It’s hard to do justice to a ragu in a photo, especially when it’s a winter dinner and there’s no natural light.  But a ragu in the slow cooker is bliss to come home to on a winter night, and there are a lot more vegetables in this meal than appear.

Vegetables are good.  I can grow most of our own in a very closed-loop system and be responsible about how they are produced. I can feed us in a way that doesn’t take food out of the mouth of our great grandkids.  But a bit of fish, and a bit of red meat, ethically harvested from the wild is good too, and the ethics of eating kangaroo meat is pretty unconflicted for Choice, and for me.

The Recipe:

For two large serves:

Slice 300g of kangaroo steak into strips. 

Plonk it in the slow cooker along with:

• one and a half dozen sun-dried tomatoes, or tomato paste (about a heaped dessertspoonful)
• one onion, two carrots and two sticks of celery all roughly diced
• a couple of bay  leaves
• a handful of oregano and a few sprigs of thyme roughly chopped (or used dried)
• two or three cloves of garlic chopped
• half a cup of red wine

Turn the slow cooker on to low if you will be out all day, or high if it is only a few hours till dinner time.

It’s wonderful over home-made tagliatelle with a bit of chopped parsley to garnish.

I post a lot of vegetarian recipes here but we’re not vegetarian.  Sometimes we go for ages eating vegetarian, but more because that’s what I feel like cooking and eating and I have all the ingredients I need without going shopping, than for any philosophical reason.  If you’ve ever seriously tried to feed yourself out of a garden, you will know that animals – big ones and very little ones – their manure, their grazing and scratching behaviours, their seed dispersal, their pollination, their predation – are part of the system. Turning it into a plants-only system requires some serious and unsustainable artificial inputs and interventions.

You can of course decide not to eat the animals, but you can’t really make them decide not to eat each other.  There’s a really stunning video doing the rounds at the moment about the cascade of environmental effects of reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone National Park. To me it says, predators are a good and important part of a biological system – wolves, eagles and sharks are good and necessary.

So I don’t have an ethical problem with eating meat.  I do have an ethical problem – a big one – with intensive farming methods that treat animals as if they are commodities, non-living cogs in an industrial process.  Killing an animal is a shock. For most of us these days its a rare experience to kill anything bigger than a mouse and even mouse killing methods are designed to distance us from the reality of that little furry body. But if you cruise the permaculture and small farming blogs, you will find that people who do it discover that raising and killing an animal for meat can be done in an honourable way.  Without cruelty and with respect.  You can’t say that about the bacon or the chicken nuggets in the supermarket.

We’re lucky in Australia that most of our beef and lamb is still free range grass fed.  We haven’t yet got into the CAFOs that dominate meat production in USA. I think for most consumers CAFOs are only tolerated because it is possible to pretend they don’t exist. All our kangaroo meat though comes from free range animals grass fed animals, not treated with antibiotics or hormones or fed GM or anything else.  There are some macropod species that are threatened, but the ones that are hunted are overpopulated. “These commercially harvested species are abundant over a broad area of Queensland and Australia. None of these species is listed as threatened under Queensland or Commonwealth legislation. They are listed as least concern wildlife under the Nature Conservation (Wildlife) Regulation 2006.” 1.

I think it’s about as close as we can get in our culture to respectful predation.

The Recipe

Makes two big serves.  If you serve it over rice, it can easily go round four.

This comes together really fast once you start cooking, so you are best to get everything assembled and chopped and, if you are serving it over rice or noodles, get it on to cook before you start.

• Thinly slice 300 grams of kangaroo fillet steak.  Mix a couple of tablespoons of rice flour or corn flour (corn starch) with a good teaspoon of Chinese Five Spice and toss the meat in it to coat.

• Slice an onion in half top to bottom, then slice it lengthways into fine half moons.

• Grate a big thumb sized piece of ginger, and mix with three or four cloves of crushed garlic and a stem of lemon grass, white part only, finely sliced.

• Julienne about 5 cups worth of vegetables.  I used carrots, green beans, leek, capsicum, and pak choi but you could substitute whatever vegetables are in season – snow peas, asparagus, celery, broccoli, kale all work well.

• Finely chop a couple of tablespoons worth of fresh herbs –  Thai basil, Vietnamese mint, or coriander all work well.

• In a cup,  mix quarter of a cup of stock with a splash of soy sauce or tamari and a splash of rice wine or white wine to bring it up to half a cup of liquid.

When it is all ready to go, put a dash of oil in a wok and get it very hot, then quickly sear the meat in two batches.  Remove the meat and add another dash of oil and get the wok hot again.  Add the onion, stir until it starts to become translucent, add the ginger, garlic and lemon grass, stir and sear, then the vegetables.  Keep them moving for a few minutes, then add the meat back in, then the liquid.  Bring it back up to boiling and cook until the vegetables are just crisp tender.  Turn the heat off, add in the herbs, stir them through and serve.  Chili lovers may like some finely diced chili as a condiment.

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It’s a while since I’ve posted a kangaroo recipe. Though I’m very critical of the intensive farming of animals for meat,  I’m not a vegetarian.  If you’ve ever seriously tried to grow enough to feed your own household (let alone enough to fully support it), you will know that food webs include predators, prey, animals, plants, insects, funghi, bacteria – the whole complex web.  If you take animals and predation out of the system, it teeters and falls.  Try to make compost or keep soil fertile without animal manures – pretty quickly you realise that you either go very hungry or use industrially produced chemical fertilisers – a short term fix that leads down a slippery slope.  Life enriches itself, knitting the web deeper, adding complexity and resilience with  every generation but like a Jenga tower, if you remove a critical bit it collapses.

And both herbivores and carnivores are critical bits. You could no doubt build a stable system as a vegetarian, but you’d have to co-opt other animals to be the carnivore predators in the system, and humans are actually capable of more moral distinction in predator ethics than goannas or quolls or eagles or snakes. So I’m comfortable with the notion that being an ethical predator is part of what being human is all about. The ethical questions for me are around whether the animal lives a “normal” life for that kind of animal, whether it is killed cleanly and without cruelty, whether the species as a whole is safe, and whether its part in the whole web is being fulfilled.  Australian beef and lamb are mostly free range and grass fed, but on all these counts, I see kangaroo as the red meat of choice.

The Recipe

The baking dish I use for this is 30 cm by 20 cm. It makes 6 generous serves with a green salad on the side.  Leftovers are to fight over.

The Pasta:

In a food processor, blend for just a minute till it comes together into a dough:

• 1 cup plain flour.  I use the same high gluten baker’s flour that I use for my sourdough, but you can make at least half of it wholemeal flour or buckwheat flour or spelt flour  if you like.
• 2 eggs,
• a good swig of olive oil. 
• a good pinch of salt.

You want a dough that is soft but not sticky. If it is too dry it will be tough. Flour the benchtop and knead just for a minute, then let it rest for a few minutes, covered with a wet bowl, while you make the sauces.

The Meat Sauce:

Brown 500 grams kangaroo mince in a little olive oil in a large, heavy pan over a high heat.  Use the back of a wooden spoon to break up clumps.  When it is brown, add:

• 1 large carrot, diced
• 1 capsicum diced
• 1 onion diced
• 3-4 cloves of garlic chopped fine

Saute until the onion starts to become translucent, then add:

• 300 grams of mushrooms, roughly chopped
• 500 grams tomato passata or about 1 kg of fresh tomatoes.
• ¼ cup finely chopped fresh basil and/or oregano
• salt and pepper

Allow this lot to simmer while you make the white sauce and roll out the pasta, adding water if needed.  You want a sauce that is fairly wet but spoonable rather than pourable.

The White Sauce

This is a cheat’s white sauce that is much faster and easier, and just as good as the traditional bechamel sauce.You don’t need to wash the food processor.  Blend together:

• ¾ cup plain yoghurt
• ¾ cup cottage cheese
• 1 egg
• 50 grams of grated mature cheese
• pinch grated nutmeg

Assembling and Baking

In the baking tray, lay a fairly thin base layer of the meat sauce.

Divide the pasta into three balls, one half the size of the other two, and at least visualise the meat sauce and the white sauce divided into three.

Flour the benchtop well and roll out one of the balls of dough very thin.  If you keep flipping it you should be able to get it very thin.  Trim it to the same size as the baking tray, roll  the rolling pin under it and transfer it to the baking tray.  Add the trimmings to the small ball of dough.

Cover with another layer of meat sauce, then a layer of white sauce, then another layer of pasta.  Repeat.

Cover the final layer of pasta with a final thin layer of white sauce.  Sprinkle grated cheese fairly thinly over the top and bake for around 30 minutes until the top is brown and bubbly.

It’s really good hot, but so good the next day that it is worth making a double batch.

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Saag is the dish I order whenever I go to an Indian restaurant, and this time of year, with silver beet and mustard both in bulk in the garden, one of my home cooking regulars.  I posted a vegetarian Saag recipe a few weeks ago, in the  Tuesday Night Vego Challenge series.  This meat version is, sadly, no more photogenic. Traditionally mutton or goat are the meats used, but kangaroo is my red meat of choice these days, and it works really well in Saag.

The Recipe:

Serves two generously.

Heat a little olive oil in a big pot or pressure cooker.

Dice 500 grams of kangaroo steak and add it to the hot pot.

Into a cup, put:

• 1 teaspoon cumin seeds
• 1 teaspoon black mustard seeds
• 1 teaspoon coriander seeds
• 1 teaspoon fennel or dill seeds
• the seeds from 5 cardamom pods

(It’s better if you use whole seeds for this)

As soon as the kangaroo meat starts to brown, add the seeds.  You may need to add a little more oil.  Cook, stirring occasionally, till the seeds start to pop.  (Don’t let them burn).

Then add:

• 2 finely diced chilis (more or less, depending on how strong your chilis are and how spicy you like your food.  Saag is more aromatic than hot though).
• 2 cloves of garlic
• a heaped teaspoon of grated or finely diced fresh ginger
• a heaped teaspoon of grated or finely diced fresh turmeric (or substitute a scant teaspoon of turmeric powder)

Cook stirring for a minute or two more, till the spices all coat the meat, then add:

• a cup of stock.
• the shredded leaves from a BIG bunch of silverbeet.  Just the leaf stripped from the stem, chopped reasonably fine.  It will be much more than you think should go in, but it reduces, and it’s the heart of the dish.
• 3 bay leaves
• 3 cm of cinnamon stick

Pressure cook for 15 minutes, or simmer for 40 minutes.  If you simmer, you’ll need to add a bit more water.

It should end up with the meat and silver beet in a little bit of sauce. Take it off the heat and stir in 3 heaped dessertspoons of greek yoghurt.  Stir vigorously to break up the silver beet and make the sauce creamy.

Serve over rice, and/or with naan bread.

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