Beef stew marinated in red wine with onions and mushrooms

One other piece of meat that we bought yesterday at the Lindenhoff farm is a large bit of beef. I have no idea how you call meat that goes into a stew in English but we call this particular piece of meat a sukadelap. It’s not suitable to eat without preparing it for a couple of hours and you have to be careful to remove some of the tendons that are in the meat. In any case; with the weather being all gloomy and rainy these last few days it was definitely the perfect time for a good stew. When we were in France for our cooking class we also made a beefstew and I more or less followed the same method as we did then. To go with the stew I wanted to do something a little different with the mashed potatoes and I decided it would be really nice to have celeriac with those.

Kinds of looks a bit like an alien doesn't it?

So I bought one piece of the ugliest vegetable in the world.. It does look very weird if you take a closeup shot, doesn’t it? So how did I prepare the beef? I made a recipe for you, but really you can add loads of other stuff to it if you want. Just follow your tastebuds!

Ingredients

500 gr of beef

2 large onions

3 cloves of garlic

2 laurel leaves

chestnut mushrooms, approx. 250 gr

small pieces of bacon

half a liter of red wine

Cut the meat into small chunks, making sure to remove any bits of tendon you can find. Put them in a bowl and pour the wine over the meat making sure it is all submerged. Leave to marinate in the red wine for at least half an hour but preferably a little longer. In the meantime cut the onion into fairly large chunks but not too large (I left mine a little to large!). You can put the cloves or garlic in without cutting them.

Preheat your oven to 150C.

Toss onions and garlic and your laurel leaves into a Dutch oven or cast iron pan

Remove the beef from the wine after marinating and transfer all the wine to your pan. Dry the beef with kitchen towel and quickly brown them in  a little butter and transfer to your pan as well. Make sure to season the beef while you are browning it with pepper and salt.

Once everything is in mix it all and put the pan into the oven. Leave for at least 2 hours to simmer in the oven and stir occasionally. About half an hour before it is ready, add the mushrooms and the bacon. Season where necessary to taste.

MASHED POTATOES AND CELERIAC

Ingredients:

1 Celeriac

equal amount of potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks

about 100 ml double cream

1 part of butter

nutmeg, salt and pepper to taste

Clean the celeriac and cut into pieces, roughly the same size as you are cutting your potatoes. Put them all in a pan with water and salt and boil until they are soft enough to mash. Mash them together well, adding cream and butter in there. Season with salt, pepper and nutmeg. I think this would also be fantastic with a little cheese mixed in, but since Tom is not the cheese lover I would like him to be; I left that out…. But try it and let me know what you think! I loved the addition of the celeriac to the mix and it also increases your vegetable intake without overdoing it…