Weekend Cooking: Roast Beef with Hasselback Potatoes, Stuffed Paccheri, Apple Pie and Strawberry Meringue Pie

This weekend mom had to go to Sibiu for a few days. Me and dad had planned to make stuffed paccheri and roast beef. We did them both plus this oh-my-god strawberry meringue pie and an apple pie. And when I say we I mean I. They were all delicious, but only the strawberry pie and the roast beef looked good haha. I WILL make the paccheri and the apple pie again and they WILL look good, next week maybe. We also made hasselback potatoes which were awesome! Check them all out!

 FRIDAY we shopped. We bought cow-hide, carrots, potatoes and celery for the roast beef; turkey mincemeat and Parmesan for the paccheri; biscuits and strawberries for the tart; a puff pastry and some apples for the apple pie. I started with the paccheri. I fried the onions and the carrots together, then added the meat. When it started to look ready, I added a glass of white wine and half a cup of tomato sauce and then covered it and left it to boil over low heat. The paccheri were left to boil for 5 minutes so they were ready to be filled with the meat sauce. Oh, and the bechamel sauce! For it, I melted some butter and then added flour, milk and Parmesan. Then I folded it over the meat sauce. It was so good! After everything was ready, I arranged the paccheri vertically into a big pot and filled them with the bechamel meat sauce and sprinkled some more Parmesan over it. Into the oven and it was perfect! They don't look that well, but next time they will!

I also tried my apple pie on Friday, which was a semi-fail because I didn't rolled the dough in the baking pan, but on a wooden work table and it got stuck onto it. Also, the filling was hot and made everything even harder. But it was delicious! I coated some apples with sugar, cinnamon and a bit of lemon juice and baked them for a bit, then poured it on the pastry and back to the oven. Ready in half an hour and delicious, but hideous. Anyway...


On SATURDAY we both had some important stuff to do so we planned on cooking the beef on Sunday. Which we did. SUNDAY morning. Me, dad and M agreed on a recipe for the roast beef and I thought of surprising them with something sweet. The beef was very easy to make, I just made a cozy bed for the meat from all these.

 This is what it looked like afterwards.

 I'm not a big fan of meat and I didn't really liked this dish either, because it was kind of stringy, but it had an amazing flavor! And those vegetables were delicious!! I also made some hasselback potatoes, with lots of garlic, chilli, oregano and some olive oil.

And finally, my masterpiece so far, the strawberry meringue pie. It was so easy to make, I would have finished it in 20 minutes if it wasn't for all these stuff in the oven. I crushed some biscuits and mixed them with butter and baked the crust. Then I cut the strawberries and made the meringue. After decorating the pie I baked it for about 5 minutes to make that golden meringue I love! Here's a mug shot of the late strawberry pie (now it's all gone).

Looks nice, huh?