Braised Steak & Onion Jaffles

A while ago, I made Steak & Onions in the slow cooker. I froze the leftovers, and tonight we had it in jaffles for dinner. I get a lot of questions about what jaffles are from my American readers, so here's the simple step by step.

Butter two slices of bread. Place sandwich toppings on unbuttered side. Place in a jaffle maker.

This is a jaffle maker

Cook until golden and crunchy. Then eat.

This is a jaffle.

It's basically just a toasted sandwich, but the press seals the edges of the sandwich while toasting, so you can put things like baked beans, or canned spaghetti in there, and it doesn't squoosh out during cooking. Every type of jaffle tastes better with cheese. Except perhaps a banana and peanut butter jaffle, but then only my DP would eat that. And maybe Elvis. Ok, choc chips with a sweet jaffle, cheese with savoury. Doesn't metter what you throw in, if you stick with that it'll taste good.

Braised Steak and Onions

My slow cooker is my new best friend

Since having children, well, since moving out of home really, I've been trying to cook a lot of my favourites of Mum's dishes. Steak & Onions in particular I really loved, but somehow I just could not get it right. Tonight was no exception, but I'm getting a lot closer, and at least we didn't have to eat onion flavoured shoe leather. I tried this dish using my slow cooker, and the only problem was there was too much water at the end, which would not have nearly been so bad had I not run out of gravy powder.
Steak & Onions
500g stewing/braising/blade/whatever steak
500g or more onions
40ml 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, until nice and brown. Add them to the meat. Add vinegar and let the whole lot simmer for a few more minutes.
Thicken with gravy mix, stir while you are adding the gravy mix. Serve with mashed potato.

Or at least, that's what my mother emailed to me. I used a kilo of chuck steak, browned in the frying pan and then placed in the slow cooker straight away on Low, with the vinegar and just enough water to cover. Then I fried 1kg onions in the same frypan (in batches), tipping them into the slow cooker after each batch browned. Then I deglazed the pan with some more water, and tipped that in too. That brought the water up to cover the onions, which was too much. Next time I'll just cover the meat, and it'll be perfect.

I've said before that the best thing about a slow cooker is the wonderful smells through the house all day. And while that held true today, the best thing about a slow cooker is actually the luxury of getting to mid-afternoon and not needing to do half a dozen things so that dinner can be prepared, and getting to late afternoon and not having to frantically rush around, cooking and feeding and cleaning and screaming... ah, I mean... it's nice to be able to spend time with the kids, and not just around the kids. Not only does everyone have more fun, you can get some great photos too.

Miss Two loves to dance!

Braised Steak & Onion Pie with mashed potatoes

The other day I made my leftover steak and onion into pies. Tonight we ate them. With mashed potatoes. T'was tasty. And finished the meal with the last of the vanilla bean ice cream, that I topped with broken up pieces of choc bunny.

In other news, I won eBay this morning, so there's a 3MP camera on it's way to me, which should improve everyone's experience on this blog, mine included. Plus, it's just in time for baby photos ;)

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!