Roasted Beef and Vegetables Recipe

Roasted Beef and Vegetables

I was delighted with people results. Gluten-free without even trying!

Good Moroccan Food lover that I am, my dinners quite often consist of tajines, where I put every single ingredient in a single wide pot, cook it on a stovetop and wait for the wonderful meal-in-one to be ready.

You will find no end of these complete dishes on my blog, but just to name a few,

Chicken vegetable tajine, 
Artichoke fennel tajine
Fish tajine 

What these all in one tajines have in commun is: they are based on chicken, fish or tofu/seitan: All ingredients that cook relatively quickly.
But I had never try these stovetop tajines with meat: I always feared the veggies would be ready much faster than the meat, and I would end up either with mushy vegetables or with tough meat.

Roasted Beef and Vegetable Tajine?

Roasted Tajine? Is that even a thing? My answer is Yes yes yes! This past Friday I was faced with a super short winter day with a ridiculously early candle lighting time and not as moment to spare for fussing. I thought, what if I did it the lazy way and threw ALL my ingredients in an oven proof pot with a tight lid? The same as I always do with fish, chicken or tofu/seitan/tempeh, but this time with beef, in an oven-baked tajine? Roasting would eliminate the risk of the ingredients drying out or scorching on a stovetop during the long cooking, so the oven was the answer!

Let me start by saying that the finished roasted beef and vegetables dish was amazingly delicious, with no preliminary sautéing or searing or anything. All I did was, all aboard in the pot! I couldn’t keep my hands off, and after two sample refills I stopped using the lame quality-control excuse.

Put the Grain in a Separate Cheesecloth Bag

When I say I wanted the dish to be complete, I really mean complete: meat, grain and veggies.  The problem I had with that was, I thought the rice dispersed in the whole dish made it look like a cousin of paella. Nothing wrong with paella, of course, one of my favorite dishes. But I lost the moisture of he dish to the grain, and it took away from the final presentation (perfect outcome for paella but not so much for my pristine roasted beef and vegetables. So the improvement I decided to make in my original recipe is: I am wrapping the rice in a cheesecloth bag, so all ends up looking perfect, and I would have enough cooking liquids left to pour over the whole dish. I highly recommend these cheesecloth bags: they are closed on one end, and they stretch and grow as the grain expands: all that is left to do is open the bag and pour out the grain onto a platter before pouring the rest of the dish on top. Perfect, too, for making chicken soup and other soups where the bones must be discarded.

The Dish is Incredibly Elastic

I will share the recipe I started with, and then get you started on some variations, confident you will come up with some exciting melange of your own.

Ingredients

For about 8 servings

• 3 1/2 boneless beef cut in large dice (flanken,  shoulder roast,  very well rinsed beef cheeks, lamb stew)
• 2 large red onions, sliced this
• 1 head garlic, all cloves peeled and sliced coarse
• 1 pound creaming mushrooms, quartered
• 8 long thin carrot, cut into 2 inch segments
• 6 sprigs thyme and 2 sprigs rosemary (Ok to leave them whole and fish them out at the end)
• 1/4 cup tomato paste
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 cups dry red wine
• 1 cup water
• 1 tablespoon each turmeric and paprika
• Salt and pepper to taste (no added salt whatsoever if you used beef cheeks)
• 1 cup brown rice loosely wrapped in a cheesecloth bag

Instructions