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Slow Cooked Beef Stew

Copyright 2008 by Stephen Vermeulen
Last updated: 2008 Oct 12
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This is a hearty beef stew with chickpeas and black eyed peas. This was a ad-lib creation, the measurements are what I used but could easily be varied to improved or suit your taste.

Ingredients - Part 1

  • 1.118kg stewing beef (bought pre-cut into cubes)
  • 30g canola oil
  • 28oz can of whole tomatoes
  • 28oz can of crushed tomatoes
  • 2g dried oregano

Ingredients - Part 2

  • 150g dried black eyed peas
  • 150g dried chickpeas

Ingredients - Part 3

  • 500g fresh carrots,
  • 100g fresh celery, use both stalk and leaves
  • 100g fresh leek (one medium sized leak)
  • 220g fresh parsnip

Preparation

This is a slow cooker recipe, so set up your slow cooker (the above quantities will fill a large one) and then:
  1. heat the canola oil in a skillet and brown the beef cubes
  2. put all the beef into the slow cooker
  3. add the tomatoes
  4. add the oregano
Now put the slow cooker on a low setting for about 8-10 hours.

At this time you can put the black eyed peas and chickpeas to soak in water, they need to be covered to about 2-3 times their depth in water.

That's it for the first part, now you wait for the 8 hours or so.

The last step is to chop up all the fresh vegetables from "Ingredients - Part 3", just rough chop them into 1-2 cm chunks and toss them into the slow cooker. At this time you can drain the black eyed and chickpeas and add them to the slow cooker as well. Leave the slow cooker on low and cook for another 4 hours or so.

Serve with pasta, rice or a rough bread to soak up the gravy.

Notes

It might be possible to just add the chickpeas and black eyed peas right at the beginning without any pre-soaking, if you do this you'll probably need to add additional liquid for them to soak up.

The stew as described is quite thick, certainly no need to add any thickening agent (flour, corn starch, tapioca), in fact you may need to add 200-300ml of water.

The 4 hours cook time for the vegetables is fine for the carrots, there is still some crunchiness left to the dried peas which suggests they could be added at an earlier time.

I didn't add any pepper or salt (the tomatoes bring enough salt to the dish), so a bit of fresh ground pepper is nice to add once it has been dished out.

The use of a leek probably eliminates the need for an onion, but it would be worth chopping up and browning an onion and adding it to the beef.

Potato, mushrooms (particularly the dried ones as they can be quite chewy) and olives would be interesting additions.

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