Basic casserole question

[nannyL]

Am doing a yummy casserole tonight

the recipe suggests cooking meat for an hour before adding veg and cooking for another hour

BUT i want to cook the meat really slowly for about 4/5 hours...
I dont want the veg to turn to mush so do i add them after about 3/4 hours instead?

I normally throw in meat, onions and carrots with stock. I may also add rice or pearl barley. Then about 30min before we are eating i add peas and any other veg i have.

If you are putting in potatoes you need to add about and hour before eating.

It also depends how big the pieces of veg are. Big chunks of carrot / parsnip / potatoes take longer to cook and won't disintegrate etc

I normally fry the meat in a bit of oil first, just to get it brown, then add a bit of flour to soak up all the juices. Then, basically throw it in the casserole, with all the root veg and forget about it for 3 or 4 hours! 20 mins before we eat it, I throw some dumplings in, but put the lid back on. Mainly because DD and DH prefer soggy dumplings and lots of juice!

ok.... well i'll do big chunks and let them get on with cooking... and add potatoe about an hour before

how does that sound?

thanks everyone

If you're having any kind of tinned/pureed tomato in the casserole, make sure your spuds are cooked first as something in the tomatoes 'seals' the outside of the spud and they don't get cooked properly. As I found out at the end of a long day when I opened my slow-cooker to find nearly-raw spuds after 8 hours' cooking!

thanks for that

have decided that as we are having jack pots AND have loads of oterh veg not to add pots anymore

but will bear it in mind for the future

My potatoes always cook in soup with tomatoes in it. Takes about 1 to 1 and a half hours or so for the potatoes to cook.

Possibly it's just me, then

But I'm sure that after that happened I then read something about the acid in the toms reacting with the spuds to have that effect... will go google to see if I imagined it!

knew I wasn't going mad!