Bohemian Goulash

Here at the bottom of the South Pacific the days are getting longer and the nights are feeling warmer. But I'm not fooled: it's still winter.

Nonetheless, my opportunities this winter for posting lovely hearty stews are running short, so here's one of my all-time favourites: Goulash.

Whether your Goulash is simply hearty or truly fiery all comes down to how much spice you add, so if you like a good hit of tongue-burning heat, just double the quantities of paprika and carraway.

Otherwise, this meal follows the template of most of my stew dishes: Sealing the flavours into the meat in a hot pan, deglazing the cooking pan with wine and stock, and cooking for a couple of hours, adding dumplings at the end. What better way to wrap up a Sunday night?

Bohemian Goulash
(Serves 4)

Ingredients:
400g stewing steak, cubed
1 large onion, chopped
4 garlic cloves, crushed and chopped
2t carraway seeds
2t dried thyme or 1T fresh thyme leaves
2T paprika
2t flour (or potato flour to make this recipe Gluten Free)
2 carrots, sliced
3 small potatoes, diced
1 kumera, diced
1/2C red wine
1 1/2C beef stock
1/4C sour cream

Dumplings

Heat some olive oil in a pan, fry the onion and garlic until soft, then add the meat and brown quickly. Add herbs, spices, flour, and freshly ground pepper and salt. Sear thoroughly without burning.
Place the carrots, potatoes and kumera into an oven dish and scoop the browned meat and onions into it. Mix well.
Return the pan to a moderate heat, then add the red wine, scraping the bottom of the pan to bring up all the cooking flavour. Add the stock, not too quickly, ensuring the reduction doesn't cool too far. Allow to thicken slightly.

Pour the reduction over the meat and veges in the pan, top up with a little water if required to stop the meat from drying out.

Cover and place into a preheated oven at 200C, and cook for 1 1/2 hours. Then add your dumplings, and cook for a further 20-30 minutes.
When the stew is done, dish up the dumplings, then mix the sour cream through before serving. If, like me, you sometimes forget to do this, it's also fine to just spoon it up on top of the stew.

Great with mashed potato and fresh steamed greens, plus a nice big glass of bold red wine.

Gnocchi, Gnocchi, Gnocchi on Heaven's Door

Yes, the sad puns don't get much sadder than that. However, you get the point.

Every culture has its own version of dumplings. The English have lovely glutinous globs of flour and butter, in China they wrap up pork in dumpling dough and steam them, and in Italy they make them out of potato and call them Gnocchi.

My sister asked me specially to have a go at gnocchi, because she's had some really good ones, and some really bad ones. Generally speaking, the bad ones have come from the supermarket in sealed plastic bags, and the good ones have been homemade or catered.

My own experiences of gnocchi have been, unfortunately, a combination: Mass produced gnocchi supplied as part of a catered meal, and I've never been impressed. So this time I did some research.

Eventually I settled on this recipe (scroll down a little to reach the recipe), give or take a few tricks and techniques and ingredients I noticed along the way. The key thing I found, and what I think distinguishes the rubbery shop bought stuff from the elusive light and delicious homemade type, is the handling. It's very important not to overwork the dough, as the air you create by grating the potato is what gives the gnocchi their lightness. I assume that commercial attempts at this are all done by soulless machines that crush the life out of the potato long before it ever gets as far as your mouth, thus the disparity of experiences as reported above.

I set out to remedy this cosmic injustice.

I just wish someone had told me how long it was going to take to do so.

Making good gnocchi took a long time. For the most part, I put this down to my not having a clue what I was doing, and I'd say that I could easily trim up the time and effort required with a bit of practice and the application of some cooking nouse, now that I've done it once.

But seriously, this is a dish for a rainy Sunday afternoon. Delicious, but labour intensive. My verdict: eating-wise, these were really well worth the time, but if I'd had anything else that had needed doing, it would have just become plain old hash browns.

Fresh Potato Gnocchi with Tuna Sauce (Serves 3)

Gnocchi Ingredients:
500g New Potatoes
75g Strong (Hi-Grade) Flour
25g Fresh Grated Parmesan
1 Small Egg, Beaten
Freshly Ground Pepper, Salt and Nutmeg, season to taste

Method (Direct from the Otago Daily Times, Wed 20th August 2008)Wash and boil the potatoes with the skins on until just cooked.

Drain and peel with a paring knife while still hot. (If the potatoes are not hot when peeled they can become gluey when mashed.) Mash or pass potatoes through a mouli, make a well in the centre and season.

Add egg, Parmesan and flour and mix together as you would scone dough.

It is important not to overwork the mixture.

Divide dough in half and roll out, on a floured surface, into two 2cm-thick lengths.

Cut through dough on the angle using a sharp knife or dough scraper.

For a clean cut, sprinkle a little flour over the dough before cutting.

Gently place gnocchi onto a tray and blanch in a large pot of salted boiling water.

The gnocchi will sink but rise to the surface when almost cooked.

Cook for one more minute and remove with a slotted spoon.

Chill in iced water, drain and toss in olive oil to prevent them sticking together.

Place gnocchi into a hot ovenproof non-stick pan with one tablespoon of olive oil.

Avoid stirring the gnocchi in the pan as you can damage the crust.

When a good colour is achieved, turn gnocchi over and place into a 180degC oven for 4-5min.

The Tuna Sauce, in comparison, is really really quick:

Tuna Sauce (Serves 3)

Ingredients:
1 Onion, Chopped fine
1 Large Fresh Tomato, Chopped
2T Worcester Sauce
Freshly Ground Salt And Pepper
1/8 Cup of Tomato Paste
2t Sugar
100g Tin of Sandwich Tuna
2T Sour Cream

Method:
Fry the onion and tomato in a small pan with the Worcester and seasonings. When the onion has softened, add the tomato paste and sugar, then the tuna.

Mix well, bring to a steady heat and then simmer until heated through. Shortly before serving, stir Sour Cream through, then remove from the heat.

Dish up on a plate with the hot gnocchi.
Serve with salad, and more sour cream. And after all that work, you better make sure that everyone who's sharing these with you really enjoys them.

Winter is here

Oh yes. Jack Frost has been about, and the wind is now blowing cold from the north as well as the south.

After a week that has ranged from the mildly annoying to the downright depressing, it's finally the weekend again. We missed our trip to the market last week due to being in the South Island, but we braved the cold and the wind to get down there this morning. The sun came out and it was a clear crisp day at the riverbank with bargains to be found. We spent about $30, and the vege crisper, fruitbowl, and the cupboard where the onions, potatoes and kumaras live are all overflowing.

A quick word about garlic. Without any suggestion of xenophobia, I really have to recommend that you (assuming you're in NZ - if not, replace "NZ" with "local" just to make the same points) buy NZ garlic if you can find it. Most of what we get in the stores is grown overseas, particularly in China, and you'll see it in those jammed plastic mesh bags in the supermarket for bargain prices. NZ garlic is more expensive than the mass imported stuff you can get, but it has a much shorter drive to the market. Besides the reduced carbon footprint of buying local produce and the way that local stuff tends to taste better, we have stringent quality controls in place in NZ to regulate the quality of the soil that our food is grown in. But my main issue with the chinese garlic we have here is that by the time is gets to us, most of it is going green in the middle, and these bits have to be cut out, and the cloves are usually a bit rubbery. For the sake of knowing that you're eating a quality product that you can use completely and has been grown in good soil without having been shipped across an ocean to reach you, look out for NZ garlic.

Beef Stew with Lime, Chilli and Kumara

Cube about 400g of stewing steak (to serve 2 adults, 1 toddler and to leave enough for one lunch)

Finely slice a small head of garlic
Deseed and finely slice one small red chilli (You can up this amount if you are a chilli fiend - I went on the awfully mild side because my lovely wife is a chilliphobe and I thought I should be careful not to burn Isaac's mouth or else he might never eat chilli anything again!)
Grate the zest from half a lime. Combine all the above in a metal bowl. Add the juice of half a lime, a big swig of soy sauce, some freshly ground pepper, a splash of olive oil, and a T of brown sugar. Put aside to marinade for at least half an hour.

Heat some oil (I use Rice Bran Oil for my basic cooking) in a heavy pan and start frying up the fat you've removed from the meat. This is just to get the flavour of the meat into the onion base. While you can eat this cooked fat, I don't recommend it. It might seem crunchy and nice at first, but it doesn't go down quite the same as crackling.

Preheat the oven to 210c.

Normally I would make a base for the stew of onions and carrots, but our visit to the market today convinced me to deviate from this plan ever so slightly. We got some lovely carrots with the tops still on, which I couldn't bear to chop up, and we got some really cheap tomatoes, some of which were on the way out.

Roughly chop one large onion and four overripe tomatoes. Remove the beef fat from the pan, cook the onions and tomatoes until softened (about 7 minutes) and then place in an oven dish that has a lid. Add a little extra oil to loosen up the pan, get the oil very hot, then add the meat. As liquid runs off the meat into the pan, drain through a sieve back into the metal bowl, and tap any solid flavour in the sieve back into the pan. Repeat this until the meat is able to brown nicely, probably about 3 times. Into the metal bowl with the juices, add a cup of hot water and half an Oxo Beef Stock Cube. If you have a cup of beef stock, this will do the trick as well. Stand this by.

When the meat is brown all over and just starting to crisp, remove from the pan into the oven dish with the onions. Heat the pan again and add about 1/4 Cup of Red Wine. Use a spatula to stir up all the residual flavours from the pan, then add the stock mixture. Allow this to reduce. Mix up 1t of cornflour in 1/2 a Cup of cold water and add gradually. You may not need to put all the cornflour mixture in, just judge it as you go. Continue to reduce the gravy, allowing it to thicken, until its about the consistency of cream.

Peel and chop a kumara into bite-size pieces. Pour the gravy into the oven dish and add in the kumara. Combine all and place in the oven, covered. Cook at 210c for 25mins, then reduce to 190c for a further 1 1/2 hrs.

Meanwhile, get your dumplings ready. This comes pretty much straight from the Edmonds CookBook, so if you don't have this fine kitchen manual, I strongly suggest you find a copy. Sift 1.25C of Flour, 1t Baking Powder, a pinch of salt and the other half of the Oxo Cube into a bowl. Add a shake of dried mixed herbs and 50g of butter, cubed. If you have a pastry blender, this is an easy way to crumble up the ingredients. If not, just rub it through your fingers until it feels like a light crumble. Then add milk or water a little at a time until the dough forms into a sticky mass.

The stew should cook for 2 hours, and the dumplings should go in for the last half hour. Get the stew out of the oven. If it seems a little dry, add a splash of hot water over the top. Spoon the dumpling dough over the stew in balls, replace the lid and return to the oven for the final half hour.


For the veges tonight, I sliced the carrots lengthwise so that they still felt all rural what with their tops on and all. I steamed them for about 10 minutes and put the fresh green beans into the steamer for the last 2 minutes. Crunchy fresh veges with tender beef and chewy dumplings! With the fire going and the rain walking down the windows, it was a great night to be inside.

It Begins with Sugar Free Stew

Firstly, lets be clear about one thing. Normally, I remember everything thats meant to go into my cooking. Being sent home sick from work on Friday, I have to admit I wasn't really on form on Saturday when I started on one of my famous stews. To put that in perspective, I rarely work off actual recipes anyway, but there are certain things that must be done. So it was rather unfortunate that with Uncle K coming to dinner, I missed out the critical dosage of brown sugar necessary to balance the balsamic vinegar that gives the beef its melty texture.

On top of that, I thought that rather than my tried and true dumplings, modified only slightly from the classic Edmonds Cookbook recipe, I'd have a go at Yorkshire pudding. Well, there's some work needing to be done to get those right. I'm sure that its not meant to form a dark crust on the underside that tastes more like burnt toast than either Yorkshire or pudding. I'll give them another go at some point, maybe doing it in muffin tins like C has suggested. Until then, it'll be dumplings all the way.

Luckily, the homemade bread came out perfectly, but you get that after about 6 years practice. Thanks to L for the extra cheese in the fridge.

Despite the hiccups (no pun intended), everything got eaten and was well enjoyed by all, even the obligatory steamed broccoli and cauli. Dinner was followed by Celtic beer and the David Fincher mini-epic Zodiac, which was longer than it needed to be, but nicely shot, before discussions about building fences and gates.

Sugar Free Stew (with optional recommended Sugar) - Serves 3 (plus one 1-yr old)

600g Topside Beef - cube and season with freshly ground nutmeg, salt & pepper, olive oil, worcester sauce, balsamic vinegar, dried tarragon, carraway seeds, 2 bay leaves, flour to coat. This is also where, if you remember, you should add the brown sugar. Leave to stand for at least 15 minutes. Chop 2 onions, 2 carrots, and a bulb of garlic.

Preheat the oven to 200c.

Brown meat in hot oil in batches. Place browned meat in an ovenproof dish with a lid, and put the onions, carrots and garlic into the hot pan. Wilt lightly, then add a good splash of soy sauce. Simmer that for a few minutes. Remove to the dish with the meat, and heat the pan before adding:
1/2 cup of red cooking wine, 1 1/2 cups of beef stock with about 2 T of condensed tomato paste. Deglaze the pan, scraping all the sticky good stuff off the bottom. If you have forgotten the brown sugar before this point, this is also a good time to add it. When the gravy has reduced by about 1/3, drain it off into the oven dish. Add hot water to cover the stew, stir everything together, and place in the centre of the oven.

Cook for as long as possible, preferably about 3 hours.

Serve with fresh bread and dumplings. Watch this space for that recipe at a later date. Good with a bold red wine, such as a Shiraz.

D