Fruity Beef Casserole

Now the weather has cooled, and I've conquered my fear of meals that take hours to cook with this recipe, I'm loving the idea of cooking lots and lots of warming stews and casseroles as easy meals for the colder nights.  I stumbled on this recipe last Friday, and having grown up with my folks making sweet curries, thought that this would be pretty good.

I will admit... I did tweak the recipe.  I halved the amount of beef, and made it up with diced potato, an extra carrot, cauliflower and a heap of mushrooms.

I started out by browning the meat off in an oven proof casserole dish in a little oil, and then pulled it out of the pan.

 

Next, I added the onion and let it cook for a couple of minutes until it had softened.

Then I threw in the carrot, potato, cauliflower, garlic, tomato paste, flour and chilli powder.  I got a bit carried away with the chilli powder and put in about twice as much as the recipe called for.  

 

I didn't have any lemon, so instead of lemon rind, I had to just use lemon juice.  Next I added beef stock and, instead of plum jam, 1/2 a cup of asian plum marinade sauce.  Then I put the meat back in, and topped the dish up with stock to make sure the meat was just covered.  Then I added salt and pepper and brought the pot to the boil, at which point I put the lid on the dish and popped it in the oven.

Now, I had actually started preparing this fairly early in the afternoon, so, with a lot of time to let it cook, I only heated the oven to about 100/120 (it's hard to be sure with our oven missing numbers on the dial) and let it cook for three and a half hours.  At that point, I pulled it out of the oven and threw in a big handful of mushrooms and put it back in the oven.

I let it all cook for another half hour or so, and then pulled it out of the oven all ready to serve with lots of crusty bread.

I will admit that both Hubby and I had our tastebuds a bit confused when we ate this.  On the one hand, there was the chilli and on the other hand, the fruity plum.  It was part asian, part casserole, part sweet.  It wasn't bad, but we just couldn't quite reconcile the flavours.  Having said that, we both took the left overs for lunch at work the next day and it was like a totally different casserole.  As Hubby said, it was almost like it needed overnight to 'settle'.  It was the PERFECT winter lunch with some crusty bread to mop it up with.  I think I will be making this regularly on a Sunday, for the purposes of easy winter work lunches.