Newspaper Stew

      It came to me as email spam from The New York Times -- second only to the NRA for desperate pen pal behavior -- and I decided to give it a try, a fairly conventional beef stew with an easy approach to making a roux, one I have used before.

     It's not a cheat; you flour the meat and brown it in butter or oil.  This naturally forms the basis of a meaty roux, some in (mostly stuck to) the bottom of the stewpot, some on the meat.  Comments to the article complained of blandness, so I added pepper, a pinch of salt and a little dried garlic to the flour -- and I used Wondra, pre-cooked flour that is almost impossible to turn into lumps (and it never tastes "raw").

     Shaken up in a big Ziploc bag with the flour mixture, browned in extra-virgin olive oil a little at a time and set aside in a bowl, the stew beef looked like a good start.  I sauteed about half a (leftover) white onion, chopped (another deviation from the recipe, since they add the vegetables much later) before deglazing the pot with a mixture of mostly red wine and a little bit of vinegar (at this point, I discovered I didn't have any red wine vinegar -- so an equal amount of balsamic vinegar with a touch of white vinegar for acidity filled in for it).

     Deglazed, the roux dissolving into the wine, the meat goes back in, with about twice as much beef broth as wine added.  The whole thing gets bay leaves and is brought to boil, then turned down to simmer for an hour and a half.  I sprinkled in a little Herbes de Provence and went away to do laundry.

     The recipe calls for adding carrots and onion after the hour and a half is up.  I thought that was a great idea and had a small red onion and baby carrots, but it needed celery, so I added some.  (Onion, carrot and celery is one of the "trinities" of cooking.  Watch for these; they can be counted on to work well and they're what our palate expects.)  That gets covered and boiled gently for ten minutes, then a potato is cut up and added -- they called for two, but I went with just one.  That gets another half hour, with done-ness of the potato as a guide.  I added three Shishito peppers, sliced into rings, about halfway through that time, as a hedge against blandness.

     The end result was an opaque, flavorful broth with nice vegetables.  It needed a dash of salt at most, and not even that if you mopped it up with crusty bread.  Well worth the fairly low effort required -- I like any dish I can let simmer and just look in on from time to time while I get other things done.  I froze the leftovers in two batches, and there's a couple of weekday suppers, ready to go.