Beef Olives - just in time for Sunday lunch!

You should have seen son & heir's face when he asked what was for dinner on Sunday and was told "Beef Olives".  It went from "Beef - YES!" to "olives - NO!" in seconds.  I had to temper his disappointment quickly by telling him that actually, the name "Beef Olives" has no involvement with his hated ingredient, the olive.  He cheered up a lot after that - and thoroughly enjoyed the end result, as we all did.  Hubby really excelled himself (considering he was outside of his comfort zone) with this one.

I had a quick look online to see if I could determine a little bit about the history of the name "Beef Olives", and from Historic Foodways' "History is Served" pages, found this : 

"The British term for wrapping meat around a stuffing, browning it and finishing it in a brown sauce is called an “olive,” although there are no olives in it.  Perhaps the word referred to the final “olive-like” shape the meat took when it was tied up and cooked.  Beef, veal and even fish olives have been part of the British cuisine since the 16th century".

Well that was news to me.  I considered the dish to be very much a seventies creation - but it seems it goes way back into the mists of time.  I can see the correlation between an olive and the shape of the rolled meat - although you have to think more of the elongated shape of the wild olive, rather than the round, fat, cultivated olive.

Anyway, I shall turn this blog post over to hubby now, so that he can tell you how he did it, in his own words :

The making of Beef Olives is a fairly straightforward thing.

This was my first attempt at them, drawing on both childhood memories and various cook books.  None of the processes involved are in the slightest bit complex but the thing I hadn't anticipated was the time needed to complete each stage - especially the flattening (is that the technical term) of the beef itself.  To avoid timing issues, I heartily recommend leaving half a day spare or perhaps preparing the beef in the morning.

From the dim recesses of my memory I can recall eating both stuffed and un-stuffed Beef Olives. I've given here, the recipe for the Olives that we had last Sunday but I can see a lot of scope for alternative stuffings - I think we're might try a blue cheese based one next.

The beef that I used in our dish comprised three 200g braising steaks from our local butcher.  To prepare them, I cut each steak into three equal pieces and then placed each piece on a chopping board before laying a sheet of clingfilm on top and then beating enthusiastically with a meat mallet and a rolling pin.  I used the mallet to do the heavy work and the rolling pin to ensure that the meat was the same thickness all over.

Be warned that this process takes a *long* time and requires a fair amount of effort.  The decision to use braising steak in this recipe was based on the fact that it looked nice in the butchers display.  In fact, pretty much any kind of beef can be used, with the combination of tenderising and long slow cooking rendering the beef very soft in the finished dish.

The recipe below is how I prepared the dish on the day.  On reflection, I think I would add an extra stage to the preparation of the Olives, so feel free to add this if you like the sound of it!  After stuffing, rolling and securing each Olive, I would flash fry them before placing in the roasting dish.  This would colour the outside of the Olives and help to boost the 'beefiness' of the flavour.

I have also seen another variation that I'd like to try.  This involves taking each beaten sheet of beef and then painting the entire surface with a thin layer of mustard and then a layer of stuffing.  The whole thing is then rolled up like a Swiss roll before being secured and cooked as normal.

Anyway, on with the show. 

BEEF OLIVES    (makes 9 olives)

Ingredients :
For the Stuffing :
3 rashers smoked streaky bacon
50g breadcrumbs
3 largish chestnut mushrooms, chopped fine
half a tsp fresh sage
half a tsp fresh thyme
half a tsp fresh parsley

3 x 200g beef braising steaks
1 red onion
1 clove garlic
1 glass red wine
600 ml good beef stock.

Method :

1.  Cook the bacon until crispy and then chop into tiny bits.

2.  Add the mushrooms to the bacon, breadcrumbs and herbs in a frying pan.  Ideally, fresh herbs should be used and in quantities to your own taste.  The amounts listed here are simply a guide.  Fry the mixture in a little olive oil until the breadcrumbs turn golden and then set aside to cool completely.

3.  Beat the beef into a thin sheet, 2mm thick or so, and then repeat with each chunk of braising steak.  

4.  The Olives can now be assembled.  This is done by taking a tablespoon (or more if you like) of the stuffing and spreading it across a sheet of beef.  Roll the beef tightly around the stuffing and then secure it with two cocktail sticks or by tying with kitchen string.  The finished Olive should be about the size of a large sausage.  The Olives can now be placed into a large, deep roasting dish or lasagne dish.

5.  The next stage is to prepare the stock.  In a saucepan, gently saute the chopped red onions and garlic until soft.  Once done, turn up the heat to a good sizzle and then add the red wine. Allow the wine to reduce by half and then add the beef stock.

6.  All manner of other ingredients can be added at this point.  Think mustard, or mushroom ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, redcurrant jelly,  horseradish - whatever takes your fancy really. Simmer this mixture for a few minutes before pouring over the beef until the liquid reaches about two thirds up the Olives.

7.  Now cover the dish with a lid or a sheet of foil and place into an oven, pre-heated to 160degC for at least 90 minutes.  Take the dish out of the oven after 45 minutes and rotate each Olive before returning to the oven.  After ninety minutes, remove the foil lid and return the dish to the oven for another 10-15 minutes.

8.  Make gravy from the meat juices and stock in the roasting dish.  This can be done the hard way, by reduction and the addition of gravy browning, or the easy way, with gravy granules - no, I'm not telling which way I chose!

Serve with roast potatoes, a selection of vegetables, Yorkshire Puddin', English mustard and good old Horseradish sauce!

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Some weeks, you just can't cook a thing ...

Last week's menu plan turned into the menu plan from hell.  No, really.

Hubby's fish pasta began the sorry tale, in that he found it inedible.  I quite liked it, but it wasn't the sort of thing I'd be wanting to appear regularly.  The smoked salmon went very nicely with the lemon, but the cream cheese sauce just wasn't quite right.

It looked nice, though!

Next was my Minced Beef Curry with a Vegetable Curry.  Well, it doesn't often happen, but the minced beef went into the bin.  It was utterly inedible.  I haven't a clue what went wrong - but it went wrong with a vengeance.  We had fish fingers instead.

Thursday evening was okay - but then how wrong can you get sandwiches?  We had a lovely chicken and ham salad at my parents' for lunch and so didn't need a big meal come the evening.

Friday was supposed to be hubby's take on a Moussaka.  However, he spent a rather long time wearing himself out in the garden (we're remodelling the lower half of the garden - making it into a miniature wild flower meadow) and the Moussaka was dropped in favour of a rather easier but no less gorgeous Shepherd's Pie (which I'll be blogging the recipe for very soon).  It was a Prince amongst Shepherds, that pie.

Saturday's Sherried Chicken didn't go well.  The smoked paprika I'd got - I hadn't realised - was a hot paprika.  The recipe for the Sherried Chicken demanded one tablespoonful of paprika.  Well, thank goodness, I didn't opt for that much but reduced it down to two teaspoonfuls - which were still too much.  I think there is something intrinsically wrong with the recipe, as the photograph that goes along with the recipe bears absolutely no resemblance to what appeared on our plates.

We did butt up against hubby's intense dislike for a broth-like sauce or gravy (or "pond water") as he calls it.  He absolutely hated the dish (even if the paprika had been balanced right, he wouldn't have liked it) and says he knows when a dish demands a) vegetables, b) a tin of tomatoes and b) stock - that it's going to be horrible.

I didn't object to it anything like as strongly as hubby did.  Yes, the paprika was wrong, but the remainder of the dish had some promise - providing you don't object to a thinner style of sauce.  It made great ammunition for soaking your crusty bread in - which I felt was the object of the exercise when they recommended crusty bread in the recipe!

I suspect that our polarised views very much came down to personal taste.  Hubby doesn't like that sort of dish - I do.  It's a simple as that.

Sunday's Beef Olives dinner went about as well as it was possible for a recipe to go.  I was glad, as hubby had been so worried about it.  He was cooking a dish that he remembered from his childhood - which is never an easy thing.  He had found a number of recipes for Beef Olives and had taken the best bits out of several recipes, along with using his own common sense.

I'll be blogging the Beef Olives for sure - as they really were super and hubby's recipe is well worth sharing.  We'll just have to wait for him to write it up, that's the only problem!

This evening's dinner of Barbecue Sausages & Peppers was another stellar success.  As a variation on Sausage & Mash, it makes a lovely change.  I had a feeling that the spicy barbecue sauce would go very nicely with mashed potato - and I was right.  This is another one that I'll be blogging - so watch this space!

On the whole, hubby had a good week in the kitchen.  Me, not so much.  *sigh*  Even my Baba Ghanoush didn't work so well.  It tastes great - but it has set and seems distressingly jelly-like.  I suspect I didn't put enough olive oil into it - but hey ho, at least it's not so bad for the waistline in the jellified version!

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Fish, beef, lamb, chicken, pork - is there anything we've left out?

Looking at this week's menu plan, purely by accident, I think we've about covered all the main meat groups one way and another!

Last week's meal plan went out of the window at regular intervals and we managed to have, instead, a takeaway curry, pie & chips and chicken & chips (with a kebab for hubby).  I'm not really sure how that happened, but it can't be allowed to continue!  For one thing, we wouldn't be able to afford it!

The first recipe to be jettisoned was the Couscous stuffed peppers, which I just lost all enthusiasm for.  Anyway, my prize voucher from The Heart of India was burning a hole in my psyche and I just SO wanted to use it - so we did.  I had a gorgeously tender and non-fatty Lamb Biryani which comes with a lovely vegetable curry.  Hubby had a Chicken Pathia and son & heir had a Chicken Korma.  We all shared a Sag Bhajee and a Keema Naan and it was absolutely glorious.  I'm not sure when we'll be able to have another, but I can't wait!  With the prize voucher for £25 to use, it only cost us around £4 which was brilliant.

The next recipe that got the heave-ho was the Sherried Chicken Casserole.  This was part of a swap with the Smoky Pork & Bean Wraps because we were trying to fit the best meal to match up with an extra guest as son & heir had invited a friend for a sleepover.  I was intending on giving him the chicken dish and so swapped the two dishes around - only for us to forget to buy the Smoked Paprika when we'd gone to the shop specifically for it!  We got rather distracted by other things and the old grey cells aren't what they used to be, you know.  By the time we realised the lack of paprika, it was too late to do anything about anything, so we had a quick trip to the chippie instead.  What a shower!

The poor old Five Spice Beef noodles was the next one to go, as son & heir decided to stay at a friend's house for tea that night and it was just easier to go out and get something, rather than cook.  Hubby is always in the market for a kebab, so I got some chicken & chips.

So - you can see - all this has got to stop or we'll be completely spherical and skint!

This week's meals - which we WILL stick to (there, I've said it so it's got to happen now) are : 

 Tues : Fish pasta

Weds : Minced Beef Curry, vegetable curry and rice

Thurs : Sandwiches

Fri : Moussaka with tomato salad

Sat : Sherried chicken with broccoli & crusty bread

Sun : Beef Olives, roast potatoes & parsnips, Yorkshire puddings, carrots & savoy cabbage

Mon : Barbecue Sausage & Red Pepper with mashed potatoes, peas & sweetcorn.

  

A number of those meals require explanation, so I'll do my best.

Yesterday's Fish Pasta was something of a disaster for poor hubby.  Before I go any further, I will say that I liked the dish.  However, I was in the minority.

It all stems back to when I had a yearning to use papardelle pasta with the Pork Ragu that I make.  Don't ask me why papardelle - I just had a fancy for it.  Somehow (and I'm not too sure how), this got translated into hubby volunteering to make a fish pasta dish with the papardelle (which we'd sourced in Sainsbury's and bought by then).  He had planned to make a dish using a lesser-known type of fish (and we sourced and visited a Fishmonger, but they were closed, unfortunately - which was the start of the dish going wrong) in a Buerre Noisette sauce with lemon, capers and dill.  Sounded flipping lovely, to me.  With no fishmonger available, we were stuck with whatever Asda could supply - which wasn't much.  Hubby had got sidetracked a little by smoked fish - smoked trout in particular.  However, he couldn't get acceptable trout (never mind smoked) and opted for smoked salmon pieces.  Can you see how the expectation for the dish is being scuppered at every turn?  Well, unfortunately, we were too caught up in trying to make it happen to notice.

As he was cooking the meal, he began to lose faith in his vision of the Beurre Noisette and how it would marry up with the smoked salmon - and I think he has a point.  I suspect we should have swapped out to something totally different at the point that the fishmonger was shut - but then hindsight is a wonderful thing.  What he landed up with was nothing like his original vision, which was such a shame - but something of a learning experience, I think!

Keema Mutter - a lot to live up to!

So, tonight's curry will be something of a return to more pedestrian dishes - but hopefully, dishes that will soothe the savage breast and comfort the thwarted creativity with delicious and exotic curry spices.  I'm basing the Minced Beef Curry on the Keema Mutter (which is lamb) recipe and hopefully it will be just as nice.  I absolutely love a vegetable curry and it will be nice to have one as a side dish, along with the plain rice.  It also gives the sugar snap peas something to do, now they're not being used for the noodle dish!

We're visiting my parents on Thursday and if we're out for either lunch or dinner (not sure which, at the moment), sandwiches will do for whichever meal we'll need to provide at home.

My Moussaka - along different lines, but still nice!

Hubby is back in the kitchen on Friday, making a Moussaka

Hooray!  The Sherried Chicken makes its come-back on Saturday.  I was quite determined not to lose this recipe altogether as I've been really looking forward to it and so back onto the menu list it went.  The crusty bread we bought for it last week is still good as we bought home-bake petit pain rolls that keep for ever.  I suspect that the broccoli will meet its Waterloo in the vegetable curry, so that's probably the only ingredient that will require buying again for the recipe, so it's all good (as they say).

Hubby is back in the kitchen again on Sunday, making a dish that he's been craving for - quite literally - years.  Way back in the seventies, Beef Olives were all the rage at dinner parties around the country.  It is one of those dishes that has taken a back seat along with the prawn cocktail and sole veronique, but hubby has every intention of it making a delicious reprise on our Sunday dinner table.  Fingers crossed that the butcher has the right kind of Braising Steak, or we might end up with sausages instead!  

Speaking of sausages, if we can find some that might meet my exacting sausage requirements (a sausage with flavour and some fat content - hubby tells me that Sainsbury's should be able to answer this brief), I'll be using up the remainder of the Levi Roots Reggae Reggae sauce on the sausages and red pepper (left over from the abortive stuffed pepper recipe).  I really like the idea of baking the sausages in the barbecue sauce, then pairing them up with mashed potato, peas and sweetcorn.  In fact, the mental picture is making my mouth water!  It will be a simple dish that's exactly right for a Monday evening.

So there you have it.

Now, as for extra cooking ventures, well my first go at Watercress Soup went down the drain regrettably.  I hate waste - but that really was horrid.  Something happened in the blitzing that caused the mascarpone to suddenly split and I wound up with great globs of cheesy fat with bits of smashed watercress sticking to them, floating on the surface of the soup.  Not nice at all.  Even with those bits sieved off, it was poor.  Very poor.  So that's that one tried and rejected.

The next one is an intriguing mix of crab and watercress in a warm soup, for which we will need to get ourselves back down to the Fishmunglers.  Fingers crossed, he'll be open this time!

Apart from that, I have an ever-growing desire to bake a cake of some sort.  Watch this space!

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