The Art of Making Perfect Beef Stew

I’ve been cooking for over 25 years now. One of my first dishes was beef stew. It’s taken me many long years to master the taste, but I have done it. Beef stew, meet perfection.

Being the generous cook that I am, I will share with you my particular secrets. Be aware that every tip is worth many gold coins, weedhopper. Haha! OK OK enough horsing around, here’s how I make perfect beef stew:

1. Cut everything into bite-sized cubes EXCEPT the potatoes.
Potatoes get mushy. Nothing’s worse than chowing down on savory stew only to sink your teeth into potato paste. I use white potatoes with their skins. I cross-cut the palm-sized taters and they boil to perfection in the pot.

2. Don’t pre-sear your meat.
I know, I am bucking the trend. Seared meat is so good, yes– at a barbeque! But it dries it out and the cubes usually taste like battle-hardened, wooden dice. A stew is comfort food, it should be smooth and really savory and it shouldn’t take 10,000 chews to eat through it. Save the seared meat for the cookout.

3. Add everything to the pot all at once.
Some fancy cookbooks recommend that you cook only the beef and onions together and, once these are cooked through, add the vegetables for the final hour. I think this type of stew is more of a mish-mash of disjointed flavors where the individual ingredients all keep their individual flavors. Like any good soup or stew, it’s the combination of all the ingredients cooked together that makes a savory, luxuriant, unique flavor. Just for the record, the ingredients in my basic stew are: beef cubes, white onion, white potatoes with skins, carrots (only a few), rutabaga.

4. Don’t add salt to the pot.
Allow the diners to add their own salt at the table. Potatoes absorb salt while they cook, so you’ll wind up adding more and more salt and wondering why the stew doesn’t taste salty! Skip the salt and let everyone add his own, to taste.

5. Use rutabagas or turnips.
I dislike boring old potatoes/onions/beef stew. I like a little panache. Rutabagas add a lovely light-orange color, tons of vitamins, and a peppy tang that bland potatoes don’t give. I usually go half-and-half with the rutabagas and potatoes, adding one huge rutabaga and 8 or 9 palm-sized white potatoes to the big stockpot.

6. Add a teaspoon or two of horseradish sauce.
Notice I said SAUCE. Not plain horseradish! You can certainly add plain horseradish, but don’t add several teaspoons or you will ruin the stew. I use the creamy horseradish sauce, the kind you spread on bread for sandwiches. It really adds some zip to the stew.

7. Add some leftover Ramen seasoning.
My sons love the instant Ramen noodles packages, but I do limit their use of the heavily-seasoned packets. I usually have a ton of them laying around. They are really great for soups! I only use about half a packet for a huge stew.

8. Use beef broth.
I don’t use straight beef broth, too expensive! Instead, I split it with water. For a huge stew that fills a stockpot, I use about 1 cup of broth and water.

9. Don’t overcook!
I allow my stew to boil on the stove in a big stainless steel crockpot. Three or four hours is sufficient to soften all the ingredients and cook the meat. Don’t allow the stew to boil, either. Once the stew starts to simmer, turn it on LOW and cover the pot. Stir it only once or twice throughout the entire cooking time. Let the stew sit for about 20 minutes after cooking, so the flavors can blend.

10. Serve with fresh bread, not crackers.
Crackers, in my opinion, detract from the soothing, smooth stew experience. A hunk of freshly baked Flax Seed Bread is so perfect.

So this is how I make my stew. Try it, try it, you will see! You will like it, I guarantee!

The Amazing Tomato

I have recently written a few articles about cooking for an online website, and found one of the topics, tomato salad, fascinating! It was interesting because, for one, I really don’t like raw tomatoes all that much and two, I learned a little about tomatoes that got my mouth watering. Here are some really neat tidbits that I learned.

• There are over 7,500 different varieties of tomatoes. The tomato is indigenous to South America. The plant is a member of the nightshade family, which is a poisonous plant. No wonder Europeans thought tomatoes were poisonous! (I sure did as a kid and my dad forced me to eat them, YUK).
• The yellow tomato variety is milder. The green tomato is crunchy and tangy.
• Smaller tomatoes like the Roma, Campari, grape and cherry varieties make the best raw salad tomato. They are less watery and have better flavor.

• Never store tomatoes in the refrigerator. Cool temperatures cause the tomato to turn its flavorful linolenic acid to the bland and grainy Z-3 hexenel. If you must have a cold tomato, place it in the fridge about an hour before serving.
• Basil sweetens the tomato and the mild and cool cucumber balances the tomatoey zing. That’s why so many tomatoe salads have basil and cucumber. For best results, use fresh basil, coarsely chopped.
• Fresh tomatoes picked STRAIGHT from the plant are the freshest. Grocery stores often stock tomatoes that have been picked while green, and allowed to ripen in a hot house or in the sun. These tomatoes just aren’t as flavorful. Even the “vine-ripened” tomatoes are blander then their garden counterparts. It pays to have a tomato plant in the garden!

Unfortunately, I am writing this in October, when all the tomato plants have turned to dust, lol. Still, the store-bought grape tomatoes are better than no tomatoes. So if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go munch on a few and then puter with my wii remote controller! Have a great week.

My Kind of Meal

You know, there’s nothing like a luscious, huge salad to perk up a girl’s day. This is what I served the family recently.

It took a bit or work, all that cleaning and chopping and placement. But OH it was so worth it. I never liked salads as a kid, but maybe that was because the salad basically consisted of iceberg lettuce, a few tomatoes (yuk) and, on fancy days, sliced boiled egg. No exactly a salad.

The stuff I like, is it called a “salad,” really? It looks too luscious to be called something as simple as a salad. Better buy the buy life insurance before eating one of these– you may konk over from ecstasy. LOL

In other news, I *finally* boiled corn on the cob over the weekend. Here I am, in Upstate NY, surrounded by millions chowing down on the local sweet corn, and I’m dragging my feet. I love corn on the cob but it’s so much work. And eating it, while superb, is a chore, too. I know, I’m asking too much, lol. I never liked holding a piping hot, slippery cob oozing with butter and steam. I like my fork. But the corn is very, very good. And the husband was grateful I finally made it.

So that’s my menu right now– throwing miscellaneous veggies on the table, maybe grilling some meat (I don’t like eating so much meat, actually, but grilled veggies are somewhat tasteless). I am really at a loss for recipes right now. I miss the lasagna, the black bean soup, the baking flax seed bread…. hopefully some cold weather will arrive soon and break this meal monotony.

Cuke It Up

HOT. Ugh. It’s summer! I hate running the oven in the summer. :-p

So we’ve been using the grill a bit more often now. I’ve been trying to get creative but I’ve really been a tad lost these days. I’m busy with so many things that I neglect the cooking.

BUT. Yesterday I splurged and bought a bunch of thin steaks on sale at Hannaford. I love Hannaford meats. They are really good, quality meats and the prices are usually pretty good. I’d been to Walmart and was disgusted at the meat section there. I don’t know what happened, maybe the head meat man is on vacation, but the places was a mess. Old, browning meat – filthy, half-empty shelves – HIGH prices! I skipped WM this time and took the extra time to go to Hannaford. I’m glad I did. We feasted on grilled steak. The last time I made steak was… well…… hmmm… maybe…. 19 years ago? It didn’t turn out so well so I guess I’ve been kind of gun shy.

My husband loves steak but the reason I don’t make it very often is because it turns out so dry. I made sure I slathered these babies in plenty of balsamic vinegar salad dressing (I was out of spiedie sauce) and cooked them gently. But you know what made the steaks? My daughter’s Tsatsiki cucumber dip. WHOA.

It was perfect, just perfect. It was cool and crisp and tangy, just the right everything to go with the steak. The last time she made it was in January… and I have no idea why we waited so long to make it again. It’s very healthy and it goes with everything– flat bread, salad, on meat and fish, everything. In case you missed the recipe last time, no need to wait for invitationbox.com invitations– here it is again!!

Tsatziki Cucumber Yogurt Dip
32 oz. tub of plain yogurt
1 cucumber, peeled and grated (or diced into very tiny cubes)
1 Tablespoon lemon juice
1/2 Tablespoon minced garlic
1 teaspoon dried dill weed (more or less, depending on your taste)
Salt to taste

The most tedious part is grating the cucumber. I guess you could toss it in the food processor as long as the machine doesn’t make it into soup…. but I think the chunks are delicious. Definitely give this a try. Yum!!!

Farmer’s Markets For Me This Year

I’m leaning towards skipping a vegetable garden this year. I’m quite discouraged about the yard after the flooding (again). You can read all the reasons here at my old house home improvement blog, I really don’t want to go over it all.

So I think I’ll be relying on farmer’s markets this year. I’m not terribly enthusiastic about it… there are no farmer’s markets in my local area (so it requires traveling, which is not terrible), and I’ve noticed that prices there are not much lower than the supermarket prices (but the farm food is fresher). Still, I can always make our visits an adventure for the kids and a way to get out of the house away from the work. I think we’ll enjoy it. We’re DEFINITELY going blueberry picking in July. My kids have been eating tons of blueberries, which I buy frozen in the store. $10 a bag! The store should be sending me Paper Culture thank you cards for all the money they are getting from me. Sheesh. So we’re going to pick fresh berries like mad, and I’m going to freeze all our pickings.

 

More good news is that my apple tree is blossoming like mad this year. We had blossoms last year, but a nasty frost killed them and we got no apples. I pray we get a good crop this year.

I also picked up some discounted blackberry vines from WalMart. They look a tad sickly. :S Here’s hoping I can just plug them in the back garden and get them to grow. I love blackberries.

How about you? Do you have any plans for the summer gardens? I had such high hopes of a massive veggie garden, and an herb garden, and grapevines and berry bushes… but I don’t even know if I can tolerate living here anymore. We experience devastating flooding all too often. I just don’t know.

Next Page »