Matambre!

Hey y'all!

This long weekend I decided to make a couple of things from my book on Latin American Cuisine! I decided I would try 'Matambre' (mata (kill) + ambre (hunger)) When I was looking at the recipe however, they kept referring to the meat used as, 'plate'. Yes, 'plate'. For the life of me I had no idea what the heck that was and couldn't seem to find anything on the internet about it, assuming it was some hard to find Uruguayan meat, but after searching high and low I figured out it was in fact beef brisket or beef flank. DUH! Oh well, the next problem was finding the brisket. I went to Safeway with no luck, apparently they sold out that day and there were several people looking for it. Maybe I wasn't the only one looking to make Matambre? Anyway, I went on down to the local Thrifty Foods instead and found a couple of cuts. They weren't exactly what I needed because of their shape, but I took them anyway.
This would probably be a good time to tell you what Matambre is. Basically, it's a thinly cut, long piece of brisket with onions, parsley, veggies of your choice and a hard boiled egg in the middle, rolled up into a little cylinder and then cut into very thin pieces. It can be eaten as a snack or alongside mashed potatoes. We would have this a lot when we would go to Uruguayan events or at birthday parties, etc.
Now, before we get on to the recipe itself, I just want to warn you guys that this recipe isn't as straight forward as it might seem and to be honest I wasn't prepared for that. This is definitely one I am gonna have to try and make again, with hopefully a better result. On to the goods!

Ingredients:
1-3Lb piece of plate (ie, beef brisket, beef shank)
1 onion
1 red pepper
3 cloves of garlic
3 carrots
3 hard boiled eggs
2 Tbsp. chopped parsley
2 Tbsp. white vinegar
4 cups milk
salt and pepper
cooking twine
And a lot of time!
*Note: you can also add any other veggies you like, apparently olives and spinach are used sometimes

Preparation:
Mix the chopped garlic with the parsley and the vinegar. Add salt and pepper and set aside. (This is the only time you will be adding salt and pepper so make it count)
*NOTE: Before I could do the following step, I had to cut the beef in half through the middle because it was too thick and not long enough to roll. You will see what I mean from the picture below. It would have been even better if I could cut it thinner, but next time I will try that.
Place the plate on cutting board with the fatty part up, cover it with the garlic, parsley and vinegar mixture and place in the fridge for marinating for 3 hours.

Remove plate from fridge. Finely chop the onion and the pepper, and spread them evenly over the plate. Do the same with the peeled and grated carrots.

Place the whole hard boiled eggs length-wise on top. Now comes a bit of a hard part. Roll the beef with all the toppings into a cylinder without everything spilling out! This is can be tricky, especially with those slippery hard boiled eggs. Now (and you may need some help with this) roll twine around the beef to keep the cylinder very tight. This is where it became complicated for me, because I HAD NO TWINE! And I didn't realize that I needed it until I had already started cooking. Instead I used some tooth picks, which worked for the most part but didn't keep things as tight as I would have liked.
Once you have everything tightly together, place your cylinder in a deep cooking pan. Pour milk over top of it and cook for one hour at 350F. Add more milk if necessary to cover it.
*NOTE: Now this recipe asks you to bake this in the oven but you could also do this in a deep pan on the burner. I may do this next time because I did not have a pan deep enough to have the milk cover the matambre. It didn't make a HUGE difference but I think it would have helped. The choice is yours really.

Now once you've cooked that up, you can remove it and place it onto something for draining. YES, draining. You will need to get creative here and find something (in my case, 2 cutting boards) you can use as a press to get all the excess liquid out of the matambre. I took one cutting board and put it under the matambre and another that I put on top. I then took a really heavy container of flour and placed it on top. You can use whatever you've got to do this. It needs to press for 2 hours.

Once it has done pressing, you can remove all the twine and start cutting it. Now if yours turned out anything like mine did, it will start to fall apart a bit. I believe this is because I didn't have twine to tie it tight enough. You want to cut it to about a half inch slices. But you can do it as thin as you'd like.

Here's how mine turned out:

Well that's it! I hope you guys enjoy this one! Please let me know of any hints or tricks to make this one better and let me know how yours turn out!!!