Dinner Tonight: Beef Casserole with Parsley Crust
Sunday, March 15th, 2009
After more than two weeks of chicken overdose, tonight’s menu is finally going to be beef. It’s still in the form of meatballs though, but my hubby didn’t seem to mind. 
The usual stuff went into the meatballs: breadcrumbs, salt and pepper, and some Worcestershire sauce. After it’s fried, it’s set aside in an oven proof dish. The sauce is made of stir fried onion, cooked until tender with a quarter cup red wine vinegar, one and a half cup beef stock, one third cup of cranberries sauce (originally the recipe called for plum sauce/jam but during our shopping I forgot to look for it). Once the onion is soft, the sauce is poured over the meatballs. As for the parsley crust, it’s made of self-raising flour, butter, milk and, obviously, some parsley. It’s used to cover most of the dish to prevent the meatballs to get too dry and the sauce to evaporate and thicken too much.
It turns out that the onions absorbed most of the vinegar taste so it ended up being the most sour part of the dish. Mixed together it was quite ok but the taste of the sauce did not seep into the meat much. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to, I don’t know. But in general, I thought the taste of the three main ingredients of this dish had completely different taste. I guess they were supposed to compliment each other, which they did, although I would probably put less vinegar in it next time.
