Comfort Food: Beef Stew

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Central Maryland is in a Winter Storm Advisory and snow is falling – this was a perfect night for beef stew.

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I used 1/2 of one of the beef chuck roasts (buy one get one Free) we picked up on Sunday – trimmed and cut into cubes.
Shook the beef cubes in a mixture of flour, thyme, rubbed sage and freshly ground pepper.
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Browned the cubes in melted butter.  Next, approximately 1/4 of a bottle of red wine and a can of low sodium beef broth…

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 I like using these frozen stew vegetable, especially on work nights… lazy but very convenient.  I did decide that there weren’t enough potatoes so I added a can of sliced potatoes, I always keep one in the pantry. I fried up 1lb of chopped bacon.  Oh, and isn’t that a neat little scoopy thing? Saw it at a kitchen shop in Maine and bought it on Amazon – it is heat resistant so I can scoop the hot bacon right out of the hot grease.  Anyway, I used about a 1/4c of the chopped bacon in the stew, the rest went into a zip lock bag.  I like keeping cooked chopped bacon in the freezer… it’s great to have to throw into an omelette or whatever.

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Stirred everything together – brought it to a boil and then dropped to a hard simmer for about an hour or so.
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 Aren’t these cute?  My son’s girlfriend brought them from home for us.  Her mom makes them out of special yarn from Korea.

They are very “scratchy” and are used to scrub pans, etc. but will not scratch non-stick pans.  Had to share!
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 Like I said – Winter Weather Advisory – my car is the single car at the bottom of the picture.

Picture on the right was approximately 7 p.m. – picture on the left at 9:54 p.m.
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 At Fogo de Chao, they have a wonderful cheese bread things as one of the side dishes.  When my Heart saw the Chebe in the Gluten-free section of the grocery store… well, we had to try them and stew seemed like a good time.  The other cool part, the package said that the rolled dough can be frozen and baked later OR the cooked balls could be frozen and reheated.  We went with freezing the rolled dough balls so that we can have them fresh baked.

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The final stew – I think this was the best stew I’ve ever made.  It was rich, thick and really delicious.  The little cheese balls were a great accompaniment … the texture is a little weird – they are hard, crunchy on the outside and light and airy in the middle but not really like bread or rolls… but there were really good dipped into the stew!  YUM!

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