Simple Steak & Guinness Pie

Hiya 🙂

Welcome to my lovely new site!  I tried to post this yesterday, but there were teething problems (aka my technical incompetence!).  Alas… here is the Steak & Guinness Pie I was dreaming about last week!

I looked up various recipes for inspiration and took what I liked from each of them; I wanted one that was slow cooker friendly, using simple, low cost ingredients.   

Some people are feart of leaving their slow cooker on whilst unconscious or out of the house.  I admit, the first time I left my slow cooker unattended to go to work, I was a wee bit worried.  According to these safety tips, however, there is no need to worry, as the wattage is very low; similar to a lightbulb.  Don’t tell me you haven’t slept with the light on after watching a scary movie! 😉

This lovely pie filling cooked sloooooowly overnight; the smell of the flat in the morning was amazing!  I prefer overnight slow-cooking, to starting it in the morning.  Firstly, because I like to brown my meat, and don’t fancy doing that at 6am before work!  And secondly, if you switch it off in the morning, the flavours develop all day.  Mmmmmm!

Here is what I did:

 

Ingredients (Serves 4)

500g lean diced steak

2 tbsp plain flour

1 onion, diced

1 tbsp dijon mustard

2 cloves garlic, minced

3 Oxo cubes, dissolved into 150ml hot water

300ml Guinness (or any ale, if you please)

340g ready made shortcrust pastry

1 egg, beaten, for glazing

First, I put flour, some salt and pepper into a bag, popped the beef in and mixed it all thoroughly.  I do this because I heard it helps lock in the juices when browning the meat.  Here is a more fancy, scientific explanation.  Yeah.  What they said.

I then fried the meat until browned (a few minutes, you may need to do this in batches), then popped it into my slow cooker (which I switched on to the “LOW” setting).  I fried the onions and garlic for a few minutes, and they joined the beef.

In a jug, I mixed the mustard with the Oxo stock, then topped up with my Guinness.  I poured all the liquid into the slow cooker and gave it a good stir.

I left this cooking on LOW for 7 hours, before adding a tin of carrots and some frozen peas (yes, I like convenience, an whit?), and let it cook for a further half an hour (whilst I dashed about, trying to get ready for work.  Not a nice sight). 

The liquid became all reduced and gorgeous and flavoursome (drooool).

When I got home from work that day, I got my pastry out.

Even though I’ve used the same type of pastry on the same size of dish, I felt I was spreading it out a bit thin this time and could have done with a bit more! 

I brushed a bit of the beaten egg around the top of the dish, to help my top half of pastry stick to it.  I glazed the hell out of the top layer and made two cuts in the middle, to let the steam escape (ok, it was also to make some nostrils for my happy face).

I popped this into the oven at 180 degrees for 40 minutes.  Voilaaaaaaaaaaaa!

This was served up with creamy garlic potatoes and the honey mustard carrots saved over from my last recipe!

 

As with all my recipes (apart from the Sad Pie one), I would thoroughly recommend it 😉  If I had a bigger slow cooker, I’d double up the recipe and batch freeze into individual portions, for some lovely midweek dinners!

There is a bit of a slow cooker revolution going on in my office right now!  What’s your fave slow cooker recipe?  I’d love to hear about/drool over them!

See you next week 😀 x

12 Comments

  1. Pingback: Noble Nourishment has moved! « Noble Nourishment

  2. Janice

    Lovely tasty pie. Good idea to do it overnight, I gave up on my 1980s slow cooker because I couldn’t face browning stuff in the morning.

    1. Catherine

      Thanks Janice 🙂 yeah it’s not ideal first thing in the morning, eh? I definitely want to start using mines more; I’m thinking a chicken dish next time!

  4. Corina

    I love my slowcooker but so far i’ve never used it to make a pie filling so I’m really glad to have a new idea for it. I bet the meat was so tender after all this slow cooking!

    1. Catherine

      Oh Corina, it was! I had a little taste when I got up in the morning and I could have scoffed the lot 😀 it’s a great way to use up the cheaper cuts of meat (which is good for a skinflint like me!)

  6. selina

    Hiya
    Just to let you know I decided to have a wee try of this but with a couple of extra ingredients and minor amendments to suit my palate.

    When flouring and seasoning the meat I added some crushed cumin seeds. Additionally, I included a couple of bay leaves, powdered cocoa, and instead of using Guiness (being a bit of a real ale buff) I added some Hobgoblin Ale as it is quite dark and chocolatey.
    Instead of using pastry I have some Maris Piper potatoes, nice and floury, so I am going to mash them but will add a bulb of garlic to the mash (when boiling the potatoes cloves will be added then) with a touch of butter and greek yoghurt (low fat) making it nice and creamy.

    This morning I arose and ran straight thro to the kitchen switched off the slow cooker and delved right in there. Magic, tastes amazing so I am really looking forward to my dinner tonite! Mashing of potatoes and garlic will be done before placing in oven.

    Roll on Tea Time and thanks for the ideas, keep them coming.
    Sel

    1. Catherine

      Selina, you are a Pro Food Blogger and you don’t even know it yet! That garlic mash is definitely being topped over some slow cooked concoction for my next dish. Lllarrrrrr! Hope you enjoyed the pie; yours sounds miles better than mines haha!

  7. Ananda Rajashekar

    Congrats on your blog move Catherine! you pie make me smile it looks so cute! I have never tried slow cooking but have slept with lights on 😀 oh btw the rss feed to post doesn’t seem to work, may be you want to check? thanks!

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