Warming Beef Stew

I struggled with a name for this. It was never meant to be a spicy dish, but it is full of spices, like cinnamon and cumin, so I went with something that sounds good given the current weather in the UK.
For 3:
3 Casserole Steaks
4 Onions
3 Cans of Chopped Tomatoes
2 Carrots
1 Clove of Garlic
Ground Cumin
Dried Coriander
Ground Nutmeg
Ground Cinnamon
1 Saucepan

1. Peel and chop the onions and garlic. Fry in saucepan until almost browned.
2. Chop casserole steak into pieces about a cubic inch (2.5 cm) in size. Fry the beef in the saucepan until brown.
3. Add the spices and mix into the onions and beef.
4. Once fully mixed in, add the tomatoes and carrots.

5. Simmer for about 1 hour and/or until the sauce is sufficiently thickened. Serve.

Volumise: Add more carrots. Add some spinach about 2 minutes before serving.
Add carbs: Use more tomatoes. Add some peppers roughly ten minutes before serving.
Add fat: Mix in some coconut oil, almond or coconut flour.
Add protein: Serve with bacon. Use more beef. I imagine everyone is sick of hearing "use more bacon", but unfortunately, it is a universal trueism that bacon improves pretty much everything.

Also, this will be posted to Fightback Friday at Food Renegade on Friday. Feel free to head over there and check out more recipes and food related articles.

Roast beef in plum sauce with mashed cauliflower

Good God! I thought I mightn't post this week because of exams and whatnot, but this was genuinely too good not to share. I really enjoyed this meal. The sauce was amazing.
Let's get straight to it.
For 2:
4 Small Beef Steaks
2 Plums
3 Glugs of red wine (yes, that's a unit!)
3 Onions
1 Cauliflower Head
1 Beef Stock cube (Knorr)
Coconut Oil
Roasting Dish
Frying pan
Saucepan

1. Heat the oven to about 150 degrees C. Once hot, put the steaks in with some coconut oil.
2. Slice the onions finely. Fry in the pan on a low heat with some oil.
3. Cut down to the plum stone, run the knife all the way round, then twist the plum apart and remove the stone. Chop each half plum into four pieces (so 16 plum pieces in all). Add them to the frying pan with the onions.
4. Put a saucepan of water on the boil.
5. Chop the cauliflower up into bit and start boiling it once the water is boiling.
6. Add two glugs of wine and the stock cube to the frying pan and one glug of wine to the beef in the oven. Stir the frying pan until the stock cube dissolves.

7. Once the sauce is thickened up and the beef has had roughly 40 minutes, add the liquid from the baking tray to the frying pan.
8. Once the cauliflower is boiled, drain it, then mash it.

9. Once the beef has had 1 hour total and the sauce is thick, serve.

Volumise: Use more cauliflower, boil or steam some broccoli.
Add Carbs: Boil and mash some sweet potato instead or as well.
Add fat: Add coconut oil to the mash.
Add Protein: Wrap the steaks in bacon and with cheese.

PS Most of these recipes are now going up on Chowstalker. Two points come to mind:
1. They have a ratings system. If you enjoyed the recipe, let them know.
2. They have a butt-load more good recipes.
Enjoy.

Stuffed Peppers

I made these ages ago. They worked quite well.
I just had another go at them, they were delicious and very easy to eat.
I imagine that, with some dressing (like replacing the lids) they could be used as a (relatively) fancy starter.
On the other hand, you can eat them like a (rather messy) apple once they've cooled down a bit:
For 3:
800g Beef mince
6 Peppers
Chilli Powder
Roasting Tray

1. Cut the centre out of the peppers.
2. Mix the beef mince with as much chilli powder as you want.
3. Stuff the peppers with the mince.
4. Roast the peppers at 200 degrees C for 30 minutes.

Volumise: Add shredded spinach to the beef mince.
Add fat: Use fattier mince.

Meatza

Sounds crazy; tastes amazing.
For 4:
800g beef mince
1 Carton Tomato Passatta
1 Onion
1 Pepper (Red)
4 Mushrooms
Oregano
1 Saucepan
1 Baking Tray

1. Press the beef mince into an even layer in the baking tray.
2. Mix the passatta and some oregano in the saucepan, boiling down to make a thick sauce.
3. While this is boiling, put the baking tray in the oven at 200 degrees C for 20 minutes.
4. Chop the onions, pepper and mushrooms into thin slices.
5. Once the mince is cooked, pour the tomato sauce onto the base, and place the onion, pepper and mushroom on top.
6. Return this to the oven until the vegetables are slightly crisped.

Volumise: Add some spinach with the veg in step 5.
Add carbs: Use more peppers.
Add fat: Place a layer of cheese on top of the vegetables.
Add protein: Use more beef mince. Use some usual pizza toppings such as pepperoni.

Meatballs with Vegetable Stir Fry

Forth and final installment (for now) in my Chinese cooking series. One of my major weaknesses is lack of diversity when it comes to veg so this meal also contains a very simple vegetable stir fry that I'll work on in the future.
For 4:
900g beef mince
4 Spring Onions
4 Garlic Cloves
2 Tablespoons Ground Ginger
2 Tablespoons Apple Juice
2 Tablespoons Oil
2 Eggs
2 Pak Choi (Chinese Cabbage)
6 Medium Mushrooms
1/2 Broccoli Head
Wok
Frying Pan
Mixing bowl (or use the wok)

1. Chop the spring onions. Chop or mince the garlic. Mix the spring onions, garlic, ginger, apple juice, oil and eggs with a fork until the eggs are beaten together.
2. Thoroughly mix the mince into the mix above. Ball the mince up until balls a little bigger than a golfball. Store on a plate until ready.
3. Pull broccoli florets off of the head. Chop these finely for easy stir-frying.
4. Chop the mushrooms to the same fineness as the broccoli.
5. a. Fry the meatballs in the frying pan in a little oil (they should exude quite a lot of fat as they cook). Fry on "top", then "bottom", then "sides" (obviously they should be spherical, but sides will form as they fry). They should fry through within roughly ten minutes (check the middle of the biggest one before you take them off the pan).
b. The pan probably won't contain all the meatballs in one go, so fry in batches and keep them hot under the grill. Once the last batch have been in the pan for about three minutes, start stir-frying the mushrooms and broccoli.
6. When the meatballs have roughly two minutes left to cook, tear and add the pak choi to the wok. Continue stir-frying for two minutes.

Volumise: Add more pak choi, broccoli or mushrooms. Add some "normal" cabbage to the wok.
Add carbs: Add some sugar to the meatball mix. Add a little tomato puree to the meatball mix. Serve with a sweet potato (or sweet potato mash).
Add fat: Add more oil to the meatball mix. Add some or all of the fat from the frying pan to the stir-fry.
Add protein: Add some bacon to the stir-fry. Add one or two more eggs to the meatball mix.
Make a tasty breakfast: I was cooking bacon alongside this for consumption the next morning. I added the beef fat to the bacon in its container, where it set, adding a ton of calories to my breakfast the next day.

Beef in Chilli Sauce

Getting a bit of a "Chinese" theme for a little while. This is going to sound pretentious as hell, but the one person I know who's been to China says Chinese restaurants are propagating a lie; I don't care, they still make great food.
For 3:
300 g "Sirloin steak" (it was in the 3 for £10 in Tesco, so we're not talking quality here, any sort of frying steak).
4 Small Onions
2 (Red) Peppers
2 Spring Onions
1 Tablespoon Ground Ginger (or fresh, whichever)
1 Chilli (or 1 Tablespoon Hot Chilli Powder)
50 ml Vinegar
1 Tablespoon Almond Flour (AKA Ground Almonds)
3-4 Tablespoons Apple Juice
Wok

1. Peel and chop the onions. Chop the spring onions, chilli and peppers. Chop the chicken into bite-size pieces.
2. Mix the ground ginger, chilli, vinegar, almond flour and apple juice. Again, I mixed it with a fork in a mug, because I'm very well equipped.
3. Throw the veg into the pan, followed by the beef, then the sauce (obviously, the chilli is chopped, so make sure you throw the sauce into the pan so the chilli gets into the pan).
4. Stir-fry the lot.

Volumise: I'm not gonna be very inventive here - spinach, pak choi, lettuce, bean sprouts; like last time.
Add carbs: Again, add some sugar to the sauce. Use less vinegar and more apple juice or some kind of apple sauce into the sauce.
Add fat: I added some coconut oil to the sauce, but as it's solid it wasn't easy to mix in.
Add protein: Again, add some egg to the sauce. Perhaps serve on an omelette base.
Add pretentiousness: Point out that I went to a local "foreign" (of the "Indian" variety) to get the chillis for this and the okra for the updated Texan Chicken. I also went to an independent supermarket to get the almond flour and coconut oil.

Roast beef with roast sweet potato, roast carrots and gravy

I've made this before, but made a small change to cooking the veg, and it made a huge difference.
For two (plus sandwiches) I used:
900g of rolled beef brisket
1 large sweet potato
3 large carrots
2 beef OXO cubes
Tin (aluminium) foil
1 large frying pan
1 large saucepan
1 roasting dish
1 jug
A kettle
A colander

1. Put your frying pan on a high heat with oil, fill and turn on the kettle, turn your oven to 150 degrees C. Put the beef on the frying pan, frying all the sides until brown all over; meanwhile, pour boiling water into jug and mix one OXO cube into the boiling water.
2. Once browned, put the beef into the roasting dish, salt and pepper it, pour the OXO stock over it, and cover the roasting dish with a "tent" of foil. Place in the pre-heated oven.
3. After an hour, turn the meat over. Still tented, return to the oven.
4. Repeat 3.
5. After the beef has been in the oven for about two and a quarter hours, peel your carrots and sweet potato (or not) and chop into large chunks (this is not optional).
6. Boil the sweet potato and carrots in salted water for 4 minutes (i.e. parboil them). Drain them with the colander (or as I did, with the lid of the pan, and a scalding). Return them to the saucepan, put the lid on, and shake them about so they get a bit battered.
7. After the beef has been in the oven for about two and a half hours (or once you're done peeling, slicing and parboiling), put the veg in with it, pour oil and salt over the veg.
8. Clean that saucepan.
9. After a total of three hours, take the roasting dish out of the oven, take out the beef and the veg, and pour the juices into the (clean) saucepan. Return the beef and veg to the roasting dish and into the oven at 170 degrees C.
10. Heat the juices over a medium heat. Put a small amount of boiling water into the jug, mix in an OXO cube, and add that to the saucepan. Put a small amount of cold water into the jug, and mix in some (corn)flour with a fork (or a whisk, if you wanna be posh).
11. After a total of three and a half to four hours in the oven for the beef, take the lot out. Slice up the beef, scrape the blackened, but not burnt, veg off the bottom of the pan and pour the gravy over it.
12. Put off washing that roasting dish until tomorrow - honestly, nothing will move that except an overnight soak (or maybe that stuff that black chef advertises on TV).

Volumise: Add some parsnips, turnips or other root veg (not potatoes) to the veg present. Replace sweet potatoes with these to reduce carbs.
Add carbs: Add some more sweet potatoes or some potatoes.
Add fat: Use almond flour in the gravy. Replace some of the water-based stock with olive oil. Pour more oil over the roasting meat and veg at every possible point. Buy a "self-basting" joint, that is one with a block of fat on top.
Add protein: While you're putting the veg into the pan, wrap the beef in bacon (pig for more fat, turkey for less).
Add a hospitalisation: Don't use oven gloves.

Jerked beef, fried broccoli and peanut-mashed cauliflower

The jerked beef and the fried broccoli I'd made and eaten before, it's not a bad combo, but the herby, peanut-buttery mashed cauliflower was a new one, and I think it worked well (would have worked better had I not rushed it and not cooked the cauliflower to fully mashable, but whatever).
For three, I used:
600g of beef steak (it was on offer in the supermarket)
A whole head of cauliflower
A whole head of broccoli
Peanut Butter
Dunn's River Jamaican Jerk Seasoning
2 Frying pans and a saucepan.
1 Colander
1 Masher

1. Put enough water to boil the cauliflower in on the hob to boil.
2. Break up the cauliflower into florets (the larger, the slower they cook), and remove the fibrous stem at the bottom.
3. Place cauliflower in boiling water.
4. Break broccoli into small florets.
5. Heat olive oil to medium heat in smaller frying pan, then add broccoli. Stir every minute or so.
6. Heat olive oil to high heat in larger frying pan, and when hot, add steak and cover in jerk seasoning (to taste). I couldn't fit all my steak in one pan at once, it took me three goes, so it went in as soon as the broccoli did.
7. Once the cauliflower is over-boiled, but not discoloured (when you think you can mash it), strain it in a colander, return it to the pan (which should be on no heat, but on the still-warm hob) and mash. About half-way through mashing add a tablespoon scoop of peanut butter and some mixed herbs (I used thyme, oregano and sage) and continue mashing until its consistency is as close to mashed potato as possible.
8. The broccoli should look a bit brown in places when its cooked (which should be soon) and the beef should be as well done as you like (I always cook to well done because I refrigerate mine). Serve it with the cauliflower in a heap at the bottom, the beef on top of it and the broccoli around the edge so that the cauliflower absorbs the beef juices.

Volumise: It's broccoli and cauliflower. Add more of it and ta-da; it's volumised!
Add carbs: Replace cauliflower with potato. Sprinkle a little sugar on the beef as well as the seasoning. Add a little sugar to the mash.
Add fat: Add more peanut butter in the mash. Replace the broccoli with fried avocado (I haven't tried this, but I will).
Add protein: Um, more beef. Make the beef a leaner cut. If you're desperate, you could try adding a small amount of whey powder paste to the mash, but I would not advise it.
Add anger-management: Tenderise the beef with your fists. Just punch the shit out of it. Trust me, I've done it, it works.