Yummy beef stew - cheap too

Ok, so I didn't entirely make this up myself, I got the quantities of beef to liquid from various internet recipes but the rest is mine alone!

It makes enough for four hungry people if served with swede/potatoe and a vegetable.

400g beef suitable for slow cooking - stewing, braising etc
oil, preferably something flavourless like vegetable
4 tablespoons plain flour
2 pinches each celery seeds and savoury
3 pinches dried sage
salt and pepper
6-8 shallots, the smaller the better, peeled
2-3 carrots
1 can tomatoes
water
small bottle red wine (one of those third size bottles they sell for single people!)

Add the herbs to the flour, season and stir. Toss the beef pieces in the flour and fry in a dutch oven in the oil, in batches so they can brown without getting steamy. Don't worry about cooking them through, they only need browning on the edges, it will get fully cooked later.

When all the beef is browned add it all to the pot with the remaining flour, shallots, carrots, tinned tomatoes and wine. Also, fill the tin half full with water and add it.

Put the lid on and cook it in the oven for about an hour and a half at 180 degrees C.

Serve with a green vegetable and some form of carbohydrate. With stew, I have a preference for swede that stems from my childhood.

Yummy!

For the really budget conscious amongst my non-existent readership, you could substitute other English herbs in instead of buying celery seed, savoury or sage specially. Thyme would work well.

New Year, new cook books, new recipes!

I think you can tell a lot about a person from what books they got at Christmas. I got the following:
Hats, An Anthology By Stephen Jones;
Vogue Covers;
Latin, A Biography;
German Cooking;
Illustrated Food and Cooking of the Caribbean, Central and South America;
Illustrated Food and Cooking of Africa and Middle East;
The Hummingbird Bakery Book (I also got given silcon cupcake cases and a cupcake stand - people know me well);
and, which I bought myself with Christmas money, Warm Bread and Honey Cake.

Fairly representative of my interests - fashion, history and cooking. I should have studied historical chefs outfits at university.

I am extremely excited to start trying out my new cookbooks and sharing the results with my imaginery readership. We've been a bit slow recently but I am pleased to announce that very soon, for the first time, I will be listing a recipe I have INVENTED MYSELF. Yup, a new stage in my cooking and blogging. It's a paneer and chick pea salad, very fresh tasting for the new year if you're tired of all the heavy stuff we seem to be eating at the moment.

Until then, I'm off to eat my lovely lunch - pheasant and red cabbage soup, made with the left overs from Wednesday night's roast.

Toodle pip.

Ich bin ein Berliner

Actually, I'm not and nor did I eat a donoughnut for this post. And the whole 'ich bin ein Berliner' meaning I am a jelly donoughnut is an urban legend.

Anyway, I did got to the Zeigeist in Vauxhall for dinner recently. It's all part of Schwester's learning Deutsch intensive course. Eat German, hopefully speak German.

They were out of my favourite dish Kartoffelkuchen mit Apfelmuss (potato cakes with apple sauce) but which they call Rievkooche. Rievkooche must be the Plattdeutsch (low German) name for the same dish (ooh, I have learned something!).

I ended up having a Weiner Schnitzel which was very good but then it's not hard to mess up.

There's a very good selection of beers and a fair selection of wine. I love German food so we might well cook something else traditional. My text book has a few ideas so watch this space!

The world is still my oyster

I'm still on an oyster kick and apparently there's even truth in the old adage that oysters are milky around full moons.

I had some last Friday, very near the full moon and they were milky.

Amazing! I had thought it was something of an old wives tale.

(Sorry we've been away recently, both boy and schwester are very busy at the moment.)

The world is your oyster

I spent the weekend in lovely Norfolk and ate oysters at the Hoste Arms in Burnham Market, which is something of a tradition.

They were the best oysters I've ever eaten. Giant in comparison to the ones you get out of season and so fresh and sweet. They are the taste emodiment of the smell of the sea. Heaven.

What caused me to write this up (apart from wanting to relive the moment) was that I finally realised what the oysters are best in months with r in their name rule was all about. List all the months without r in - May, June, July and August. All the months with r in - September, October, November, December, January, February, March and April. Ooooooh right, it's the cold months! Or as my friend CharlyMouse puts it - all the months with r in make you go brrrrrrrr with cold.

Yalla Yalla-do

Yalla Yalla is a new Libanese restaurant and cafe that's opened up near Schwester's work. She's been meaning to try it for ages but it's probably a good thing she's waited until now because otherwise she's already be a dress size larger.

It is excellent. She had a halloumi wrap for lunch with an orange blossom lemonade. It was streets ahead of the halloumi wrap she'd eaten from a local sandwich bar recently and was very well priced. All the food is made freshly and it makes all the difference. You can really taste it. Cheap halloumi is nasty and not even the best chef can hide it but this wrap was a delight. Every mouthful was a pleasure. It was a flat bread wrap with fresh salad and olives and was well worth the £3.50 asking price. Even the meat wraps were only £4.00 which for something so tasty is a very good deal!

The only downside was the slightly slow service but that appeared to be the result of an infortuitously timed lunch break. Schwester will definitely be going back and hopefully in the evening as there's a proper menu to sample.

She also may be back to sample some of their delicious looking cakes... individual fig tart anyone?

What a saucy tart!

Boy couldn't fit in a Voyages session this week so it was left to Schwester to wave the flag for exploratory eating.

She trudged off to Vauxhall on a slightly hungover Sunday where she cured any possible illness by indulging in some awesome Portuguese custard tarts at the lovely Cafe Madeira with CM. Cafe Madeira is part of a small family run business that specialises in Portuguese food.

Not only was their coffee excellent - CM's black coffee came with lovely thick crema on the top - but the custard tarts were amazing. Schwester had two (they are small!) and would highly, highly recommend them. They were the perfect consistency - the custard was set but not firm, the pastry was still crisp but not hard. They were perfect reminders of why custard tarts are popular and how far the real deal is from those nasty, blanched things you find in the supermarket.

The only downside to all this is that Schwester's discovered there's an outlet very near her flat that sells them which means she can access them whenever she wants...