On Saturday, my wonderful co-teacher took us out and we went for lunch in a Korean restaurant. Tom was very excited by the fact that we sat on the floor, even though he struggled to get back to his feet at the end of the meal! We had dumplings and galbi. Galbi is amazing. It's a kind of stew, which had various vegetables (carrots, mushrooms, GIANT Korean radishes) and lots of on-the-bone beef, which had clearly been cooked in the stew for ages because it was so tender. I love the whole stove-in-the-table thing which keeps food like this really hot. Anyway, galbi - definitely one to try.
Yesterday I decided to make a beef stew as well. There was just SO much of it in the end. I thought the quantities I used were fairly regular, but we could easily have fed another two people and there was enough sauce that we've frozen enough for another two meals (where meal = meal for two). Lots and lots of food. Yum. We ended up siphoning about half of the sauce off during cooking to allow the stew to be more stew-like than soup-like. This could be served in smaller portions with rice or pasta, or just on its own (which we did).
Beef Pumpkin Stew
Serves 4-6
1 onion
2 garlic cloves
3 potatoes
1/4 small pumpkin
1 400g pack beef
Vegetable stock
Rosemary
Basil
Seasoning
Flour
Oil
Gravy powder/meat stock
Half a can of beer (we used Korean 'Black Beer Stout,' which apparently is the closest thing to ale here)
Water
Chopped the onion and garlic, and the potatoes and pumpkin into bite-sized chunks. (Oh, it's a million times quicker to type that than to do it!) Sliced the meat into large pieces. Mixed the vegetables and meat in a pan with stock (just the powder), rosemary, basil, salt+pepper, and a couple of tablespoons of flour. Oiled and mixed well before putting the heat on medium. Stirred until everything had fried a bit, then added a litre of water mixed with gravy powder. Added the beer and a few glugs of water. Turned the heat down to low and left to simmer for roughly thirty minutes.
