Beef Stew - The Slow Way

I had some meat sent to me from Farmison & Co and as we were going to be spending time on the allotment on Sunday I wanted to come home to a cooked meal. Usually we come home with sore backs and fairly tired so it is always good not to have to cook.

I had a bag of seasoning from a visit to America that I wanted to try.

I have used them before and you put all the ingredients, meat, carrots, onion and celery in this case into the plastic bag that comes with the seasoning and pop it all into the oven for an hour and a half. 

I wanted to use my slow cooker and decided to try an experiment.  I put the whole cooking bag right into the slow cooker and went off to the allotment. It did start to cook the meat and veggies however when I got home I decided to empty the bag straight into the slow cooker.  I let it all finish cooking and served up a tender and tasty beef stew.  I hadn't cut the meat up smaller than how it arrived which meant the stew was full of lovely larege pieces of tender stewing steak along with the onion, carrot and celery.

I served the stew with my 'No Fail' raisin rice which is a family favourite and taught to me by an Indian woman I used to work with.

Soak one cup of basmati rice for about 20 minutes then rinse and drain.  Whilst the rice is soaking you can fry a finely cut up onion in a couple of tablespoons of sunflower oil.  When the rice is starting to go golden add the rice and cook for a couple of minutes, stirring so that all the rice grains get coated with the cooking oil.  Add one cup of boiling water to which you have added a Knorr stock cube and another cup of water to the pan.  Now add a handful of raisins and bring back to the boil.  Stir rice, cover and turn down the heat so that the rice can simmer for 10 minutes. After the 10 minutes turn the heat off and without lifting the lid let the rice sit for another 10 minutes.  Fluff the rice with a fork and serve.  Perfect rice every time!