Saturday, September 25, 2010

Spanish style Pot Roast

I have a terrible time at the local markets because there are real live butchers behind the counter and I have little or no idea what part of the cow the cut I´m looking for comes from or what it´s called in Spanish. Don´t even get me started on the fish.

Now that the weather has cooled off, the idea of braising and baking is more appealing, so I got a little more than a kilo (+2 lbs) of an aƱojo de ternera that´s normally for filetes. These are giant hunks of meat, so I can only imagine the size of the ¨ternera¨ (veal) they come from. Filetes are thin slices which, no matter how thick, thin or how I cook them always come out more or less like shoe-leather. V loves them, especially breaded, which produces something like chicken fried shoe leather, in Spain known as a Milanesa.These are ubiquitous at neighborhood restaurants and picnics and at the poolside lunches in the summer.

I brown this in a pan.


Remove the meat and add a few cloves of garlic. De-glaze with whatever alcohol is one hand, normally red wine which on this occasion I didn´t have so I used beer.
Add 1 large onion finely sliced and some rinsed jarred garbanzos (hence the Spanish in the title and if I soak the dried kind they never soften - even after hours of cooking) and a couple of carrots (if it were American style pot roast it would have celery, but V says it tastes too ¨vegetable¨)put the meat back in and scatter some more onions on top.


Then bake at approximately 170C or 350F for 1 1/2 - 2 hours, covered. Remove cover and continue baking for another hour or so. Serve with a steamed green vegetable - preferably brussels sprouts, but in this case Chinese cabbage and crunchy bread.



Future project - try rabbit. Which I´ve only had in Italian restaurants, and while I liked the flavor, it seems really boney and frankly, not worth the trouble it takes to eat it. That, and it´s just as expensive as chicken - which I can make into almost anything.

Also - farm food Fridays - pies, pasties, and quiches. First up - pork pies.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Coco, I tell my local butcher what I want to use the meat for, he then gives me a suitable cut, hasn't failed so far.
    Maybe when you move you can keep your own rabbits, we do and they are easy and great to recycle weeds.We started to keep them because of the price of the meat. We pot roast a half rabbit, back legs in one piece, for stews I always pre-cook, allow to cool then remove the meat from the bone and then stew up with the veg. hope the negotiations are still going OK.

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  2. Your Spanish style pot roast looks delicious. Whatever cut of meat you decide to buy, you should try grass fed beef. I work with La Cense Beef, and because the beef is 100% grass fed it is higher in omega 3 acids and lower in calorie and fat as opposed to traditional grain fed beef.

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