Braised Steak & Onions... (and pies)

Braised Steak and Onions with Noodles

Well, the plan was to have this with mashed potatoes, but the whole day was weird and one mistake after another, so two minute noodles it was. I think it was easier to get the kids to try this this way though. Master Three isn't too sure about mashed potatoes, and he's is becoming notoriously difficult about new foods or foods he doesn't recognise, but he loves noodles, and finished his entire plateful with no fussing. This is a recipe my mum makes a lot, and one of my favourites. Here is the recipe as my mother wrote it to me via MSN... only slightly edited to account for her not so great english and grammer skills.

Steak & Onions
1/2 kilo stewing/braising/blade steak
1/2 kilo or more onions
40ml small shot glass of vinegar

Fry the steak brown and then cover it with water and let it simmer until it just about falls to bits. Take out of the sop, and cut very fine. Put aside, fry the onions slowly nice and brown. Add it to the meat, add vinegar and let the whole lot simmer for a few more minutes. Thicken with gravy powder. Stir while you are adding the gravy powder, and have this with mashed potato - yummmmm

So like I said, it was just one thing going wrong after another today. I like to brown my onions first, then let them simmer with the meat, so the meat gets that lovely oniony taste all the way through it. So I'd already started my onions, and turned to the freezer bag of meat, only to open it and find Sunday's meat instead. Too late to stop cooking the steak and onions so then I had to hunt down the gravy beef I wanted to use, defrost that quickly, and continue on. Not a big deal really.

While the meat was simmering away for a few hours, I made some chicken and vegetable pies. Well, I made the filling, the pies didn't end up getting made till the steak and onions was finished.

Pie filling

So I figured I'd have to make up the meat on sticks for dinner tonight, and just make pies out of all of the steak and onions, instead of just making pies out of whatever we had leftover, as I'd planned to. Of course, I ran out of time to put the cubed steak on kebab sticks, despite starting all the cooking around 3pm, so in the end I went with the noodles. Mind you, since I thought this mix was destined purely for pies, I added a few handfuls of frozen mixed vegies, because they were on hand. My mum usually adds frozen peas to her leftovers before wrapping in a sheet of puff pastry and making into pies. But I used up all my mixed vegies, and then the kids decided they really wanted noodles for dinner. Ooops. No chance now of giving them the cubed steak just fried up with some onion and noodles with vegies. So I used my steak and onion pie mix as noodle sauce. As I said, they all ate it.

Steak and onion sans noodles

When I finally got around to making the steak and onion pies (after the chicken ones had all finished cooking) I was tired, and cranky, and running between feeding kids vanilla bean ice cream with Choc Honeycomb flavoured Ice Magic and wrestling with my kitchen to give me enough space to work in, amongst the dishes racked up that afternoon. I had a great big beautiful meat pie, that promptly fell over, and broke in half all over the oven door as I was about to put it in. Then I had to clean up all of that, and get the kids into the bath. Luckily my partner was doing the actual bathing, I just had to get them ready. After all that, I came back to the kitchen, decided I only wanted to make two more big pies, instead of more little ones and consequently over stuffed them. Which resulted in them not sealing properly, and leaking during cooking. At this point I didn't care. I wrapped them in alfoil, and that's how they'll sit in the freezer, and get defrosted, and get cooked. Sure it'll make a mess, but at least it's a disposable one.

Tomorrow I plan on making some sort of a stew with the cubed steak because we are having 'Sausages inna bun' for dinner, and I have no more noodles to go with meat on sticks anyway. Also on tomorrow's cooking agenda is a big double batch of pasta sauce, and possibly some ice cream mixture as well. Not that the next lot of ice cream I'm making is a recipe that requires overnight refrigeration, but the bowl from the ice cream maker needs a minimum of 24 hours freezing prior to making ice cream, and I only got it into the freezer late this evening. But I may leave that to do completely on Friday, since tomorrow is the kids' cooking day, and we are making Choc Crossless Buns, as part of the Cooks Club Challenge from the taste.com.au forums.

Chicken and Vegetable Pie (again!)

Right about now I'm pretty well tired, still haven't caught up in my sleep from the weekend yet, but I wanted to get all this down while I remembered it, and I'm only up so late because we watched "The Seeker: The Dark is Rising" at 10:30pm instead of going to bed then (which I kind of wanted to do). Good movie, although the book, (and the four others in the series) was much better, but that's a gimme anyway. Even though this movie is based on the second book in the series, it's somewhat stand alone, so it works, though I'd personally like to see them all made into movies. Maybe then I'd be able to find all the books at the bookstore, instead of just number two, and therefore be able to buy them for my niece, whom I think would really enjoy this series.

Agh, enough! Off to bed for me!