Quick Dinner

I've just invested in a slow cooker recently because I was craving for my friend's hearty beef stew for a long, long time now. She used a slow cooker to make it and I'm sure you can actually do it on the stove top but I think the reason why the stew was so good was the fact it was slow cooked. So, I bought a 5 litre slow cooker from Cornell (Parkson;RM119) - it was the only one with a dark coloured ceramic pot. Mum has one which is white and it stains easily.

With the new toy, I did some research for recipes and even bought a recipe book for slow cooker (Borders; RM28) which has 200 recipes covering from appettizers to desserts. Bet you didn't know that you can bake a cake using a slow cooker! Ask any Chinese - slow cooker is for soup and sweet soupy dessert tong sui. And bak kut teh.

Did a bit of history of the slow cooker as well. Apparently, slow cooker was conceived to help women who were starting to work in the post-depression era to prepare a quick yet hearty dinner for their families. They needed a device that would slowly cook the food for 8-10 hours and ready to be served when they got home. This is great as I have been trying to cook our own dinner so that the polar bear (my husband) will not roam to McDonald's drive throughs.

I successfully replicated a beef stew using this simple recipe:

about 500g beef, cubed (I bought mine from Cold Storage and it had the word STEW on the label)
2 stalks of celery, choppped
2 carrots, chopped
1 large onion, chopped
2-3 potatoes, chopped
half pack of dry onion soup mix (look for it in the soup section, if you can find Campbell's soup, it should be there)
1 cup of beef broth (I made this using a Knorr beef cube)
salt, pepper, 2 tablespoon of flour, Worchester sauce, 2-3 bay leaves
fresh rosemary
parsley for garnishing

I seasoned the cut-up beef with salt, pepper and flour before browning them on all sides on a pan. Browning means the meat should just changed its colour. This process will help seal the flavour of the meat.

Once that was done, I put all the items into the pot and put on high for 4 hours (for working days, you can cook them on low for 8-10 hours). You can serve the stew with rice, but I served it with mashed potatoes.

This recipe is for 3-4 servings. We had leftovers, and polar bear had it the next day for lunch.

Really yummy and so easy to prepare.