Bryan was sick with a cold last weekend and I offered to make him some chicken noodle soup. He didn’t want that… he thought stew would make him feel better. So I set out to make a stew.
I don’t really want to go into the how with this post. It’s a basic stew, but cooked over the stove. I must have let mine cook a little bit long because the potatoes were a bit mushy. But all in all it had a nice flavor and was very hearty, as a good stew should be. Bryan loved it, but it did not have magical powers to cure him of his cold. Oh well. That’s probably expecting too much.
Another typo here. The book says stew the beef for 30 minutes and then add the veggies. Better Homes and Garden cookbook says to stew the meat for 1 to 1.25 hours and then add the carrots and potatoes for another 30 minutes. I agree with BHG that you should not cook the veggies for more than 30 minutes. One hour of pre-brasing is minimum if I get a tender cut of beef. Sometimes, I got a tough cut of beef that probably came from an old cow, it took three hours of braising and the meat was still tough. So, it best to test the beef to see if it is "nearly tender" before adding vegetables. Additional typos in beef stew category: 1)Spicy Braised Beef with Lime (simplified version of Thai Beef Panang Curry) in the same page, the flour should be omitted, 2)Beef braised with vinegar(Daube) in page 738, the celery and carrots should be left out until the pre-braising period. Paul.
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