"Just stir it, Una!"

Well, actually my gravy did need sieving. But I'm getting ahead of myself here...

This particular journey began - as so many do - with "mystery freezer meat", a packet of meat that was roughly recognisable as beef schnitzel, but only because it said so on the packet. It'd been in my freezer for a long time, and since it's not the sort of thing I generally buy, I don't really know how it got there.

Luckily, my Edmonds cookbook provided me with a chance to get rid of it. Beef olives (p124) are little packages of beef schnitzel, rolled up around stuffing and then cooked in gravy. Sounds like fun.

I had been led to believe that making the beef olives would be fiddly. Actually, that part only took me a few minutes. I whizzed up the stuffing ingredients in the food processor - a few moments and I had my stuffing ready to go. Then I spread it on the schnitzel, rolled them up and  fastened them together with toothpicks.

That bit was easy. It's from this point on that it all turned to custard. Or to horribly lumpy gravy, to be more precise. You see, I'm not an habitual gravy eater. If ever I did make gravy, it'd probably be from a packet, but here I'm obliged to stick to the recipe.

And according to the recipe, I should heat some oil in a frypan, and brown my beef olives. So far, so good. Then, move them into a casserole dish, and begin the gravy: "Stir flour into frying pan and cook for one minute. Gradually add stock, stirring constantly. Bring to the boil. Add soy sauce". Ok, that doesn't sound too difficult. Except that the moment I put the flour in, it turned into big yellow lumps.

I stood, adding stock, stirring and trying to mush out the lumps, for what seemed like an absolute age. The lumps refused to disappear, and all I could think of was that line from Bridget Jones' Diary: "I think the gravy's going to need sieving". Meanwhile, my beef olives were sitting in their casserole dish on the benchtop, getting cold and attracting flies. Eventually I decided to go by my movie-acquired theory and sieve the gravy.

Well, it got the lumps out. A tricky business, though, holding the sieve over the beef olives with one hand and trying to pour my (by now ultra-thick and very lumpy) gravy from the frying pan with my other hand -  a third hand would have been very useful for scraping out the frying pan. The result was not wonderful. A very thick, very salty (two tablespoons of soy sauce? One would be plenty) ultra-concentrated dribble of gravy on each beef olive. I deviated from the recipe here, and poured some water into the frying pan to collect the remainder of the sauce. Having achieved this, I poured my diluted gravy over and finally put my beef olives, now swimming in watery gravy, into the oven.


40 minutes later, when pulling out my beef olives, I used a teatowel as an oven mitt, which I then placed on an element which was still on from cooking the veges. Luckily I noticed before the smoke alarm went off and/or the house burnt down. The teatowel's ruined though.


As for the beef olives: Yet another reasonably good result, despite my making a  complete mess of the recipe. I have to say Edmonds recipes are very forgiving. I found the sweet prune stuffing slightly odd in contrast with the salty gravy, but if you reduce the soy sauce, that would be less of a problem. The watery gravy had thickened up and even my old freezer-meat wasn't tough and chewy like I expected - though of course it'd still be better to use fresh schnitzel.

If you have the knack of making gravy without lumps, go ahead and try this recipe.  Go easy on the soy sauce and you'll have a decent result. If you don't like prunes, do a different stuffing of your choice; and if I've put you off with the gravy nightmare, there's no reason why you couldn't use packet gravy instead.