Now featuring... The Brewmeister's Beef Stew!

Greetings all! As we near the close (hopefully) of the dreary winter weather, here comes a classic cold weather go-to meal for me. And I might mention that this will be a bit of a cameo for the "brewmeister", who will remain anonymous at this point ; )

Anyway, one of my favorite winter meals is a rich, flavorful beef stew. Not only is this perfectly tasty, but also a very low maintenance meal, granted you are able to plan ahead about 6-8 hours. So, first step here is chopping a bunch of veggies up into bit size pieces (the more irregular the better). For this version I went with a sweet potato from our local farmer's market (I wish I took a picture of this bad boy, must have been 4 pounds or so), 4 carrots, 1 white onion, and 4 stalks of celery. Your finished product for this step will look something like this.

Now you can put this aside and focus on the star of the show-- BEEF!! What I like to do here is coat the beef in a flour/salt/pepper mixture. And just as an FYI, nearly all grocery stores will have some stew ready meat already chopped up for you. I used about a pound and a half for this recipe. So once you have the beef evenly coated with your flour and spice mixture, throw some oil in a pan and crank up the heat. Once your oil is ready, throw your meat in there and get all sides nice and brown. This step is key to locking in the tender goodness of your meat. So once your meat is good and brown, toss it in your Crockpot. Don't forget to scrape in every last morsel of flavor from your pan here.


So now we are ready to toss everything (veggies, beef, liquids, and spices) into the pot and let the flavors meld like a well orchestrated symphony. For flavor, let's invite the following friends to the party:

So we have some beef broth (I used two cups here), a couple bay leaves, about a tablespoon of paprika, 2 tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce, and my favorite, 3 cloves of minced garlic. These are really more about personal preference, so listen to your heart. And I can't forget, living up to my nickname, I also topped off the pot with some home brews. These happened to be of the gingered ale variety : ) 

Quick recap: veggies, beef, liquids, and spices are all in the Crockpot. At this point, our work is nearly over. Just set your Crockpot to the setting of your liking; low and 8 hours was my choice since it was a weekend and it was too cold to go golfing. In the meantime, read a book, have a few more beers. or catch some good TV; whatever tickles your fancy. After a few hours, check on your stew, and make sure everyone is getting along nicely in the sauna!

This meal goes really well with some yummy cornbread, or bread of any kind. Well, that is all for now, folks! Hopefully it's not too late to put this recipe into action. If it is, there's always next winter, or you could move to a more northerly latitude. 

I will gracefully stand aside now because as we all know, the women run the show...