This idea came to me in a flash: what to do with borlotti beans I had just bought from the market. One idea was to make a vegetable soup (healthy but boring), a better idea was to team it with braised beef (less healthy but heaps more fun). I thought I'd go the whole hog (or more precisely the ox) and chuck in a couple of good peppery thick beef sausages to complete the shebang.
Ingredients
1/2 dozen thick beef snags (I bought the gourmet style peppery beef snags from Woolies about $5.99 for 6)
1/2 kilo or so beef offcuts on the bone (about $5 again from Woolies, they marketed them as soup bones, but i could see more potential)
1 finely chopped brown onion
2 carrots cut into 5cm pieces(these were the sweetest carrots I've ever eaten, fresh from the Italian lady at Griffith markets)
1 tsp of vegie stock powder
1 cup water
sea salt
olive oil
Method
Turn your oven onto 150deg C ie low
brown beef in a hot pan drizzled with olive oil. season with sea salt. transfer to a warmed oven dish* and place into the oven.
slowly braise for 2 hours
Brown sausages in the pan and set them aside, draining excess fat if warranted
light fry the onion for a minute or 2 set it aside
Meanwhile, soak your borlotti beans in cool water for an hour
Drain, and cook for 1/2 -1 hour or until just tender. Don't salt them or they will harden!
After 2 hours, beef will be braised, add your beans, onion, carrot, water and stock powder and top with the browned snags. Cook for another hour with the oven turned up to 200degrees :)
Serve with mash and steamed silverbeet...
*I like my second hand terracotta dish with glass saucepan lid it works well
