A winning recipe from Brazil to use up those leftovers. They really know how to cook BBQ meat over there, lots of it, so they know how to use up the leftovers. Happily, it works just as well with the leftovers from a Sunday roast too, if you don’t happen to live in a country where you can have barbecues most of the year. This is not the first time this has featured on the blog but it’s so good it is worth sharing, especially as there are so many variations on the basic recipe.
Carreteiro (pronounced kaya-teiro) is essentially rice, cooked in stock with roasted meats and vegetables. Typically, it would involve some cooked chicken or beef, cooked with a bit of onion and carrot in chicken stock, which is perfectly lovely and can be found at most roadside restaurants all around Brazil. Me being me, I always try to mix it up a bit and cram as much flavour as I can. This recipe used onion and garlic as a base, Sunday’s roast beef leftovers, beef stock, dried mushrooms, rosemary, Worcestershire Sauce, parmesan cheese and even the leftover gravy. Cavalo Nero provided the greens but really any green vegetable could be cooked in there. Some roasted squash finished the plate off nicely for a real wintery meal that really gets the most out of your leftover roast meats.
Any rice will work well. I prefer brown rice, not only for health reasons but because it cooks for longer it seems to absorb more flavour from the meat. In this recipe I used spelt, which is a really nutty, tasty alternative to rice and even healthier, by all accounts, although I’m not 100% sure why.
Enjoy!
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading...Ingredients
- 1 medium onion
- 1 large bulb of garlic
- 100-200g leftover roast beef, cut into small chunks
- 250g spelt or brown rice
- 500ml beef stock
- 30g dried porcini mushrooms
- Whatever leftover gravy that you have
- 50g grated parmesan cheese
- A few springs of rosemary, roughly chopped
- 6-8 drops of Worcestershire sauce
- Rapeseed oil, salt and pepper
Instructions
Soak the dried porcini mushrooms in 150 ml of boiling water and set aside while you begin cooking.
Finely chop the onion and fry over a low heat for 10 minutes, taking care not to burn it.
Add the sliced garlic and cook for 1 minute.
Add the spelt and stir well to coat all the grains.
Pour in the stock and the mushrooms, including all the delicious liquid that they have been soaking in.
Add the chunks of meat, Worcester sauce, leftover gravy and rosemary springs. Season well with salt and pepper.
Simmer, partially covered, over a medium heat for around 20 minutes, stirring regularly to prevent sticking.
Towards the end of cooking, add any soft green veg, Cavalo Nero in this case.
When the spelt (or rice) is cooked through, turn off the heat and stir in some parmesan cheese.
Season to taste and serve with more cheese grated on top.
Notes
All measures are very approximate, depending on how much meat you have left over. If you have a bone from beef or lamb, thrown it in to cook with the rice. Add extra flavour to the base by frying celery and carrot along with the onion. You can even fry the onion in beef dripping, if you have it, to really intensify the beef flavour.
