Lol! You need to fry the meat so that it seals all the flavour in, otherwise, it just seeps out and you end up with that insipid colour going on there on your plate !!!

I coat my beef in flour (you can use the cornflour though), then I fry it off, put it on one side, then I fry the onions, nice and slow don't burn them or you'll ruin the whole thing, add a bit of butter to them to bring out the flavour when you're frying them too, just golden and opaque looking. Take them out and put them with the beef. Leeks are good, chopped up and so is a green pepper, loads of flavour from a green pepper. Then add boiling water from the kettle to that frying pan and get all the bits off that you've fried. Make sure you've already got the slow cooker on so that it's nice and hot, otherwise you could lose a whole hour of cooking time if you don't. Put everything in there, and then the liquid on top and voila! I chuck my veggies in (apart from the leeks and onion and peppers) about 3/4 an hour befor eating. Another thing I used to do is, put a bit of foil over the top of that casserole, throw on some new potatoes so they sit on the foil, and there you go, you have a whole meal ready in half an hour. You can do that with cabbage or whatever too, sit it on a bit of foil.

If you fry off a couple of lamb chops then place them in the bottom of the warm slow cooker and leave them for 3 hours, they'll be falling off the bone, but browned off already coz you've fried them first! Oh it's very versatile once you get the hang of it, but you must have some kind of liquid at the bottom. When I was running a busy cafe, I used to fry off mountains of bacon, and keep it hot in a slow cooker about 10 kgs a time, it brought out the flavour, kept it hot and kept it just the same as if you'd just taken it out of the frying pan, but you won't need that much for your breakfast of course!!!

Well that was a disaster - put way too much red wine in that's all I can taste

Here's my first attempt!

A beef casserole... of sorts - well I just chucked anything and everything in!

Beef (coated in olive oil and corn flour), carrots, onions, parnsips, broccoli, swede, cabbage! Then one clove of garlic, salt, pepper, some dried rosemary and even some mustard seeds LOL!

It was ok actually - but the smell whilst cooking was a bit weird LOL!!

Served with roasted potatoes with a bit of clarified butter.



And here full plate on my new desk:



One thing I noticed, is that I probably need to season it a LOT more - as I couldn't taste much of it.