Take:
2 1/2 pounds stew meat
4 cups beef stock
28 oz little taters (one to two inches in diametre)
3 carrots
3 stalks celery
2 medium yellow onions
5 cloves garlic
2 bay leaves
6 sprigs of thyme
4 sprigs rosemary
1 cup red wine
couple of slugs of Worcestershire sauce
salt
pepper
flour
olive oil
Okay.
Bung your beef stock into the slow-cooker, or decent-sized stock-pot, and start it going.
Generously salt and pepper the stew meat, dredge it through some flour, throw it into a frying pan with some oil, and brown it. You’ll probably need to do this in batches. When the meat is brown, bung it off into the stock.
You’re probably going to have a nasty mess inside your frying pan. That’s perfectly okay. Take your cup of red wine and pour it into the frying pan. With a wooden spatula, scrape the goodie off of the bottom of the pan while still on a medium flame. This is called “deglazing” and you may be surprised at how easily the gooey bits come loose. When it’s all loose, pour all that goodness into the pot with the meat.
Quarter the taters (I prefer the little red or gold ones), cut the carrots and celery into one-inch lengths, chunk the onions, and throw it all into the pot.
Run the garlic cloves through a press into the pot, toss in the bay leaves, and tie the sprigs of thyme and rosemary together with twine, and into the pot with it.
End up with a couple of generous glugs of Worcestershire sauce (about a teaspoon worth). Simmer or slow-cook on high, until the meat is nicely tender, pull out the bay leaves and the spice bundle; and serve with crusty bread.
Voila! Stew.
LawDog
Ooh! It's going to be just cold enough (ie – roughly in the single digits over night) this weekend in BFE NorthWestAR that this is going to be in the crock come Saturday night!
"Bung"?
"[A]couple of generous glugs of Worcestershire sauce" only amounts to a teaspoon? We have differing definitions of either "generous" or "glug".
"Bung" (British, verb, informal, transitive): "To put or throw somewhere without care; to chuck."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bung#Verb
Hmm. I may have a malfunctioning Worcestershire bottle. Ah, well.
Instead of the Celery and Carrots, I throw in a bag of frozen veggies, for a heartier stew. Thanks for the recipe!
Steve,
Morrow, OH
You can also do a stew in a pressure cooker. After browning the meat, bung everything into the pressure cooker, and cook it for about 15 min or so after the pressure seals.
course you may have to add flour to the beef stock, to get the juices to stick to the verggis and stuff, before you put it in the pressure cooker.
C-90
And it was GOOD! (Burp)… Add that one to the list!
Ref: doing a stew in the pressure cooker. If you take the little riser that keeps the meat and veg from burning and sticking to the bottom off, you can brown the meat in the pressure cooker with the top off, then dump the juices and meat into a bowl, replace the riser, then toss the prepared veggies, and meat and broth back in, toss in a can of mushroom beef gravy and do the pressure cook. With having lots of water in the veggies, you tend to get a soup more than a stick-to-the-contents of the stew, so you might have to play a bit with flour to thicken up the liquids to the consistancy you like.
I do basically the same thing, with a little barley and about 1 tsp. curry powder added…I do, however use a 5 qt cast iron Dutch oven instead of the slow cooker. I brown the meat, add the rest of the goodies and plop it into a 350 oven for an hour or so….
Are you going to write a cookbook after you finish the two that are in the works?
I could listen to Mike Rowe or Alton Brown talk about anything. I feel the same way about your writing.
5 cloves of garlic? A man after my own heart (and stomach).
Happy sigh.