Ingredients
- 1 kg West Ilkerton stewing steak or braising steak trimmed and cut into bite-sized pieces
- 1 or 2 onions (red if possible) skinned and chopped
- 1 tablespoon of beef dripping olive oil or cooking oil
- 1 heaped tablespoon of plain flour seasoned with herbs & spices of your choice. We particularly like freshly ground black pepper and grated ginger
- 1 bottle of Exmoor Beast Ale
- You can add more vegetables to this (mushrooms / carrots / chopped tomatoes / whortleberries or chestnuts all go well) after the meat has cooked for about an hour.
Method
Brown the onions in a little fat in a casserole dish, stirring occasionally so they cook evenly, then take the dish off the heat.
Dust the diced beef with seasoned flour. Fry in batches on a high heat in a separate frying pan, to seal the meat, and put the fried meat into the casserole dish.
When all the meat has been fried and added to the onions in the casserole dish, return the casserole dish to the hob on moderate heat.
Open a bottle of Exmoor Beast and (resisting the temptation to take a swig) add it gradually to the beef and onions, stirring continuously. Bring the ingredients to the boil, still stirring, so that the gravy around the meat thickens and becomes smooth.
Put the lid on the casserole dish and put it in a moderately hot oven (about 160 degrees centigrade). After about half an hour for braising steak or an hour for diced beef / stewing steak, add whatever extra vegetables and fruit you want e.g. mushrooms, carrots, chestnuts, cherry tomatoes and / or whortleberries.
Cook until the meat is tender, and serve the dish with potatoes (baked, boiled, roasted, mashed…) and vegetables. Red cabbage, spring greens, herby cabbage, cauliflower cheese, roast parsnips, carrots, sprouts, peas and beans are all excellent.
Double or treble the quantities to feed more people or to eat some now a store the rest in the fridge or freezer. This dish freezes well. We always have a few old ice cream tubs of it in our freezer as a stand-by (which can cause confusion if I forget to label the container and Chris fancies some ice cream for pudding!).
