One pot cooking, good prep, plus hearty (vaguely Greek) beef casserole

One pot, slow cooking methods are an odd mixture of convenience and time-commitment. It's not the kind of thing you can really do in a hurry, obviously, and once you start cooking you're kind of stuck with dinner plans from about three in the afternoon.

As someone who has been known to decide on a dish to cook only about half-way through cooking it, it's a very different way of looking at food.

But, on the other hand - the whole one pot thing. Small inner city kitchens do not lend themselves to extravagant meals that require a stock to be bubbling, sides cooking, mains in the oven, and another two or three stations of prep. Oh for one of those Hollywood room-sized kitchens with a chopping island the size of a... well, island.

A lot of the one-pot cooking I do tends to be on the faster side - chop vegetables, throw into large pot with oil or goose fat, saute for a metric bit, then cover with stock and simmer for an hour. But just a little more time spent on prep, ingredients and cooking time can deliver a fantastic dish.

Beef casserole

As usual, our Feedbag delivery came through with some great stuff, including a chunk of sirloin roughly the size of my girlfriend's head. It was a lovely, marbled piece of meat. There was also the usual selection of market fresh veg, and the Feedbag run before, which my girlfriend went on (note, girlfriends are tetchy that time of a morning), we scored a huge bag of 'souvlaki mix'.

We've had this stuff before, and it's an awesome pre-mixed herb and spice powder. The only thing - no one's quite sure exactly what's in there. Undoubtedly there's salt and oregano, and some debate over pepper, lemon or lemon pepper. I think there's more to it, though - the flavour is a touch more complex. Maybe some thyme, or onion powder, it's hard to tell. Regardless, it's extremely tasty, so it seemed the perfect compliment to the beef.

ingredients

Chunk of sirloin

potatoes

green beans

carrot

zucchini

onion

celery

tinned tomato

bacon bones

chicken stock

goose fat

In terms of directions, it doesn't get simpler. There is, however, one complication to be mindful of - the state of your meat.

If you've ever wondered why beef dishes can be so tender and wonderful in a restaurant, but so chewy and disappointing at home... it's all in the prepping of the meat. More specifically, it's in the removal of connective tissue.

Not all connective tissue, however. Good connective tissue, the stuff that surrounds each muscle fibre, is made from collagen. Collagen breaks down with slow heat, and adds that silky fattiness that makes a real gourmand water at the mouth and go weak at the knees. The bad stuff, though, is made from elastin, and this doesn't break down. In fact, it gets tough and will actually curl and warp the meat as it cooks.

So how do you tell the bad stuff?

Well, it's usually the very obvious silver membrane running through a cut of meat. This is the stuff that connects two different muscle groups - it has to be tough stuff, to stop muscles from separating. Good for walking around without tearing yourself limb from limb, bad for cooking. Thankfully, it only takes a bit of effort to remove, and when you get really good at it, you won't waste a bit of meat.

I'm... not that good at it yet. You need a really sharp knife, too, but the trick is to part the two layers of meat gently apart as you stroke the edge of the blade along the grain of the meat. If you've a cut of meat with the membrane running through the center, you'll need to trim twice - once to halve the meat into a good bit and a membraned bit, and then trim again to remove the membrane altogether. Yes, there will be a bit of wastage, but practice will make perfect.

More importantly, a bit of wastage is worth it for the end result. So, with the dreaded silver membrane removed, what do you do for this stew?

Simple. Cube your sirloin into good sized chunks, and lay flat on a tray or pan. Sprinkly with your souvlaki mix - or whatever herb-spice combo you want, really - pat the mix into the meat, then turn the pieces. Repeat - spices, pat etc - and then let sit while you get chopping the veg. Chop roughly and not too small, otherwise you'll end up with beef in vegetable soup. Do chop the bacon bones carefully, though - relatively small, and be careful to avoid too much bone.

With everything chopped up, get a tablespoon or so of goose fat melted in a heavy bottomed pot, and brown the beef. And since we're being all educational, no, you don't sear or brown meat to "seal in the juices" - cooking meat actually cooks the juices off! The reason you do brown is to caramelise the beef, adding an important flavour element.

Once all the beef is nicely browned (it should be rare at this stage, and you'll need to make sure by popping a piece into your mouth - you like rare beef, right?) take the pot off the heat, and add everything else. You don't want to cover the ingredients with the stock, but add just enough liquid that you can see it just below the uppermost layer of ingredients. Give it all a mix, then bung in an oven pre-heated to about 170 degrees.

Cooking for a few hours. Stab a carrot to test if it's ready. If not, up the temperature and cook for a bit longer. Once it's ready, plate in a bowl by itself, or add to a plate of boiled white rice, or even a nice creamy mash if you're really feeling like a lot of potato.

Okay, not my best photo. But man, it was a very good bottle of wine.

My hazy focus aside, this is serious business. This is cooking at not only its simplest and most basic, but also illustrative of the simple tricks you can use to really lift a dish. Cooking something like this in goose fat delivers a triple-threat of culinary oomph: it's flavoursome, silky from the goose fat, and silkier again from the broken down fat in the beef.

It's like eating... something really expensive and melted.

But the real star, the Jewel in the Silky Crown, is that beef. Tender. Fall apart on your fork. Melt in your mouth.

Happy. In your pants.

And that's the whole point of taking the time to properly trim your meat. That investment pays fucking dividend's when it's on the plate in front of you or your guests. Especially your guests. They'll ooh, they'll ahh. They'll ask how you did it.

"It's all in the prep," you'll say. Cool, just like that. When you'v cooked a great cut of beef to perfection, a cook deserves some cool.

The simple things, plus Chicken and Vegetables in Oyster Sauce

One of the things that's guaranteed to get me in a rage are sauces in jars. Chicken Tonight, Leggo's pasta sauces, or any of a million other varieties - with very few exceptions, these are all sauces that are so damn easy to make that it's criminal that these things are so popular. They take up so much space on supermarket shelves that it's easy to believe some people must east nothing else.

That said, I can see the reasoning, at least in terms of the time-poor. It's not everyone who has the time to come home and make a proper meal accompanied by a freshly made sauce and sides. And for a lot of people, cooking is a chore (gasp!), not something to do because you like it.

And let's be honest - I like cooking... and sometimes even I fall back on the one-bottle solution.

Chicken and Vegetables in Oyster Sauce

The other day while shopping a bottle of Oyster Sauce caught my eye. It's a vegetarian one, made from aged mushrooms, and a dingy plastic bottle, with the usual scrawl of Chinese characters that I've often assumed say "The one who purchases this cannot cook".

But I picked it up anyway, because it's always handy to have a selection of good Asian ingredients on hand. It is, after all, a region that really understands fast cooking. And that's what this meal is all about - it's quick, stupidly versatile, and as I've been having it, loaded with good fresh veg, a really good hang-over cure.

It's also, in my opinion, barely cooking, but it's still so damned tasty it's worth sharing.

ingredients

Chicken thighs, sliced

Red capsicum

Squash

Mushrooms

Onion

Shallots

Garlic

Ginger

Oyster sauce

Rice

Start off by tossing two cups of rice into a rice cooker. We only recently got one of these heavenly engines of cooking, and they are a true Gods send. You could add something like finely sliced water chestnuts or shiitake mushroom to the rice, but it's fine just plain - but then again, I loves me rice in any form.

Slice up your chicken thighs, trimming off any excess fat (I'm picky - sue me), and then toss into a pan with a tablespoon or so of vegetable oil. I've been meaning to get some sesame or peanut oil for this, but vegetables been working fine. I've also been meaning to get a proper wok, but again, am making do with a simple pan.

When the chicken's starting to cook all over (and keep stirring, you don't want it to stick and burn, or overcook), add in the chopped veg. Stir for a few minutes, add the garlic and ginger (which I just slice), stir again, then stir in a mess (a very precise measurement... ) of the oyster sauce.

Enough to give it that takeout Chinese shine.

Keep stirring, add a bit more sauce if it looks as though it's cooking off, and by about now the rice should be done. Rice in a bowl, food on rice, eat.

Like I said - it's really not cooking, really just assembly. But it's very tasty, highly nutritious assembly. And, possibly as importantly, it's really fast, maybe twenty minutes all up to cook.

As to the versatility, well, you can pretty much cook it with any ingredients. Bok choy or other Asian green are a no-brainer, and I've done a purely vegetarian version with just that. Carrots and broccoli are another option... basically, pretty much anything fresh will cook up really well.

A rice cooker and a good oyster sauce - essential tools in any lazy cook's arsenal.

Getting excited about food, and côte de porc à la charcutière

As I've mentioned, I recently had a short trip overseas. It's kind of messed up my joy for cooking - I guess getting waited on for a week and a half spoils you somehow.

Who knew?

But the latest Feedbag box has come in, and it had some lovely pork chops. I rarely cook with pork, so I wanted to do something special; something that would re-ignite that passion for cooking and good food. So where do you turn to when you need that kind of kick in the pants?

The Les Halles Cookbook.

Gods, how I love that book. It's essentially the bible to Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles restaurant, containing his philosophy for cooking, signature dishes, and some truly awesome food writing. I only own a handful of cookbooks, and this is the one I refer to almost as much as Stephanie Alexander's Kitchen Companion (the true "If you only own one cookbook" cookbook).

So back to the pork, and the recipe at hand. If you google côte de porc à la charcutière the top four or five results refer directly to the Les Hallse recipe. The rest are in French. So now I'm going to add my take on this great dish to the Google Gods.

côte de porc à la charcutière

For all that this sounds rather fancy, what it essentially translates to is pork the way the pork butcher prepares it. So you've got to guess these butchers know their job, more or less. It's also a fiendishly quick meal to cook, which means it's an ideal dinner party meal that you can cook in twenty minutes or so, and then casually mangle some French as you serve the meal.

It's the little things, really.

Please note: my recipe does deviate a touch, thanks to not having the right range of cookware or proper stock on hand. Which... yeah. Bourdain would kidney punch me for a crime like that.

ingredients

Two pork chops (about 300gm each)

Oil

Butter

Small onion

Flour

White wine, the drier the better

Beef stock (which is not only the wrong stock, but is store-bought - egads!)

Dijon mustard

Half a dozen cornichons

Sprig of flat leaf parsley

Salt and pepper to taste

See? Simple! To accompany the dish, I also prepared some cabbage and apple in butter.

First up set your oven to 190 degrees Celsius, and season the pork with salt and pepper - just pinch of each, on each side, and quickly rub into the meat. Heat up the oil, and then add the butter - about a tablespoon of each - in a non stick pan. Throw in your pork, and cook for four minutes a side. Then transfer the pan to oven... assuming you have an oven-safe pan, which I foolishly don't.

So what I did was simply pour the pan's contents into a glass roasting dish, and then put the pan aside. Cook the pork in the oven for eight minutes, which is about all you need for the rest of the prep.

Finely chop the onions, the cornichons (or baby gherkins, if you don't want to fancy about it) and the parsley. Chop the cabbage and finely slice up small apple. In preparation for the cabbage and apple, melt some better in a pan, with another pinch of salt and pepper.

Right about now, your pork should be done. Ideally, you'd remove your pan, set the chops aside under some foil, and put the pan back on the heat. In my case, I reserved the chops, and simply poured off the baking dish into the pan. I don't think it hurt the dish any, but I bet this will taste better once I get the right cookware.

Anyway, with the pan back on the heat, it's time to work on the sauce. Add the onions, and sauté until golden. Add the flour, and stir for a minute. Then half a cup wine goes in (and you'll need a refill by now, too, if you're a cook after my own heart). Reduce this by half, then add a cup of stock, again reducing it by half.

While working on the sauce, you can easily knock off the cabbage. First, toss the apple slices into the butter, toss a couple of times until coated, and then add the cabbage. Toss and stir, and let the cabbage wilt slightly - but not too much. Take off the heat and plate.

The sauce - which you've been stirring and paying loving attention to, right? - should be about done. Remove from the heat, whisk a teaspoon of the mustard through, then add the gherkins and parsley. Stir, and admire the lovely colour, and the rich, mustardy aroma. Take your two well-rested chops, place on the cabbage and apple, and then pour off any juices into the sauce. You do not want to waste good pork fat.

Then simply pour the sauce over the chops. Jobs a good'un.

And man... for one thing, I think we really lucked out with the pork. It was sublime; and pan frying and then finishing in the oven really does a great job of producing a tender bit of meat. To be honest, this would have been great just with plain three veg, but with the sauce...

Sweet fuck, that's a helluva sauce. Rich, creamy, and full of sharp flavours from the cornichons and the mustard. In combination with the pork - well, it made me very happy in my mouth.

I was pleased with the cabbage and apple, too. It's a classic accompaniment to pork, but you really don't need to do much to it. The apple sweetness and crunchiness is a great offset to the heavy textures of the meat and sauce, while cabbage is a much needed concession to a reasonable vegetable intake.

All up, it was so good - especially with a New Zealand Sav Blanc - that I felt compelled to take an 'after' shot of the plate...

What you need to know about this image, is that I am fiendishly picky when it comes to finishing a bit of meat on the bone - gristle, fat, finicky stuff... I usually can't be arsed. After this dish, though, I gnawed the bone, cleaned my plate with a bit of bread, and then set to the saucepan with another piece of bread.

So here's to you, Anthony. To your words, your passion, and most importantly your food. I raise a glass... once I refill it, of course. Anything else would be rude.