What’s your favorite thing to cook?
I love this dish, the smell fills the house when it’s in the oven. It’s also easy to prepare, although it does take a long time to cook.
We have two versions in this house, I do a slow-cooked version with cannellini beans (recipe here), Mrs S uses a pressure cooker and her recipe features oxtail soup (must be Heinz).
Both are delicious, with different textures and many common ingredients. Beef, onions, garlic, carrots for starters. I put potatoes in the stew, Mrs S does them separately. But the most important component of the stew is the dumplings.
Dumplings are easy enough to make, as long as you use suet and self-raising flour you can’t really go wrong. A generous helping of dried herbs and chilli add some flavour. We give them 20 minutes steaming over the stew. This allows the dumplings time to swell and acquire the required soft texture and some of the flavour of the stew. It also means that some moisture from the stew is lost so the stew thickens a bit.
I’ve just noticed that there’s a very angry-looking dumpling in the middle of the picture. Just as well we ate it before anyone noticed.
