Winterstew

It was Saturday in mid-November the weekend after bonfire weekend and I had spent the morning having a good session of snooker. The next day I was due to drive down to the midlands to catch up with some family I had not seen for five years.

The weather was generating some gale force winds not dissimilar to those in 1987 that caused more than a few problems for this country. This said I knew it was going to be a challenging drive if the weather kept up so I decided to cook something suitably fortifying by making a beef stew.

The ingredients were as follows:

15 ounces of diced beef.
1 diced onion.
Half a red cabbage thinly sliced.
1 diced onion.
1 diced potato.
8 ounces of lentils.
Tablespoon of tomato puree.
Half a teaspoon of black pepper.
1 pint of Banks Bitter.
Half a pint of vegetable stock.

The first job was to warm up some rape seed oil in my wok. I then added the beef and fried it lightly until it was brown on all sides. I also added all the vegetables and fried them for about five minutes. Next I added the tomato puree and stirred it into the food with the black pepper being added and stirred in at the same time.

After that I poured in a pint of Banks' Best Bitter which is suitable for this dish as it is an ale with a nut brown colour with sufficient bitterness to offset the taste of the beef. After roughly half the bitter had been absorbed I then added the vegetable stock and the lentils and warmed the food through for five minutes.

After that I added the stew to a high sided glass baking dish that I had put plenty of rapeseed oil in the bottom of. I then covered the top of the dish with cooking foil and stewed in the oven at gasmark three for three hours.

As I put the dish full of food in the oven the closing part of Joni Mitchell's 1994 effort "Turbulent Indigo" began to play. This record is one of her better latter day records and although it isn't quite up there with classics from the seventies like "Court and Spark" and of course "Blue" it is still a very good record with songs such as "Sunny Sunday" and the anthem to futility "Sex Kills".

After the stew had been in the oven for two of the three hours I took it out briefly to remove the foil and then put it back in the oven for the final hour of cooking.

Although it takes a long time to cook this dish is worth the wait and although, obviously, the beer gives a distinct bitterness to it the rich and succlent beef with the softened cabbage, potatoes and lentils make this meal a winner. It certainly did the job of filling me with energy for the challenging drive I undertook the next day.

Freshly Stewed; the perfect fortification against the high, chilly winds of winter.