Last week I bought a fair bit of tender, pink veal chuck steak from Chilcott’s Butchery and froze part of it. At this point I’m going to rave on about just how incredibly well chuck steak freezes and defrosts, making it one of my essential freezer items, along with chicken stock, raspberries, puff pastry and bread. Having defrosted another 2 kilogram lot, I needed to come up with a new, delicious home cooked meal idea. 

So I stared at my spice rack looking for inspiration. I flicked through a couple of cookbooks and I peered into the fridges and then I spotted a couple of chorizo sausages. Bingo! I decided to add a a Spanish-style twist to a veal one-pot-wonder dish, brimming with root vegetables, with the familiar aroma of bay leaves and a touch of saffron. 

Now this dish would be complete and easy to eat from deep bowls using simply a spoon, perhaps snuggled on the couch engrossed in a book or your favourite television show. A generous slice of crusty bread could be used to mop up the thick gravy juices. I ended up putting on my rice cooker to make buttery Turmeric Rice as a side dish. My 6 year old daughter Sofia adores rice prepared this way –  which she calls “yellow sunshine rice” and would be happy to eat only this for dinner if I allowed her. 

Veal, Veg and Chorizo One-Pot-Wonder to serve 10 – 12 people

Ingredients
olive oil
50 g unsalted butter
1 brown onion finely diced
2 mild chorizo cut into thick semi-circles
3 – 4 cloves garlic crushed
3 medium/large carrots
2 long sticks of celery
1 parsnip
1 leek (white part only)
2 medium zucchini
2 large potatoes peeled and diced
1 heaped teaspoon sea salt
good grind of black pepper
6 dried bay leaves
1 teaspoon saffron threads
1/2 tablespoon sweet paprika
1 tablespoon plain flour
500 ml chicken stock

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees on a conventional setting. 

Melt the butter with the olive oil over a medium heat and add the onions, garlic and chorizo. Sauté for 5 minutes. 

Dice all the other vegetables into chunky pieces (about 2cm in thickness). Add to the pot with the bay leaves and sauté for another 5 minutes. 

Add the paprika and flour and cook off for 1 minute. 

Add the chicken stock and the saffron and bring to the boil. Remove from the heat as soon as the mixture comes to the boil, clamp on the lid and place in the oven for 2 hours. 

When ready, remove from the oven, stir and serve as is or with a comforting carbohydrate side dish such as mashed kumera and potato or rice. 

For Turmeric Rice, just add 1 teaspoon of dried turmeric and 1 tablespoon of butter to four cups of rice BEFORE it is cooked. This can be added to a rice cooker or to a pot if using the absorption method. Fluff up the cooked rice before serving.