Stage one of slow cooked beef  in orange herb marinade

While reorganising my collection of cookbooks this morning, the cover shot of Maggie’s Table by Barossa legend Maggie Beer caught my eye. Although this cookbook had been added to my bookshelf almost two years – when I unpacked boxes that had been in storage while renovating – it was tucked away behind several towering hard cover compendiums and couldn’t be seen immediately which is a real pity. The cleverly photographed cover features a crisp-topped, tantalising Fig and Walnut Tart that almost “pops” from the page. A job well done by the production team because it certainly drew me in and I soon found myself leafing through the pages, marking many of them with sticky notes as potential meal ideas. It may well become another favourite home cooking guide this season. 

One such recipe is Maggie’s Italian Beef Daube, which sounds like a superbly flavoured, slow cooked method of making the most of shin beef, a basic cut of meat. It was actually the marinade that I was particularly drawn to, because it includes orange rind, an ingredient I would not usually associate with beef. I was intrigued. 

Although I didn’t have any shin beef on hand, I did have in my fridge a two kilogram parcel of guaranteed-to-be-tender beef chuck steak, expertly diced into 4 cm pieces by Chilcott’s Butchery that I had planned to turn into a home cooked beef pie. However, I decided to apply Maggie’s recipe for her Italian Beef Daube marinade to my beef chuck instead. 

Ingredients for marinade
1 orange rind – remove this using a potato peeler
250 ml extra virgin olive oil
bay leaves  – I used two dried ones because there were no fresh bay leaves in my fridge
fresh rosemary – I used 1 long stalk
fresh thyme – I used 5 short springs
fresh parsley – I used about half a handful

To make the most of the fresh herb and orange flavours, Maggie recommends marinating overnight. So while this evening’s dinner of home cooked Napoletana sauce was bubbling on my stove, I trotted out to the garden to collect the necessary herbs.

I mixed up all the ingredients including the juice from the orange, along with the beef chuck steak in a non reactive glass Pyrex dish which I placed in the fridge. It’s important to cover the dish with plastic wrap to prevent it from drying out, to contain the aroma of the raw ingredients and to avoid cross contamination with any other cooked foods being stored in the same area. 

I plan to cook this tomorrow in a preheated oven at 150 degrees for about 3 or so hours and then serve up the tender offering with golden, creamy polenta flecked with feta and yoghurt. 

My late paternal grandmother Baba Maga (short for Magdalena after whom I was named), used to make the most marvellous polenta with her own farm grown and stone ground cornmeal. It was a meal in itself, boosted by boiled potatoes mashed into the cooked polenta and sharp tasting feta cheese folded through. I am going to try and recreate this as a side to the slow cooked beef, so take a look at tomorrow night’s food blog post for the outcome and the recipes. 

Home Cooked Napoletana – an easy, healthy and popular family meal

While the beef was stowed away in the fridge starting to develop all those lovely fresh herby-orange flavours, my family and I tucked into deep bowls of fusilli pasta with home cooked Napoletana sauce and shavings of Parmesan. It was actually a flattering, enthusiastic message from my sister-in-law Emma – who had followed my recipe for this particular sauce posted on the June 2nd – that prompted me to once again make this popular dish. An ideal choice for a winter school holiday dinner.