It was cold and dreary on Monday night and promised more for Tuesday, and I have a freezer full of beef, so I decided to make beef stew for the children on co-schooling day. I started a crock-pot full of stock on Monday night with roasted soup bones and some leek tops and pork bones I had been saving in my freezer. In the morning before breakfast, I started browning two pounds of stew meat and considered my options.
It's hard to please all those kids. I know, I know, I ought not worry too much about pleasing everybody and such, but the truth is that if they eat a good lunch they are all a lot happier about schoolwork in the afternoon. So I do try to come up with things that most of them will like.
I thought -- What if I make a very plain stew, just beef and carrot? Carrots are fairly popular among the kids, certainly good for them. It seemed like a good idea. Anyway, shopping day was a long time ago and there's no celery or potatoes. Beef and carrot it is.
I happened to have some fresh ginger and, of course, onions. Onions mince up pretty finely and disappear into soup, so I browned just one diced onion with my chunks of stew meat and added some minced ginger, maybe a three-inch piece. Garlic too for good measure. I peeled six or eight carrots and cut them into one-inch chunks and tossed them in (and also threw in what was left of a bag of baby carrots). Then I opened up my crock pot and ladled plenty of the night's beef stock through a strainer into my pot. It must have been about two quarts, because that's how much water I had to add back to the pot to top it up so it could bubble away for another day. I tossed in a couple of tablespoons of oats for a thickener. Then I added salt, covered the pot, and let it go. It smelled wonderful.
Then I started a loaf of bread in the bread machine.
At lunchtime, we gave the kids big bowls of steaming beef and carrot stew, and thick pieces of buttered homemade bread. They also each got some home-canned peaches -- just a little bit. And you know, they liked the stew a lot! Several kids had seconds and thirds.
But I was not done with the stew yet, because Hannah and I had to eat, and we love yucky green stuff. So I brought what was left of the stew up to a boil, and then I dumped a bag of frozen okra into the pot. We covered it up and let it cook. Then we dished it up, the magical properties of okra having turned it silky and thick. And we topped it with chopped cilantro and just a bit of Thai fish sauce -- it's ginger carrot beef stew, remember?
Yum! What's really great about this technique -- make a plain soup, then dress it up at the end for the grownups -- is that it pleases everyone without really making extra work. A great way to do it when you've got to feed a passel of kids, and also some moms who really don't want to eat kid food.
You are one of my favorite food bloggers EVER.
A Bittman-esque Bearing, if you will!
[grin]
Happy Thursday. See you tonight?
Posted by: Margaret in Minnesota | 09 September 2010 at 09:32 AM