Hangin’ tough…

How do you all get your meat to be nice and tender, I wonder?

I used to have a slow cooker, two in fact, and be it beef, lamb…or even pork leg/trotters/knuckles or wild boar, the meat would turn out really tender, just the way I would love it. Well, the first one, I think, was a gift I got for my wedding. One fine day, I got impatient and moved the crock pot to the gas stove and turned on the heat. There was a loud crack…and my slow cooker went straight to Slow Cooker Heaven, just like that. Then I bought another one real cheap – RM60 something only with the coupons collected at a departmental store here. It was very good too…but not for chicken unless you are into chicken floss, all separated from the bones. For other types of tougher meat, it was absolutely great. Eventually, my missus spotted a hairline crack at the base, not that it was leaking or anything so I got rid of it. Now I am slow cooker-less…and my birthday and Christmas are both in December, still a long way to go. Hehehehehe!!!!

Now I would have to resort to one of the more traditional ways and those would include using papaya leaves…

I would pound them well…

…and rub the meat with it and leave it to stand…

…for an hour or so. After that, rinse the meat well to get rid of all the bits of leaf but I guess if there are traces of any left, it is perfectly all right. After all, I have heard of the wonders of papaya leaves in the treatment of dengue fever patients.

Of course, for those of you living in the big cities, it may hard for you to get hold of any of those leaves but they do sell this in bottles, liquid form with a picture of a papaya on the label. That is good too! Once I marinated the meat in the morning for a barbecue at my house and left it for the whole day till evening. The meat turned out like tofu…or one of those vegetarian meat, so soft that it hardly had the meat texture anymore.

Another way would be to make sure that you cut the meat across the grain…

…so that it would come apart easily when chewed or maybe, you would like to try my mum’s way which would be to put a porcelain spoon in the stew or soup. She said that according to the old folks, the hardness in the meat would “fight” with that of the spoon and of course, the meat would lose and be rendered all soft and tender.

Anyway, I bought some beef that day as I wanted to try this…

…that my cousin in Australia sent me sometime ago.

I got all the other ingredients ready – the onions, carrots and potatoes…

…and since we can’t get fresh button mushrooms easily here, I just used the canned ones…

They sure made it sound so easy…

…on the label and I would say it was!

Incidentally, I had no intention of cooking it in a casserole in the oven – my plan at that point in time was to cook it as a stew so what I did was to put the meat in a pot and let it cook on very low heat till all the juices had come out…

…and then, I mixed the contents of the packet with water…

…and poured that in. I did not have any tomato paste in the house so I added this…

…instead – barbecue sauce. After all, there is tomato paste in the ingredients along with all the other things.

Once I had brought it back to boil, I added all the aforementioned ingredients, brought it back to boil again and let it simmer on low heat for an hour or so.

It turned out really nice…

…except that initially, when I tasted it, I thought it was very strong on those herbs and spices that one would find in western cuisine and some people may not be all too fond of those but when all the flavours from all the ingredients added had come out, it tasted really great and we sure did enjoy it a lot.

The beef was all right, not tough, quite tender…and if you’re wondering which method I used, I actually used all three – except that I do not have a porcelain spoon in the house so I threw in a stainless steel teaspoon instead. Hehehehehe!!!!