Slow Cooker Beef Pho

My favourite Slow Cooker Beef Pho recipe is a winner in my house.

This information is from my new program The Kitchen Reset.
The Kitchen Reset is a 9 day loving bitch slap to overhaul your BS excuses about why you’re not cooking. We’ll set up your pantry, fridge and cooking repertoire…. all in 9 days. You will learn exactly what to cook to keep yourself sane, well fed and without spending hours in the kitchen. If you are constantly asking yourself the question ‘what the F is for dinner?’ and always feel at a loss for recipe inspiration this course is designed to help you rise above your doubt and provide a solid ground of family favourite recipes for you to learn and grow with. Let’s take your training wheels off your kitchen bike, dust off those oven mitts, find the spatula and begin to realise that cooking, all along, is simple and delicious…. and don’t you LOVE FOOD?
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“my slow cooker is my best friend” is a sentence more people should be singing from the hilltops.

I’ve shared my Slow Cooker 101 Guide before but wanted to focus in on how you can make something so amazing and delicious in your slow cooker that takes 5 MINUTES TO PREPARE allowing you to get on with your busy quarantining-working-from-home-and-being-a-home-school-parent-kind-of-day.

Let me recap some of the benefits of dragging out your slow cooker from the far to reach places of your kitchen cupboard:

1. Slow cookers are slow to cook, meaning you can use tougher cheaper cuts of meat which relax into melt-in-your mouth.
   YOU SAVE MONEY: Rib eye steak is approx $40-$50 per kilo. Brisket or chuck steak is approx $15 – $25 per kilo.

2. 5 minutes to prep. Throw your ingredients in and allow the heat and flavours of your food to work their magic. This is hands off auto-pilot cooking.
   YOU SAVE TIME: You could get dinner going in the time it takes to make your morning coffee.

3. So many flavour options to choose from. If you think your slow cooker meals always taste the same, is it because you use the same ingredients every time? There are so many ways to make your slow cooker meal taste different and delicious. This can be achieved at the end of your cooking time, using simple FLAVOUR BOMBS. I talk about Flavour Bombs here and also in the Flavour Town series here.

4. You can make 2 meals at once. In the recipe below we’re using both the meat and the broth, however, you could keep the broth to make soup at a later date. It will be delicious and full of flavour, try this Roasted Pumpkin Soup. Take it a step further and cook the veg required in this recipe in the slow cooker at the same time. You’d then have meat to use for a meal and a soup ready to blend.
   YOU SAVE EVEN MORE TIME: Cook 2 meals at the one time in the one pot.

5. Use your slow cooker to cook your dried beans and chickpeas. I know you all have so many packs of chickpeas and beans right now because I went to buy some and they’re out of stock. Beans and chickpeas cooked from scratch are a game changer and I believe, a necessity in home cooking. I still buy tinned chickpeas from time to time and keep them on hand for emergencies, but, the flavour, the ingredients, the texture are all second to none compare to that tinned packet. Here’s what to do:
   Soak your beans overnight. > Rinse well the next morning. > Throw them in your slow cooker and let them cook away unsupervised all day. > Cool and store in snaplock bags in the freezer. You now have chickpeas or beans on demand.

6. Your neighbours will be jealous. Wonderful smells will takeover your home throughout the day and you’ll become the neighbour with ‘the good smells’….. and we all want that over ‘the neighbour with the bad smells’ – do it for the good of humanity.

Slow Cooker Beef Pho

Serves: 4

Ingredients – slow cooker

• 2 onions

• 2 carrots

• 10 button mushrooms, halved

• 2 – 10 garlic cloves

• 3 tbsp tamari

• 1 tbsp maple syrup

• Optional: Kaffir lime

• 1 tbsp Chinese Five Spice OR 2 cinnamon sticks, 1 star anise, 4 cloves

• 1 tbsp dried rosemary

• 1 tbsp tomato paste

• 500g chunk of beef – leave whole or dice into 2cm x 2cm chunks: oyster blade / chuck / brisket / cheek / topside / gravy beef

• 2L water

• Black pepper

Ingredients – assembling your pho

1. Vermicelli noodles / pad thai noodles

2. 1/4 cup shredded cabbage or kale

3. 4 green beans – per bowl

4. Ginger

5. Garlic

6. Fish sauce

7. 1/4 chunk lime – per bowl

8. Toasted sesame seeds

9. Fresh coriander and mint

Method

1. Throw your slow cooker ingredients into slow cooker and cook on low for 8 hours.

2. Now it’s time to assemble your bowls.

3. Cook noodles to packet instructions and divide between bowls, along with cabbage and green beans.

4. Grate a little ginger and garlic into each bowl, this will add a new pop of flavour.

5. Add 1/2 – 1 tbsp fish sauce to each bowl. Start with 1/2 tbsp and leave on the table for people to adjust their own flavours.

6. Serve lime chunks, sesame seeds and fresh herbs on table for people to add as they please.

7. Serve up bowls with a scoop of broth and a chunk of beef and slow cooked veggies.

READY TO GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER IN THE KITCHEN ONCE AND FOR ALL?

Join The Kitchen Reset.

You will learn how to get over the fact you have no time, move beyond the boring BS excuses that you can’t cook and set yourself up to make delicious simple food. It doesn’t matter whether you have 5, 15 or 30 minutes in the kitchen, what matters is that you make the choice to feed yourself the goods. Because, takeaway does not cut it, meal kits don’t cut it and pre-made meals are boringly simple to make…. you can make them.

I’ll show you how…