Recipe: Slow Cooker Goulash Soup

Sometimes the slow cooker is indispensable! Yesterday my husband  had a drive home of several hours after work, and would welcome a hot meal when he got in - but these days road works and traffic jams can lengthen a journey very unpredictably, so a slow cooked meal was perfect as an extra hour or two of cooking wouldn't spoil it. So I decided to make a goulash, a complete one-pot meal.

I've called it a soup, but it's actually something in between a soup and a stew. Cutting the meat and veg small makes it spoonable, but it's still good to have something to mop up those yummy juices. I served it with home made caraway rye bread.

The goulash itself was a bit of a fridge clearing exercise - I wouldn't normally have used celeriac in a goulash, but it was just reaching "use it or lose it" point, and in fact it added a lovely savouriness to the goulash and I'll make a point of always adding it in future! And of course it means it contains even more veg, and makes an already cheap cut of meat go further.

This goulash reheats beautifully (we've just eaten the leftovers for lunch) and would probably freeze well too, although I wouldn't keep it for too long in the freezer as I find anything with garlic in it can develop a musty taste after a couple of months.

Goulash Soup in the slow cooker

ingredients (to serve 4)

500g lean stewing beef – buy it in a single piece if possible (I used skirt)

2 tablespoons plain flour
1 tablespoon paprika – hot or sweet, as you prefer, but NOT smoked
½ tsp salt
pepper
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 tablespoon sunflower oil
750ml beef stock
4 tablespoons tomato purée
1 bayleaf
2 onions
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 large carrots
½ a small celeriac
2 large potatoes

Mix together the flour, thyme and seasoning in a large plastic bag. Cut the meat into small pieces, about 2 cm square, and toss with the seasoned flour.

Heat the oil in a frying pan and brown a few pieces of meat at a time, taking care not to overcrowd the pan. Transfer to the slow cooker pot as done.

 

Peel and dice all the vegetables into roughly 1cm cubes, and add to the pot along with the bay leaf. Blend the tomato purée into the stock and pour over the meat and veg, then mix together.

If your slow cooker has an auto function, cook on auto for 10 hours. Otherwise cook for either 4-6 hours on High, or 1 hour on High followed by 8-10 hours on Low. Serve in soup bowls with crusty bread. I added a dollop of sour cream - not essential but rather yummy!

Mark suggested I should have garnished it with chopped parsley, but as there's no parsley in the recipe, to me that counts as an "irrelevant garnish" (one of my pet hates). However I've just thought - it DOES contain thyme, so a few leaves of fresh thyme would have prettied it up!

Since this is so cheap, easy and nourishing I'm going to spread the word by entering it into:

Extra Veg  at Jo's Kitchen  with Fuss Free Flavours and Utterly Scrummy Food For Friends


The Slow Cooked Challenge at Farmersgirl Kitchen



Credit Crunch Munch at Utterly Scrummy Food For Friends with Fuss Free Flavours and Fab Food 4 All




Super Soup at Jo's Kitchen