I love nothing more than cooking at home with my children, who always get involved in the kitchen. My food at home is easy to prepare, bursting with flavour, based around good quality ingredients and child-friendly.
My children help with the prepping and cooking, which gives them a real appreciation of the ingredients and the food. I think it’s important they should grow up understanding food and what better way that to get their hands dirty.
We all love a good pie and this is one we recently made at home together.
Gareth Mullins is executive chef at the Marker Hotel, Dublin and Commissioner General of Euro-Toques Ireland.
BEEF AND GUINNESS PIE
Serves four
Ingredients
4 beef cheeks, trimmed and diced, or 400g diced beef and 300g minced beef
2 carrots, diced
2 red onions, diced
2 cloves garlic, diced
3 sticks celery, diced
1 tbsp flour
100g butter
100g chestnut mushrooms, sliced
1 tin of tomatoes
2 bay leaves
Small bunch of thyme, picked
2 bottles of Guinness
1 roll of all-butter puff pastry
2 egg yolks for glazing the pastry
Method
1. Sear off the beef in a hot heavy-based pan until it is golden all round. Take out and set to one side.
2. In the same pan add butter then onions, carrot, garlic and celery and sauté until soft.
3. Add the beef back to the pan along with the stout, tomatoes, mushrooms and herbs.
4. Place a lid on the pot and cook in a 140 degree oven for three hours until the meat is soft and tender.
5. When the beef stew is cooked place it in a casserole dish and allow to cool before laying the rolled out puff pastry on top of the cooled mixture. I used a tool that makes a lattice from the pastry, but you can just crimp the edges with your fingers, or the tines of a fork, and make a couple of small slits in the pastry to let air escape.
6. Brush the top of the puff pastry with the beaten egg yolk.
7. Bake the pie for 30 to 40 minutes in a 170 degree oven, until golden brown and piping hot. Serve the pie with seasonal greens.
Chef's tips: Be sure to get plenty of colour on the beef as this will give the sauce more flavour. This recipe will also work with diced stewing beef but the cheeks give superior flavour.
Kitchen Cabinet is a series of recipes from chefs who are members of Euro-toques Ireland who have come together during the coronavirus outbreak to share some of the easy, tasty things that they like to cook and eat at home #ChefsAtHome
