Beef and mushroom ravioli

We turned shin of beef into this fabulous meal which we haven't had for a while.
Would you believe the ingredients for this dish are around £3.50 per person and that's including the red wine!
The beef was cooked in red wine, plus (optional) star anise, thyme, rosemary, and bay leaf using the slow cooker, then set aside to cool. To stop the beef from drying out, we cooled in the cooking liquid. After removing all the meat we rolled this into a sausage shape, wrapped it in cling film and put in the fridge to cool (and heated through before serving). The pasta was made from scratch and stuffed with mushroom and blue cheese. (To serve 2). Dice 4 fresh mushrooms, place in a pan with salt/pepper to release the liquid. Keep cooking until the liquid disappears. Remove from the pan, add some blue cheese - to your own taste - we added just a small amount - depending upon the strength of the cheese. We used about a thumb nail for the two portions. If we didn't have time to make pasta we would at least make the mushroom mix, as it goes so well with the beef. Alternatively, you could buy some ready made or just go without the pasta!
The sauce was a reduction of the cooking liquor with the addition of salt and pepper. Reduce to your desired thickness.
We served ours with celeriac puree. The celeriac was cooked in whole milk. Chop into cubes, place in a saucepan, cover with milk, and bring to the boil then simmer until soft. DO NOT used semi-skimmed/skimmed milk as the liquid will separate! As we were going out for a quick walk, we boiled then turned OFF the pan and left the celeriac to cook in the residual heat. When we returned 30 minutes later, we found the celeriac was actually cooked through. This saved us having to continually watch the pan as the milk has a tendency to spill over!
The carrots were cooked in the juice of one orange. If you wish, you can pep it up with other things like e.g. ginger. The parmesan crisp was easy - simply grate onto a greased baking sheet and pop under the grill then trim to shape. To be honest, it was a little too strong for this dish - but looked good.
We estimate our dinner came to around 550 calories - so there is plenty of room for something else .....

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