I guess you’ve spotted that the picture above is not a
vegetable. Last week, circumstances meant that I veered from the path a little.
We still didn’t eat meat at home, but
I did have to make something meaty – very, very meaty – and then take it with
me for dinner somewhere else.
First, I had four (four!) kilos of beef to cut up and brown.
They were layered with onions and surrounded with a lovely ale and beef stock
and then shoved in the oven, low and slow to turn into carbonades flamandes. It’s
one of those recipes from the Reader’s Digest Cookery Year that my mother and my mother-in-law were cooking with
in the 1970s – and it’s still the book I’m most likely to turn to first for any
classic recipe. Like most good stews, this one is best cooked in advance and
reheated, hence me making it at home the day before it was needed. When you’ve
got it back to temperature the next day, you cover the top with slices of
garlic butter-soaked French bread and stick it back in the oven to form a
gorgeous crispy crust. This doesn’t seem to be standard practice in other
carbonades recipes I’ve seen, but I think it makes the dish absolutely perfect.
Can you tell how much I enjoyed this little foray into the
world of meat cooking and eating? Honestly, apart from the actual chore of the
hour I spent reducing four kilos of meat into small pieces, it was all pleasure
–the ease of knowing exactly what I was doing without having to refer back to
the recipe all the time, the smell of the meat browning and then the couple of
hours of yummy rich odour coming from the oven, the idea that all by itself as
it cooled and rested and was reheated it was magically turning into something
delicious. And the actual dish itself? Well in the end it probably had a little
too long in an oven I wasn’t used to so it was on the verge of being
overcooked, but it’s very forgiving, which is why it’s such a good recipe when
you’re not in control of the timings. It was rich and full of flavour and just
delicious.
I’ve had meat several times since we started this veggie
experiment. Mussels out were OK. I had a very good bacon roll, with thick,
salty bacon. I had shepherd’s pie at my mother-in-law’s, that was tasty. All of
them were nice enough but didn’t make me feel that I was particularly missing
anything by not having these things every day. But oh this stew! This is the
thing you need meat for. I’m still waiting for a veggie recipe that is quite so
satisfying.
Here's the entire menu for Week 8.
Claire Watts and her family are cooking vegetarian for a year. You can find out why - and why 'cooking vegetarian' doesn't always necessarily mean 'eating vegetarian' here.
Claire Watts writes and edits books for children.
She's currently working on making something beautiful with fairy tales.
Find out about her Snippets project and how you can help on her Patreon page.
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