Another Sunday where there is some time to give the food the loving that it deserves. I just love the whole day of just hoovering around in my pyjamas and making something really nice out of it.
It was cold and it was early afternoon so I was looking for a recipe that didn't take all day, but still had a decent amount of hours to it. I ended up using this recipe from the Greek foodie for making this eggplant and beefstew. As a side dish I made some tzaziki from love and lemons and used this just with some turkish bread as a meal.
Now I used these recipes as a sort of timeline for the dish, but I also freewheele here and there, as I am not the best in following recipes on the letter. Let's get cracking!
First the beefstew preps
I went for a 2/3 people dish which was mostly choosen because of the amount of beef that I still had in the freezer. If I would have had more, I would have surely made a bigger portion for some more days to eat from.
I started with dicing an aubergine or eggplant and with a little brush I rubbed some extra vergine olive oil on there. After covering it with some salt and pepper and dried oregano it was ready to hit the oven for about 30 minutes on 160 degrees Celsius.
In the mean time I was chopping 1 red onion and 2 cloves of garlic. I also got this little bush from the supermarket with some herbs. For this dish I only used the fresh oregano and the thyme from the bush.
For the beef part I used 500 grams of chuck roast beef (I don't know how you call this, we just say ribmeat) which I drief off and drizzled some salt and pepper and then some flour over it.
These chunks went into a big cooking pot with heated olive oil and I just seared the outsided and then took the chunks out again. In that same cooking pot I started with baking the onion for a minute, and afterwards I tossed in the the garlic, a cinnamon stick, half a tablespoon of cuminpowder, half a teaspoon of nutmeg, and half a tablespoon of oregano . I stirred this around for 2 minutes or so
This is where I hate reading recipes when it comes to teaspoon and tablespoon. I read the wrong thing and initially the mix tasted like nothing untill I saw you needed more flavour in there. By this time the bottom of my pan looked like a bomb and I thought it was all going to crap.
But then after adding 1 can of peeled tomatoes and 125 ml of water immediately I saw that because of the acidity of the tomatoes, the bottom was cleaning itself.
I also added the thyme and fresh oregano and the beef chunks, gave it a good stir and then it was time to put the lid on the mixture. I turned the heat to low and let it simmer for 1 hour
After 1 hour it was time to add the aubergine pieces into the mixture. With a good stir it was good to go for another 45-60 minutes. After that time is when I found out that it was really lacking taste still. I added some additional cumin and also some extra sugar and more pepper.
After this the taste was awesome!
Making tzaziki
Making tzaziki as a side dish is such an easy process and you can never feel any guilt about this, except for that you will smell like garlic forever afterwards.
I started with grating half of a cucumber and let it drip out in a strainer. You need to get the moist out, so after about half an hour of waiting I literally squeezed out the remaining water, which was actually still a lot.
In a big bowl I put some decent scoops of Greek yoghurt , a tablespoon of extra vergine olive oil, * a diced clove of garlic and some grated lemon zest and its juice. Finishing off with some salt and pepper and adding the grated cucumber and you can just leave this in the fridge until you are going to use it.
Putting everything together with just some simple Turkish bread for the carbs (be gentle...this stuff is heavy) all of this was just an awesome meal again.
The slowcooking saga continues!
For those who have missed my slowcooking sessions over the winter, I have a post about making Tom ka Gai soup, making some guilty pleasure cookies , some baguettes and also some stifado. Check them out if you are hungry!