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Welcome to my blog, these are the ramblings and musings of an (upper) middle aged biker and if you enjoy braais, (barbeques) beers and motorbikes then hopefully you will enjoy what Janet and I do; we do lots of braais, we drink lots of beer and we tour South Africa on our motorbike, which at the moment is a BMW R1200RT. Join us, read about what we do and please leave us your comments.



Thursday, February 20, 2014

Another Beef shin potjie in the middle of the week

Wednesday was an opportunity to do another potjie, one of my favourite pastimes. I am on leave for a week, I took five days just to chill after the chaos of the December and January production demands, also I needed to get my bike down to Capetown for it's 90,000km service. Janet came down with me on Tuesday and we had a nice day but the mechanic needed more time with the bike so I left it there and only had to go and collect it on Thursday.
As the beef shin pot needs a long time to simmer I was able to get started early and as I had a new product that I wanted to test I invited Frank to come for dinner, he was to be a "Guinea pig". He definitely has no objection to this at all, in fact I think he enjoys it!
I am not a traditionalist, it has been a long time since I have cooked a potjie over the coals, I use gas for the sheer convenience, you can say what you like, gas is super convenient.
I started at 16h00 by heating some cooking oil in the pot and then added two roughly chopped onions, one red and one green bell pepper also roughly chopped and then a heaped teaspoon of crushed garlic,
In the meantime I cut my beef shin into smaller chunks and seasoned liberally with Aromat, mixed herbs and crushed black pepper,
I then added the contents of one packet of "Chilli Beef and Vegetable" soup powder and gave the whole lot a good shake up so that the meat was well coated with all of those ingredients.
Once the onions and peppers were softened and translucent I dumped the meat into the pot and kept stirring until the meat had browned.
The new ingredient that I wanted to try was "Koo Concentrated Wet Stock" so I mixed the contents of the sachet into a large cup of red wine and stirred it in. I must say that my pot definitely had a good beefy flavour in the end although it was difficult to ascertain whether that was because of the soup powder, the stock or a combination of the two. I will have to experiment further.
Time to simmer, I left the pot on a low heat with the lid on for an hour while I prepared my vegetables; I give my pot a good stir every so often while it is simmering to keep the meat from sticking to the bottom.
Mushrooms, butternut squash, potatoes, cauliflower and broccoli, I didn't use the cabbage after all, I thought that was enough. I added the hard vegetables, the potato and butternut and left it to simmer again.
I still stir the pot occasionally, but carefully this time so as not to break up the potatoes and squash, once they start to feel soft, and the meat feels tender I add the other vegetables and leave on a low heat just until the cauliflower and broccoli have heated through but retain their "crunch".
Time to eat! Janet prepared some rice and the consensus was that it was a good one, a nice meaty flavour with a good, thick and tasty gravy. When I do a pot like this we could feed another four people but Frank always gets a "doggie bag" and we have enough leftovers for another meal the next night.
Man I love potjies!

2 comments:

Neil said...

Just googling for beef shin potjie recipes. Stumbled across this, and will give it a try this afternoon. Am an Engelsman from Sharks Country transplanted into Stormers Town, so am having to adapt fast! Shot for the blog!

the rider said...

Welcome Neil and I hope it turns out right for you, thanks for your comment I appreciate it very much.