Beef Stew

Contributed bydoctor_god

This is definitely a winter-time meal. Cooking it really heats up the house, and there's nothing like a big bowl of stew to drive away the cold on a winter night when your landlord hasn't gotten around to fix the heat yet.

Ingredients

• 2-3lbs stewing meat
• 3-5 Potatoes (cubed)
• 1 pkg (2 lbs or so) carrots
• 3-4 stalks Celery
• 1 onion
• 1 cup tomato sauce
• 3 tbsp barkey
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 1/4 tsp marjoram
• 1/4 tsp thyme
• 1/4 tsp sage
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp pepper.

Method

Here we have two packages of stew meat from Walmart. I decided to spring for the "Extra Lean" kind because I didn't feel like trimming fat off the meat all day.

The chunks of meat are too large as they are, so each piece got cut into two or three smaller chunks

Chop the potatoes into small cubes. I used about 6 potatoes total.

Prepare the carrots by chopping off both ends.

Chop the carrots into small disks. I chopped the largest disks into semicircles to avoid a potential choking hazard.

Next, prepare the celery by chopping off the white part at the base of the stalk, and everything after the joint at the top.

Split each stalk in half lengthwise...

... then dice into small pieces.

Now we combine everything into our large pot. My oven won't hold a large pot, so I'm using the large cooker that first appeared in my chili recipe in the last thread. First, we add the meat...

... followed by the potatoes ...

... carrots ...

... celery ...

... and everything else. In this picture, the diced up onion is in the upper right, the tomato sauce in the lower right, the barley in the lower left, and the spices (marjoram, thyme, sage, salt, pepper, and sugar) in the upper left.

Mix everything together.

Cover the pot with foil.

This is the part where you'd put the pot in your oven, but I just set the cooker for 250F.

After 5 or 6 hours, the stew should look like this. I recommend eating it with biscuits, by which I mean those bready roll things, not "wickets" or whatever "biscuit" means in England.