Steak and Ale pie is one of my favourites. Like all one pot dishes it is simple to prepare and, if you are familiar with the process, almost an unthinking act. You should be spending no more than 20 minutes cooking it and then that’s it, your job is to let the oven melt it into submission over the course of two and a half hours.

So, get preparing:

600g braising steak

2 red onions, diced

2 or 3 cloves of garlic

4 medium carrots, sliced generously

1 punnet of chestnut mushrooms, quartered

1 bottle of Guinness or Superbock

1 beef stock cube

Ready prepared puff pastry

1 egg, beaten

Rosemary

Flour

Heat the oven to 190C.

Dice the onion and get that slowly softening over a medium heat. Then chop then garlic, carrots and mushrooms and, when the onion is soft – add to the pan.

Chop the meat into bite sized chunks and throw that into the pan along with a good two tablespoons of chopped rosemary, crushed beef stock cube (you can go mad here and add chilli, worcestershire sauce – anything that takes your fancy. Then add a tablespoon of flour. This will help thicken the sauce. A pie with a runny sauce is like a child with a runny nose – not a good thing at all.

Give it all a stir and let it fry for a few minutes before adding the Guinness. Add boiling water so the stock just covers the meat and then bring everything up to the simmer point.

Cover and slam into the oven for 1½ hours. Check the mix after that and give it a good stir and then continue cooking for another hour. Keep checking though because you don’t want the sauce to dry up.

When you are happy that everything is tender, spoon out the mix into individual pie dishes and then cover with some rolled out flaky pastry. Bung it all back in the oven for about 30 minutes or until the pastry is golden and then eat with some green vegetables.

©2010 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

Presentation should have dictated a lighter touch on the sauce but the steak was in there for the finding.

I have a love-hate relationship with meat. I know it’s cruel. I know it’s environmentally wasteful. In all conscience I shouldn’t be eating it. But I’m weak. And it tastes great.Saturday’s evening meal was steak with veg.

I’ve been eating too much risotto and pasta lately and not enough green vegetables so I decided to go old school and cook up a simple meal of steak, mushrooms, veg and potatoes. It worked out pretty well.

The potatoes were the king of this dish. I know the steak ought to have been but really, I can’t get enough roast potatoes into my gob and these were perfect. You’ll see how they were cooked from the photo. Jersey Royals the size of a small boy’s fist (yes, I measured) were scrubbed and then par-boiled for about 10 minutes whilst I heated up a couple of tablespoons of oil on a roasting tray. You could flavour the oil a bit with garlic but for this I decided to go naked and leave off everything bar the seasoning.

After the 10 minutes were up I poured the hot oil over the potatoes before quickly placing them on to a board and partly slicing. About 2/3rds of the way down and not thinly. The idea is that they stay whole but you get crisping down inside each crack. Then I placed them on the hot roasting tray, poured more hot oil over them and added plenty of salt. Bang, they then went into the oven where they would scream for about an hour at about 200C.

The sauce is the other star and for this I soaked a handful (not smal boy’s this time) of porcini mushrooms in hot water for 20 minutes. Then I heated up my frying pan whilst I chopped an onion into rings and sliced some mushrooms. Looking back I wish I’d used a few nice oyster mushrooms for better presentation and a varied taste but chestnuts were fine. Fry off the onions so you get colour and add the mushrooms, again until you start getting a bit of colour.

When this stage is done you should start throwing in things such as worcester sauce, a beef stock cube, some chilli, pepper, maybe some concentrated liquid stock – anything meaty really. Let’s pretend we’re about to become vegetarians at the end of this meal.

Then add the porcini liqiud as your main stock. I normally pass the liquid through a sieve lined with a couple of paper towels. I must have read that somewhere and still do it. It catches grit or something. But then I dice the now soft porcini mushrooms and add that into my sauce.

Let the sauce reduce down until it’s nice and thick. Assuming my potatoes are taking an hour, I’d say that you’ll have added your porcinis maybe 10 minutes after slamming the potatoes into the oven. That leaves you 50 minutes to reduce it down. Plenty. You may even end up loosening the sauce a little with liquid from your veg.

Right, all that remains is for you to cook your steak and the veg. You can leave that until about 15 minutes before the potatoes are due to emerge. Chop some cauliflower and some broccoli into small florets and pour boiling water over. Cover and simmer for 10 minutes and they ought to be soft enough but not mush. I prefer my veg a bit harder but I cook for my wife and who am I to argue?

Get a frying pan nice and hot for your steaks. Oil the steaks, not the pan and season liberally. Fry for 4 minutes before flipping. I like my steak rare to medium but other wishes dictate a little longer.

After no more than 10 minutes everything should be ready to serve. I carved the steak neatly (which you can’t see beneath the mound of sauce) and then distributed the food artistically but quickly upon the plate. Salt and pepper and then eat.

©2010 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.