Beer with her soup, that’s my gal!

I was so thrilled to get an email from my penpal Annette of I’m Annette to say she’d found a Jane Russell recipe on the internet.  This was music to my ears as the only recipe I had in my collection is BONKERS, really bonkers!  I was planning to use it in the Vincent Price Co*Star cookbook but was dreading having to test cook it as one of the ingredients is a can of “spiced veal”.  Believe me, I have spent quite some time googling this foodstuff and am none the wiser.

Thankfully, the recipe Annette found is much more do-able for the modern cook.  The recipe featured in a syndicated newspaper column in 1966 and it’s utterly delicious.

Yum, yum!  I’ve tweaked it a little bit for the book as follows:

 

Jane Russell’s Green Pepper Steak A La Waterfield

2 lbs top round steak cut into ½ inch strips

4 tablespoons olive oil (divided use)

2 large green bell peppers cut into thin strips

2 large onions, coarsely chopped

2 cloves garlic, crushed (divided use)

½ lb fresh mushrooms, sliced

½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

2 teaspoons salt

¾ cup red wine

5 or 6 pinches of curry powder

Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil in a large, heavy frying pan and brown the steak with 1 crushed clove of garlic.  In a second frying pan, heat another 2 tablespoons of oil and slowly sauté the green peppers and onions until the vegetables are tender.  Add the second clove of crushed garlic, mushrooms, black pepper and salt.  Add the sautéed vegetables to the meat, then add in the wine, cover and cook slowly for half an hour.  Add in the curry powder, cover and continue to simmer for another hour.  Jane says, ‘At this point, you may eat with gusto, but you may also continue cooking gently for many hours or even take it off the stove and store it overnight, in which case the flavour will be even better.’

Serve over warm rice.

Serves: 4-6

Jane advises adding chicken or beef broth if the mixture needs more liquid. She also says not to use too much curry powder as, ‘This isn’t a curry: it is a delightful green pepper steak, and you’ll like it and wish you’d made more.’  I hear ya Jane, me and Mr R loved this and had two big helpings each.  I sent two portions back with Mr R for his freezer – a Friday night din-dins with that soon I am hoping.  For UK cooks, an equivalent for top round steak would be silverside or topside.  Here’s a pic of our dinner, not very photogenic but utterly delicious!

I’ve been LOVING Jane in the two Vincent Price films we are featuring in the cookbook.  She looks absolutely ravishing in them both.  What a babe!

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