mum did make Salt Beef, which I’ll try to make myself one day, but it just isn’t the same (in fact, it’s far better, but still, not the same).

By chance, I was browsing around ASDA with my flatmate, Russingleton, when I spied a ‘brisket’ and my juices got flowing about having having lovely roast beef sandwiches for a week.

I couldn’t find any recipes on the video websites by any of my favorite chefs, so I thought I would piece together what I thought I remembered from Telly and do something myself.

Here’s what you need.

• A bag of carrots
• 2 onions
• 2 Garlic bulbs
• Some port or red wine
• Some concentrated beef stock
• A brisket of beef.
• Olive Oil, Salt and Pepper
• Mustard (Grainy or English)

Here’s what I did….

• Put the oven on full-whack
• Cut the onions into 6 or 8 pieces, all put together.
• Cut the carrots up into bite sized chunks.
• Cover the beef in Olive Oil, Salt and Pepper
• Make up about 1½ pints of beef stock, I used some concentrated stuff because I thought it would taste stronger.
• Add three good glugs of port to the stock.
• Brown off the beef in a frying pan
• Cover the beef in grainy mustard, or English if want a fuller flavour.
• Rest veg in the pan, with 2 bulbs of garlic separated into cloves (I didn’t bother to peel it, life’s to short) cover  the veg with stock.
• Place the beef on top, cover with tin foil.
• Put the oven down to about 150ish.
• Cook it for about 3 hours, turning it every now-and-then.
• Leave to rest for 30 minutes, carve and serve.

Most of the stuff I used.

Brown off the beef.

Veg in a pan

Beef covered with mustard, veg covered in stock.

The liquid doubled ! Oops, oh well, makes a nice soup.

Looks good, but was way too tough.

The soup bit is amazing though.

The garlic is nice and squidgy, but the other veg was too hard.

Quick'n'Easy pasta

This is simple one, using the sauce from ‘Steak Sandwich with Mustardy/Creamy/Oniony sauce‘, I boiled up some pasta, griddle-pan’d some chicken and mixed it all up.

The sauce, before I heated it up, was quite thick (almost solid), but upon adding it to the heated pan after cooking the chicken, it became the right consistency again, but reduced to the point where there wasn’t enough pasta… so I added a few dollops of mayo, and that fixed things.

Griddle Pan up some chicken and boil some pasta

The sauce reduced quite a bit.

A dolop of mayo fixed that.

Add the sauce once the chicken is done.

Quick'n'Easy pasta - Tuddah

The finished artical

Steak, allegedly one of the finest things known to culinary kind. And a fillet steak is king of steaks. And “28 day matured beef” steak is the king of fillet steaks. And the fact that I got it from ASDA knocks it down a peg, but it’s still a top notch steak. I decided to do a fillet steak with a sauce made from cream, onions, Dijon mustard and grainy mustard. I’ll be honest, I’m not the manliest of men, and steak doesn’t normally float my boat, but I wanted to recreate the memories of my favorite restaurant in Cyprus, The Moon Over The Water.

The sauce is amazing, I’m more than pleased with that, the steak though, left a bit to be desired. I think it could be that I didn’t cook it properly, or may have chosen the wrong kind of steak (fillet, rump…etc). I did the sauce first and then the meat, rather than the other way ’round (getting steaky-flavour into the sauce) because I wanted to have the sauce the next day and I wasn’t entirely sure it would be safe with the meat there.

Ingredients and Equipment

• Griddle Pan ! (yes, love them, get one, right now, if you don’t have one)
• Dijon Mustard
• Grainy Mustard
• Double Cream
• An onion
• Fillet Steak (or some kind of meat, it would work well with chicken)
• Butter
• Salt and Pepper

Instructions

• Put a ‘Bake at home’ half-baked Ciabatta in the oven. I wasn’t sure if you should keep it in the bag, so I took it out.
• Chop up the onion so you get slivers of onion (I mean, not diced)
• Melt some butter into the pan and sweat down the onions for about 5 minutes
• Pour over the cream
• Put two big dollops of Dijon and one big dollop of grainy mustard into the sauce
• Keep on stirring until the cream is thick enough to have a consistency that you want.
• Pour the whole lot into a bowl and run the pan under the tap and whip it dry.
• Pack a load of Salt, Pepper and any sort of Herby things (I used dried Basel) over the steak.
• Now, I’ve been told the following rule for a fillet steak …

1. Two minutes on each side, 8 minutes resting = rare
2. Three minutes on each side, 4 minutes resting = Medium
3. Four minutes on each side, 2 minutes resting = Well done.

• Well, let me tell you, that didn’t work. I went for medium rare and the middle was still cold when I went to cut it, so I put it back on, gave it about 5 minutes on each side, the middle was still raw (not rare, raw). I tried one last time and I *think* it was cooked. I didn’t enjoy the steak part, which was double-gutted because I thought that would be the best bit.
• Anyway, take the ciabatta out the oven, slice it in half, spread some butter and mustard on top.
• Slice the steak into strips and place on the bottom slice
• Pour over some of that AMAZING sauce
• Put top on
• Plate up

The good news though, is that I have plenty of sauce left over, that I’ll do with some chicken and pasta tonight.

My lovely Griddle Pan

Nice and organised

Sweat 'em onions down

The sauce (still need to stir it in)

Finished Sauce

Ok, a little bit messy.

Steak on the Griddle Pan

Great, GRIDDLE MARKS !

I still think this is raw, did I eat raw steak?

Steak and Bread - I AM MAN !

The finished aritcal (opened)

The finished artical