An Indian Chianina

I was lucky enough to take delivery of a box full of delicious Chianina beef from my good friends at Feather and Bone last week.  On occasion they do a bit of bulk selling where they'll break up one or two whole carcasses and sell them as a box 'o flesh.  It's always very exciting to see what you'll get, but usually an 80/20 mix of secondary and prime¹ cuts.  For the prime cuts I was lucky enough to get 2 beautiful pieces - a bistecca (thick cut t-bone) and another which will stay between me and my chest freezer for now2.

I cooked the bistecca up last weekend - Himself and I enjoyed it very much, I may have bragged about it on Faceplant.

But! Enough of prime cuts - they're boring (and delicious).  Today I decided to do a curry.  A hot curry.  Hmmmm beef + hot curry = vindaloo! hooray for vindaloo!!  So pulled out one of my trusty Indian cookbooks and mixed up a heady spice mix of cardamom, black pepper, dried chilli, turmeric  cumin, coriander, cinnamon, fenugreek⁴, white vinegar and dark vinegar.  Apparently vindaloo was developed by the Portuguese in Goa and roughly translates to vinegar and garlic (10 cloves no less!! but that's later).

I pulled a 1.5kg bag of meat from Falkor⁵ helpfully labelled 'braising beef' and mixed it into the spice/vinegar mix.  The smell coming off that marinade was absolutely amazing - shame I don't have smell-o-blog here.  I then left it to think about itself while I enjoyed an afternoon at the Art Gallery (as you do).

I'm lucky enough to be in possession  of a pressure cooker which was lent to me by a dear friend⁶ so used that to cook up my soon to be vindaloo, after browning my onion, adding ginger julienne and mountains of garlic.  

Once it was cooked until tender I took the lid off and let it simmer for another hour to develop the flavours (and I may have been busy chatting to the Wee Girl on Skype in Italy).  There was a big look of disgust on her face when she found out it was curry night.  While she's lovin' la bella vita Italiana she's missing the multi-cultural aspect of home where every cuisine is fair go.

I then served with some dal tarka (you have got to try that recipe - it is the shit) and ready made lacha paratha.  I would have loved some rumali roti but can't seem to find any in my neck of the woods - don't these local Indian shops realise I'm in desperate need of some rumali in my life???  

A tip for you all, frozen lacha paratha can be cooked with great success in a sandwich press - we find 2 min 20 sec with the toaster open to the first notch is paratha perfection.

And then we ate it. It was delicious - It was one of those slow burners - okay at the beginning, lip tingling at the end; a sign of excellent hotness. So go get some home made Chianina Vindaloo into ya! Here's the recipe.

¹ Which, incidentally is how it comes on the cow - so all your prime cut eaters are wasting 80% of utter deliciousness... sucks to be you!
2 I'm keeping it close to my chest3
3 See what I did there?
4 Fenugreek is the uber 'curry' smelling spice
5 I mention my chest freezer so much I figured I'd give it a name
6 How good are pressure cookers????