It’s starting to get a little cold – and I’m getting excited. On Friday night it was lovely and cool so I thought it would be the perfect time to cook the first roast of 2011.
After work I found a lovely piece of beef at the shops which would be great for a simple roast. I started by cutting into the meat a few times and pushed pieces of garlic and small sprigs of rosemary in each cut then rubbed olive oil into the meat and seasoned with S&P.
For the perfect rare roast beef, place in a baking dish then pop into a preheated oven at 190 degrees for 30 minutes. After that take it out, loosely cover in alfoil and rest it out of the oven for another 20. Perfetto!
I served mine with some wonderful crispy sage and olive oil roasted potatoes that we saw on Jamie Oliver’s Family Christmas Special last year. I managed to find it again on his website (with thanks to the trusty world wide web) and you can find it here. It is pretty much the best way to cook roast potatoes EVER. I’ll let you read the recipe yourself but basically it requires you to par boil the potatoes, then bake for 30 minutes in the fat of your choice (butter, olive oil or goose fat) and seasoned S&P, then press down on them with a potato masher, add the herb of your choice (sage, rosemary or thyme) and bake for another 45 minutes. I know it seems like a lot of effort, but they turn out unbelievably light, fluffy and crispy – and well worth it!
I also wanted to serve some greens with the meat and starch offering, so at the last minute I threw some string beans into boiling water for two minutes then took them straight out and plunged them into ice cold water for a 10 seconds. You only need to cook them for a couple of minutes to make them tender to the bite, but throwing them into the cold water shocks them to a beautiful glossy bright green colour. To finish I tossed in a little olive oil, seasoned and stirred through some raw garlic pieces (pull the garlic out prior to serving).
As you can see from the picture below, the meat was perfectly blushed, the potatoes wonderfully crispy and the greens bright and al dente. All together a great success – and only one recipe followed!
The best part about the roast beef was that we managed to get three tasty meals out of it. The next night we had a spicy Thai Beef Salad that Scotty threw together to perfection (as always) and then the night after that we made a Pho Soup with thin slices of beef, enoki mushrooms, coriander, vermicelli noodles and chilli. I think there may even be a little left over for lunch wraps tomorrow – it’s the meal that just keeps on giving.
