Beef Karai Potjie

These days (last 5 years) I really enjoy eating a chicken Karai. This is a Pakistani dish with very wholesome flavours. Karai is also the name given to a kind of “indian style” wok to cook over the fire. You might immediately notice that the heading and the small knowledge snippet have discrepancies. For one it is beef and not chicken. The cooking apparatus is named twice. This doesn’t bode well for a simple/wholesome dish (my cooking mantra).

There a method in my naming convention. Beef is the meat used in the dish (obviously), Karai in this case does not point to the cooking apparatus but rather the recipe and the potjie is the cooking methodology/apparatus. This is a kind of Afrikaans/Pakistani fusion dish.

For all my adoring fans, you might be wondering why I went AWOL instead of me going on about the recipe, well in a nut shell, I visited Morocco with my better quarter and so did not get the opportunity to blog, and sadly my tagine that I bought was confiscated at Morocco customs for no particular reason, but the country is flippen awesome.

I found this recipe via google for chicken and have used it on a number of occasions. When making this dish with fresh ingredients the taste is amazing. When I eat out I have to look for an alternate recipe since I much prefer my own homemade chicken karai.

This was an experiment to use the same chicken recipe with beef and same procedure but in a potjie. Let’s just say the flavour was amazing. The recipe has been scaled for a potjie.

Ingredients:

• ·         3 Tbsp butter

• ·         3 cloves garlic, crushed and diced

• ·         2 Tbsp ginger, diced

• ·         5 tomatoes, liquidised

• ·         3 chillies chopped up (mild heat)

• ·         2 tsp turmeric

• ·         2 tsp salt

• ·         1kg beef chopped in small pieces (I prefer approximately 20mm cubes)

• ·         1 handful/bunch of coriander (or any other meaningless measurement of size)

Method:

• ·         Place empty potjie onto fire, let pot heat up

• ·         Add butter, ginger and garlic until garlic changes into a brownish colour (not burnt)

• ·         Add tomatoes, chillies, turmeric and salt – stir and let water substance reduce to a Jam like texture

• ·         Add Beef, mix and cook until tender

• ·         Add coriander and serve!



Served with Aubergine salad

 

 

Mutton "Tagine"

This pot/cooking apparatus is the reason that the word Tagine is in quotation marks. This is a very expensive gift, but for the life of me I cannot figure out what this pot is meant to be. Google gives a possible reason as a paella pot, I think it is closer to a tagine. Maybe some of my (taking ownership of my readership in the 2nd post, STALKER!!!) more seasoned googler readers can correct me.

Using the term mutton mush for a heading might also not be very appealing.

This pot is like the adopted ugly duckling of the tagine family (why not the paella family, call it autocratic discretion and raise the issue with my board of directors) and grew up to be the bigger, resilient ,with better skin AND ate all its siblings, the Termyna-Tagine. (play on the terminator movie).

Its like when a paella pot and tagine defy their families, elope and create this hybrid offspring that is a threat to the old ways of the cooking world. The whole sentence is like when Cars meets Romeo and Juliet meets Lion King 2 (not lion king 1, that was awesome).

Jokes aside this pot fits into one of my principles that I apply when cooking. Cook food slowly. The reason is that you give respect to the ingredients that you are using that have their own unique flavors and are combined (or blended :) ) to form this food that is both satisfying and tastes real good (not steers). This pot provides sizzling flavor at the bottom and steam which can cook tough meat till it is tender, all this undertaken at a very low heat (1/6 or 2/6 on the stove dial).

The other principles is fresh fruit and vegetables, whole spices and fresh meat.

Ingredients: 
2 Tbsp butter
1 onion (sliced)
2 garlic cloves (crushed with flat side of knife and then sliced)
2 teaspoons of ginger (diced finely)
2 whole chilies (red, green does not matter, except if it is a habanero then it matters, funny story coming soon )
1 cinnamon stick (this ties in with how long is a piece of string, i could advise feel the size but this ties in with a very lucrative internet industry so I would estimate about 5cm long (these hidden meanings are getting worse))
1 tsp mustard seeds
2 tsp salt
3 tomatoes (I used pomodoro tomatoes, i'm showing off, you can increase the number of fruit to cover the entire dish, the problem is that there is too much moisture and spills over from the "tagine" creating a mess, which I will have to clean, I bet chefs don't clean their messes that's why they waste stuff like nobodies business or not their business)
1 kg of mutton or beef
2 teaspoons freshly ground pepper

Method:
Place the pan on the stove.
Layer all the ingredients in the order described above
switch the stove on (assume stove has 6 dials to describe flame intensity)
place dial on 4/6 (66%) for 10 mins
Reduce to 1/6 (15 %) for 1.5 to 2 hours (do open to check, because the built up heat will be lost but open if the sense of smell is very intense)
Open pot, stir once and serve
I enjoy this meal with a coleslaw (recipe coming soon)

The pictures are arranged order of cooking method. Bon appetite! I hope you don't mind my commentary in brackets at random places, please let me know if I should stop that. I might consider this in the future. (you must be thinking how UN-autocratic of me, maybe I'm changing or not can you trust this stalker).