Beef ratatouie

Blogging frequently means that I have too much time on my hands. At home, I'm "on holiday" from my MBA studies and so have at least ten hours free time a week (which I seem to be spending on watching 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' - we're now near the end of the second season), and at work the second half of a month always seems to carry a lighter load than the first half.

Here's a recipe for a dish which I've been cooking very successfully over the past few months. It's another recipe with a good "value for time invested" ratio; there's no beating roast chicken, but this one comes close. Let us say that the value of a roast chicken meal is 10; it takes me maybe fifteen minutes to prepare it, so the ratio would be 0.67 taste units per minute. Fancy cooking leaves me cold and takes a long time so such a ratio would be around 0.1. This casserole dish has a ratio of about 0.4.

Take a large casserole dish suitable for cooking over a flame and heat in it some oil. Dice a large onion and then fry it in the dish until it browns (but not caramelises). Add 500g minced beef; mix, fry and try to make the pieces of fried beef which inevitably result as small as possible. Once all the meat has a grey tinge, add vegetables which have previously been cut into cubes - potatoes, carrots, courgettes. The original recipe calls for a tin of baked beans to be added, but I've been using haricot beans and this variation improves the result. Add tomato paste and enough water to almost cover everything. Stir and heat until boiling, then reduce the heat and cover the dish. Leave to cook for two hours. Turn off the gas/electricity but leave the dish covered. Warm to serve.

Last Saturday I started cooking at around 8:30 by cubing the vegetables; by 9am the casserole dish was covered. I continued heating till about 11am, then turned off the gas. A quick reheat at 12am and then the food was ready.