Slow cooked Sunday

Yesterday I decided that I wanted to do a slow cooked something for dinner today. I wasn't quite sure what so I flicked through the newest book by the Hairy Bikers to see if they had any new ideas for me.
Not really a new idea, but one that sounded straightforward (and repeatable in the future) was their Pot Roast recipe.


Basically: brown off a kilo chunk of beef brisket in a flameproof casserole, then let it sit while you brown two sliced onions in the casserole. Chuck in some thyme and a bay leaf, add 500ml of hot stock and 200ml of wine, then whack it in a 160C oven for three hours.
After three hours, you chop up two more onions, four carrots and six sticks of celery into 3cm wedges/chunks, brown them in a frying pan, then pop them all in around the beef and stick it back in the oven for at least another hour or maybe two until "the beef is very tender and yields completely to the pressure of a spoon".
They then say to cut off the string and carve it into slices; possibly I'd taken the spoon thing a little too far as we could basically carve it with the wooden spoon I'd used when browning the veg.

Their version looks like this:

My version looked like this:

Not too shabby!


I would definitely cook this again, however:

• I was using my 22cm cast iron casserole and I still couldn't fit all the veg in, despite the fact that my chunk of brisket was only 950g and their recipe actually stated 1.2kg. So next time I will only use three carrots, and probably four sticks of celery (seeing as that didn't even get sampled by two out of three of us).
• It needed something green with it. They recommended serving it with potato latkes, and I actually dished it up with Yorkshire puddings which I would certainly do again. But it needed something green with it; I'd have done spinach, Anthony would have had cabbage or green beans.
• I probably wouldn't just do it for a "I want to COOK something Sunday meal" again. Mainly because those are usually an excuse for trying something completely new, and partly because it was quite an expensive IWTCSSM at £8 for the beef chunk.

So less veg, add something green, and more for big occasions. Although I suppose the not having enough room for the veg thing is a good excuse for buying a 26cm casserole... especially as it's the kind of thing I'd do if folks were coming to spend Christmas with us.

Inspiration (and spoon quote) taken from The Hairy Bikers' Meat Feasts