Cooking with Uri: beef olives with potatoes in their skin

Ingredients for two Persons:

- 2 slices of beef from the topside (have your butcher cut them thin and long)
- Bacon
- pickled gherkins or cornichons
- 4 big onions
- hot Dijon mustard
- butter or sunflower oil or rapeseed oil or...
- a carrot
- 1/4 of a single celeriac
- a single clove of garlic
- one big tomato (or 2 smaller ones)
- tomato paste
- 0,4 l beef stock
- fresh thyme
- dried laurel leaves
- freshly ground pepper
- salt
- waxy potatoes



Equipment needed:

- a cutting board
- a kitchen knife
- a frying pan
- three pots
- a bowl
- a sieve
- skewers

First peel and wash the onions and cut them in half as shown on the picture. Put them in a bowl filled with cold water to avoid the tears when cutting them into smaller pieces.



After five minutes, take two of the onion halves and cut them into long bits.

Now it's time to prepare the meat. Wash and pat it dry, then salt and pepper it from both sides. Now slather the slices with mustard and put the bacon on top of it. Add the onions, quarter the pickled gherkins lengthwise and put them on one end of the slices. It should look like this when you are done:



Now just roll the whole thing up from the side where you put the gherkins and fix it with the skewers.



Now we turn our attention to the veggies. First, wash the tomatoes under hot water and quarter them. Then we cut the carrot, the celeriac, the garlic and the remaining onions using the Brunoise technique. Take a look at my Bolognese post for reference.



Take your frying pan and heat up the oil/butter in it. Sear the beef olives from all sites and put them out of the pan onto a plate. Then you put the vegetables into the pan (not the tomatoes!) and roast them for a while. Add a tablespoon full of tomato paste and mix it with the greens.
Now pull the pan off the hotplate and put your pot on it (a big one). Put the fried vegetables, the beef stock, a single leaf of laurel, a stipe of thyme and the tomatoes in the pot and cook it up. Then turn the hotplate down to the lowest heat level and put the beef olives in the pot.



Put the lid on and let it braise for 1 hour and 50 minutes.

After one hour, it's time to prepare the potatoes. Now this is an easy task. First we wash the potatoes really good and then we put the unpeeled (!) potatoes on a pot with cold water. Boil it up and let it cook for 20 to 25 minutes, depending on the size of your potatoes. Then strain the potatoes and put them into another (dry) pot. Heat that pot up once, put the lid on and and let the potatoes steam out until you serve them.

When the sauce is finished, you can either keep the vegetables and just remove the laurel, the thyme and the skin of the tomatoes or you pass all the vegetables through a sieve. Season the sauce to taste and serve. Don't forget to peel the potatoes



Other possible side dishes:
- spaetzle
- red cabbage

Best served with a dry red wine with a strong taste like for example a Dornfelder.