Cheap recipe: stew

Another one of my dodgy recipes following on from the fairly popular “best chicken burgers ever“. This is another based around four simple provisos:

1. Cheap
2. Fairly healthy
3. Little effort involved in preparation
4. Hardly any washing up involved

So it’s ideal for students, skinflints and blokes.

First up, ingredients:

• Stewing steak (“real” or tinned)
• Peas
• Carrots
• Potatoes
• HP Sauce
• Salt
• Other veg, spices, sauces to taste – your preference

The recipe is pretty simple. Heat everything up. If you’re using “real” stewing steak you’ll need to get it going quite some time beforehand – one reason I tend to use the tinned stuff. So have this to hand, whichever version you’ve chosen.

Get a huge pot. Something about 6″-8″ deep. Fill it about half or so with hot water, and drop in a palmful of salt. This adds flavour and gets the water boiling faster. Chop the potatoes into thick slices or chips (don’t peel them, but do wash the dirt off if necessary) and drop them in. Do the same with the carrots.

Those vegetables go in first as they take some time to boil to the point where they soften. Keep checking them until they’ve gone past “crunchy” and start entering “firm”. Drop the meat in at this point.

After a minute or so, you’ll be able to skim any excess fat off the top of the boiling water. Remove it and ditch it – told you this was healthy.

Finally, add the peas. These cook quite quickly. If you’ve got them in a tin, just throw the juice in as well. It lowers the temperature of the water, but adds flavour.

We’re getting to the fun bit. I hope you have a potato masher handy (the one you use for cooking, not the old German stick grenade), because once everything’s nice and soft, you’re going to pour off a little of the water (or filter it out using a sieve)  then pummel the hell out of the contents of the pan. Squish everything. All of it. Mashy-mashy.

Make sure you’ve got all the water out by pouring what’s left through a sieve if you’ve not already done this. Get a large plate and plop the resulting mush onto it.

Cover it in HP Sauce. I usually use about a third to a half of a bottle. Mush it all up.

Eat.

Looks awful, tastes awesome.