Recipe Beef and pork stew with juniper berries

Hemulen

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Beef and pork stew with juniper berries
stew_4.jpg

Preparation: 10 - 15 min, cooking time (oven): 6-7 hours
Serves 6

Ingredients

500 g beef
500 g pork
(e.g. boneless chuck, rib, chank, flank or round), cut into chunks
2 tblsp butter
10 cherry tomatoes/tiny plum tomatoes, halved
1 yellow onion, cut into quarters
2 one-clove garlics or 8-10 singular cloves, coarsely cut
1 carrot (I used four of my homegrown midgets), cut into slices
Zest of 1/2 lemon
20 unbroken juniper berries
3/4 teaspoon black peppercorns, whole
3 bay leaves
4 teaspoons coarse seasalt (the stew is supposed to be rather briny)
8-9 dl water

Preparation

Keep the meat in room temperature for 30 min before cooking. Brown the meat chunks lightly in butter in small batches on high heat. Toss the bits around on the pan for a minute or so; don’t let them simmer. Put aside.

Prepare the vegetables and mix them with the meat and seasonings in a large lidded oven pan/Dutch oven. Add enough water to cover the meat and vegetables generously.

stew_1.jpg


Cook in the oven (150 C°) for several hours until you can’t wait anymore. The more you cook, the tenderer you get. Check occasionally to ensure that there is enough liquid in the pot. If the meat doesn’t seem tender enough, add water and keep cooking.

Serve with mashed potatoes, pickled cucumber and black currant or cranberry sauce.
 
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Great photos! And that is a lot of juniper berries.

Serve with mashed potatoes, pickled cucumber and black currant or cranberry sauce.

I love the Scandinavian way of adding pickles and tart fruit sauces as an accompaniment to meat/fish dishes.

2 one-clove garlics or 8-10 singular cloves, coarsely cut

Didn't understand this.
 
Great photos! And that is a lot of juniper berries.



I love the Scandinavian way of adding pickles and tart fruit sauces as an accompaniment to meat/fish dishes.



Didn't understand this.
Thank you! I took lessons in digital photography earlier (in respect of my studies). Sadly, our kids took all the better photo equipment along (when they left the nest) and I've been too lazy to acquire a new camera. I shoot most of my photos with a mediocre Samsung phone, utilize its image processing features, reduce the resolution (just to ease transmission) and send the pics to my PC to finish with common photo editors like AVS and PowerPoint (the easiest way to make a collage). I do have an Adobe license but I find their software too complex for daily use (when not working with RAW pics).

When left intact, the juniper berries do not release that much woody flavor even if you poach them for several hours. The amount of other ingredients was plentiful, too, so we weren't bothered by excess tanginess.

Due to my RA, I try to cut down peeling and cutting (although my current meds work like magic). Solo garlic is what I mean with one-clove/single clove garlic. It is common here, imported from - surprise, surprise - China.
 
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. I shoot most of my photos with a mediocre Samsung phone,

Samsung has one of the top phone cameras. I use a Samsung Galaxy S7 for all mine. Its now an old phone (you can pick one up for £170). I used to use a Pentax digital but get far better results with the Samsung phone camera. Its much much better in low light conditions. I set it to max size image and HDR then edit on MacBook.
 
Newer than mine then. Are you reducing the resolution because of your bandwidth? I don't reduce it.
Not really. I reduce the resolution because my default phone pic files are too large to download here without reduction. A7 doesn't seem to have a common option to reduce the default resolution (in settings or in the image gallery editor); only the aspect ratio. I often send 20-30 pics to my email (if I'm too lazy to connect via usb) at once so it spares time to reduce the pic file size straight in the email app before sending. That reduction method affects the quality of images surprisingly little.
 
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That reduction method affects the quality of images surprisingly little.

Maybe - but perhaps you would be better transferring your best food photos to your computer via the USB at full size. I transfer to a memory stick straight from my phone and then upload onto my MacBook. This provides a back up too. I find it makes a big difference not to reduce. This forum (irritatingly for me) reduces the resolution somewhat, in any case.

I'm discussing this because your food photos are very good. And I reckon they could look even better. I'd like to be able to use them in 'featured' items (the images which appear at the top of the screen). They need to be really top resolution for me to do that. I end up using my own images mostly because of this issue. The current Recipe Challenge image is one of mine but I'd much rather use someone else's!
 
Maybe - but perhaps you would be better transferring your best food photos to your computer via the USB at full size. I transfer to a memory stick straight from my phone and then upload onto my MacBook. This provides a back up too. I find it makes a big difference not to reduce. This forum (irritatingly for me) reduces the resolution somewhat, in any case.

I'm discussing this because your food photos are very good. And I reckon they could look even better. I'd like to be able to use them in 'featured' items (the images which appear at the top of the screen). They need to be really top resolution for me to do that. I end up using my own images mostly because of this issue. The current Recipe Challenge image is one of mine but I'd much rather use someone else's!
Your images look pro to me! Keep using them, if you ask me. All of my phone pics sync automatically to two cloud services (and I backup them on an external hard drive too) so all of my images are safe in high resolution. Anyway, I'll change the manner in which I download my photos to CookingBites: USB, edit and download in higher quality it is from this day forward 👍.
 
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