Post 198: Jamie Oliver Beef stew mk2

A little while back I did a Jamie Oliver beef stew. It came out quite excellently, even though I didn't follow Jamie's recipe exactly. If you're a regular visitor around these parts you may have noticed a distinct lack of posts recently this has been for two reasons:
1) Slight disillusionment with blogging on account of not having made my millions from it yet
2) Not having done much cooking, due to having been a bit busy with a mixture of boring work and not so boring gallivantings.

No (2) led me to being rather backed up with VegBox goodies. I was, forced to chuck a few pieces which had gone manky. This hasn't happened in quite a while; the shame of it.

Thinking of dishes which had come out well using what I had, I thought of sainted Jamie. Here's the start:
- 2 biggish onions fine chopped and slow fried with three cloves of garlic
- 2lbs/1 kilo stewing beef. Uncooked - which is the Jamie Oliver-ness of it

- 1 bottle red wine.  Now anyone really observant among you will notice that this is Bulldozer Pinotage; which I've blogged previously. It's muck, when drunk. However, it's quite a heavy weight wine so good to go with the beef and worked well here as cooking booze.

To these I then added basically all my leftover veggies:
- 1 medium turnip & 6 medium potatoes, (cut into inch cubes)
- 3 medium/small parsnips & 4 carrots cut small
- Salt, pepper, 1 big handful of parsley & 2 bay leaves
- 1 red cabbage, sliced into chunks: so that they leaves stayed together
- Then topped up with beef stock until everything was covered.

Then into the oven at 160c for as many hours as you've got. By the time this photo was taken it had been in for 6. Because I'd not used any cornflour at any stage the sauce was still pretty thin. I don't mind that: far better a thin, tasty runny sauce than one that tastes of flour. Proving it was no fluke, the non floured and fried meat was beautifully soft, as Jamie promised .

This would have been ideal served with thick wodges of crusty over-buttered white bread.  Sadly I didn't have any; but the stew was good!