Slow Cooked Food | Finding Feasts

Braised Beef Cheek and Mushroom Pie

Braised Beek Cheek and Mushroom Pie — Click image for recipe

Well, with Frost Fest 2013 now done and dusted, I have to say that for Bella and myself, for our first restaurant service, we kicked ass! Rave reviews for our mushroom dishes from everyone who dined at the vineyard and now an eagerness to get ourselves out at the markets before Christmas… what a thrill it was, so a massive thank you to Jonathan, Jess and Valerie of Stockman’s Ridge Wines for having faith in us to compliment their wines with our dishes… a much appreciated learning experience.

With that said, here is one of Saturday’s sellout dishes, Individual Braised Beef Cheek and Mushroom Pies. The original pie recipe I had planned for was a Rabbit and Mushroom Pie, but with a complete lack of rabbits in Orange at that particular time I needed to change it. So after a discussion with the butcher I left with 2kg of beef cheeks and 7kg of chicken carcasses (for the rich chicken stock). With the luxurious texture of the beef cheek and silkiness of the gravy teamed with the mixed mushroom topping, it was sure to be hit! I was completely inspired by a recipe I came across at Grazing At Large‘s food blog, the changes are only due to substituting ingredients that I didn’t have available, that and punching up the mushroom quota and intensity.

The beef cheeks were sourced through M&J Butchers in Orange, NSW and what a treat they were too. Already trimmed of fat and ready to go, and the flavour was outstanding!

The greatest thing about this dish is if you are having a group of people for a dinner party, the three different elements can be pre prepared and then assembled and reheated when needed. Serve with a walnut salad on the side with a mustard and balsamic dressing and you are sure to wow your guests with such a flavoursome dish.

Cheers and enjoy!

Blondie

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Beef and Mushroom Cottage Pie

Beef and Mushroom Cottage Pie… What’s more warming on a cool winter’s evening than a pie, and not just any pie, a cottage pie… The beautiful full flavours of the meat and mushroom mixture blanketed with a thick layer of soft, fluffy mashed potatoes. This is the meal that you make a big batch of so you can freeze the leftovers in easy single meal versions and can just pull out of the freezer when you need an embracing food hug.

If you can, try to get organic, pasture fed beef. The difference in flavour is outstanding and when you are cooking something as homely as cottage pie, the flavours of each component are particularly important – that, and it’s nice to use meat from happy animals. The beef I have chosen for this pie is from Greenhill Farm and if you are lucky enough to live in Sydney or Canberra you can place your orders for pick up.

bellissimo! Blondie 🙂

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Rooster Ragu aka Pastitsada

Rooster Ragu aka Pastitsada… I’m not sure how easy it is to get your hands on rooster in the city – I haven’t seen it on my travels – but I was fortunate enough to receive one from my sister who got five live roosters yesterday. Four were prepared for the freezer and one went to a friend (but may well end up slow cooked after she gets woken up at dawn every morning when he gets to that age) I know this from personal experience after I saved a chick from the gas chambers at school, his name was Maxwell. We did try to do a light tight environment for him to sleep in till the family/neighbourhood woke up, but primal instinct was there, he just knew he had to start his wake up call at a particular time. Every day on the dot Maxwell would announce himself to the neighbourhood. Needless to say that the neighbours in our Lower North Shore suburb weren’t too impressed, that and the fact he would escape to go down to the beach so I would have to spend my afternoons trying to chase down a rooster on the esplanade after school, which wasn’t too much fun!

Finding Feasts - Balmoral Beach — Balmoral Beach

Anyway, a long story short, Maxwell went to a farm where I like to believe he lived out his natural life fulfilling his rooster duties.

This is my first rooster and was very excited to make an awesome meal of it, so I went with a traditional Greek dish from Corfu called Pastitsada, a type of Rooster Ragu.

When handling a rooster, the few differences from a chicken are that the fat is an amazing dark yellow, the legs are longer and the wings and chest are different to a chicken. The chest meat is much smaller and it was harder to cut into the pieces necessary, but maybe that’s because I wasn’t too sure of the breakdown of it? The flavour is chicken but enhance and the meat is leaner, which is why you need to do the slow and low cook.

I hope you get a chance to try one but if that’s just not going to happen, try and get a free range, organic chook so you get a more flavourful meat.

Happy plucking ! Blondie 🙂

Finding Feasts - Stivens Free Range Farm — Painting on side of shed at family’s farm in New Zealand

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Coconut Beef w/ Thai Red Curry Paste… From Scratch

Coconut Beef w/ Thai Red Curry Paste…From Scratch. This is a stunning, slow cooked Thai dish using Martin Boetz’s Red Curry Paste recipe from his stunning book, Longrain: Modern Thai Food.

If you are going to make one from scratch you must try this one! Plus it makes 1 cup worth of paste, which is basically 5 meals so it’s well worth the effort. I explain my favourite way of storing pastes and the such in the recipe so you have it easily on hand.

I used a gravy beef for my recipe as I love big chunks of melt in your mouth meat, that along with the sauce and the rice to sop it up with and you have a meal you would pay a small fortune for quite happily. Serve it with a side of shredded greens.

Enjoy, Blondie

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