Sunday Dinner

Sunday Afternoon Beef Stew

Throughout most of 2009 and the earliest months of 2010, my Sundays were typically spent on business-of-life type tasks -- collecting groceries and dry cleaning, cleaning the apartment, doing my laundry, and batch cooking to get me through a week of working eighteen hours a day.  Then the lovely girlfriend came along, and my weekend routines became far more social and far less domestic.  A pair of nasty headcolds hit us this week, though, so I've spent the last few hours collecting groceries and cleaning and cooking around a beautiful, blanket-covered lump of Corrin. There's a delightful satisfaction in having a kitchen full of yummy things and a house full of wonderful smells!

I signed up for the Real Simple Daily Recipe emails earlier this month, to assist in my quest for actually planning meals and cooking real food more often. The slow cooker beef stew delivered on Monday struck me as being a delightful dish to come home to, so I filed it away (read: left it marked as unread in gmail) for a rainy day.  My slow cooker is in the process of delivering delicious pulled pork* for sandwiches to pack for the week, so I adapted Slow Cooker Coffee-Braised Brisket with Potatoes and Carrots as follows.

• I used 2-1/2 pounds of stew beef rather than brisket. I chopped the cuts into bite-sized pieces, and browned them in batches in my cast iron dutch oven, removing the finished pieces to a warmed plate. Then I added the onion (an eighth-ed Vidalia rather than a quartered Spanish) and carrots to the remaining fat and jus, turning and warming through.  I tossed in the new potatoes scattered the browned beef, then seasoned the whole thing liberally with French sea salt and freshly ground peppercorns.
• I brewed a quadruple strength 1/2 cup of coffee (thanks to my Dad for leaving a box of single serving coffee filters in my cabinet after his last visit!) and mixed it with three tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce, a can of tomato paste, and two tablespoons of brown sugar -- then poured the whole mixture over the top of the beef and vegetables, stirring thoroughly.  The covered oven is now sitting on the back burner of my stove with the flame turned to the lowest setting, merrily becoming a tender stew in a glorious gravy.

Now it's back into the kitchen to wash the dishes and attempt to find a blueberry muffin recipe that won't destroy my girlfriend with a dairy overdose!  If only these didn't require sour cream...


* Yes, I recognize that I'm not supposed to be eating either beef or pork. We'll leave the commentary on that to another, less tasty, post.

First published at expetesso.com