Oven Stew

It has been so cold!  My house is having trouble keeping up with the temperatures, or at least the room with the thermostat is.  Let me just take a second to complain about flawed logic with thermostat planning.  If you put a thermostat in the room that contains the fireplace, that room will get nice and toasty and your thermostat will say that the temperature of the house is comfortable.  Your body will probably feel otherwise if you take a step outside of the room that is being heated by the fireplace.  Likewise, if your thermostat is in a room with a ton of possibly leaky windows, the temperature of the room registers as colder than it should be.  Then your furnace runs continuously and the rest of the house is warmer than you’d like, even though the thermostat is not showing that.  On a related note, I think I need to reconsider the placement of my thermostat.

These are the sorts of days where hibernation makes sense.  Of course there are a thousand projects I could be doing, but it just seems like a lot of effort to get moving.  It’s the sort of day where I just want dinner to cook itself without a lot of intervention from me.  As I was pouring over recipes, I found a recipe for Oven Stew.  It is the perfect recipe for frigid, lazy days.  I made this recipe while my son had a friend over. His friend saw the onion on my cutting board and said, “Is that an onion?  I like onions.”

“Like raw onions?” I asked.

“Any kind of onion.” He stated.

“Like on something…or….?” I questioned, confused.

“Like anything.  Chopped up in pieces.  Can I have some?”

“Like for a snack?”  I queried, still trying to figure this kid out.

“Yeah, like 50 of them.”

“Um…I’m cutting up cheese and sausage for you guys.”  During this whole thing, I was trying to decide if this kid was for real.  We’ve all heard about those old men that will eat onions like apples after they finish their braunschweiger and Limburger sandwiches, but a kid?!?

He is an awesome kid, even if I was a little surprised by his request.

I ended up not giving them onions as a snack and just put the onion into my oven stew.  When his mom came to pick him up later, she commented on how good the house smelled. “It’s my great-grandma’s recipe.” I replied.  (But then again, it seems like they all are these days.)

This recipe does not say to add water to the pan.  Do it anyway.  It’s not stew without the water.  It also doesn’t call for tossing the beef cubes with flour and browning them before adding them to the pan.  Do that also.  It just makes for deeper flavors in the stew.

Have you ever had oven stew?  It is incredible and easy.  Once you are done putting everything into the pot, you are done.  You can just walk away.  That makes this an ideal recipe for the crockpot if the temperature outside isn’t so cold that you want your oven on all day to try to warm up the house.

We ate ours with homemade bread.  But you do you and eat it with whatever you want.

Oven Stew

1 1/2 pounds of beef cut into cubes
1 cup chopped celery
1 can of tomatoes
1 TB sugar
6 carrots, cut
2 TB minute tapioca
1 large onion, sliced
4 medium potatoes, quartered
Salt and pepper to taste

Mix ingredients well in pan or kettle with tight fitting cover.  Bake at 250°.  Do not disturb while baking.

Sauerkraut In A Hurry

I have this friend that has an amazing German heritage.  Her family speaks German and sometimes when trying to talk “secretly” in front of people they will speak in German.  Her grandma forgets that I understand German also, which is why I found out that her grandma lost her teeth on the way to the birthday party.  “Ich habe meine Zahne verloren!” She exclaimed upon entering.  I tried to stifle my giggle, but tend to have a very expressive face.

I wish I had made this dish when she was coming over, but instead I made it when my brother was here.  We also have amazing German heritage, but our celebration of the culture has a lot more to do with sausages and beer than it does language.  (That might also be the Wisconsin background.  It’s pretty indistinguishable, really.)  Regardless, it’s an excuse we didn’t even need to eat brats and sauerkraut.

You are going to have to excuse these terrible pictures.  They are from the time where I was still learning how to use the basics of my camera.

The sauerkraut here is not something you do in a hurry, regardless of what the recipe says.  To get it to the point where I felt it was done, it took at least a half hour, maybe longer.  Maybe their idea of a hurry was different than mine?  I mean, they are making Jell-O salads that take all day.  These are not things that a working mom can do on a limited schedule.

Ok, so taste.  Have you had a French choucroute garnie? Because it’s like that.  I’m sure that doesn’t help a lot of you.  Here’s what Wikipedia says about it.  If you don’t feel like clicking over, it’s sauerkraut, sausages, potatoes, onions, and beer all cooked together for a nice long time and best served with mustard (not the yellow stuff, the good stuff).  The long cooking time mellows the bite of the sauerkraut and everything sort of melts into each other.  This has amazing similarities to that dish, but much quicker.  It’s kind of like sauerkraut for beginners.

When you have time to make this “in a hurry” dish, you may want to put on your leiderhosen, put on some polka, make some spaetzle, and indulge.  Even if it wasn’t my brother’s favorite, I thought it was pretty darn good.

Pork Chops and Rice

Sickness has invaded our house.  It came in with a slight wheeze that turned into a cough.  A slight sniffle, a small sneeze.  The weather is going to turn again, maybe for real this time?  We want to be outside absorbing the last little bits of vitamin D, finishing up the yard work that we wanted to get done before it got too cold.  Instead we are just doing small bits of things in between dealing with assorted viruses.  We could all use some comfort food.  

I pulled this recipe out from the archives.  I originally made it in the summer when my tomatoes and peppers were fresh from the garden.  There is nothing quite like summer tomatoes.  The woodchuck that lives under our garage agrees.  Tiko has an entrance to his den in the garden.  We put a fence around the garden hoping to keep rabbits and assorted other animals out, but there is no stopping a woodchuck.  The garden had been a dog kennel.  Apparently even though I can still smell dog in the area, it doesn’t bother Tiko.

 

Tiko also likes apples and will sit up and eat an apple just like a human.

At some point this summer, we realized that Tiko also has a girlfriend.  We named her Tika.  I have these images of Tiko and Tika hanging out and Tika saying things like “I don’t like that wall there.  I want more of an open concept.” and Tiko obligingly digs another hole.  “You know, our living space is just not big enough, we need a bonus room.”  Tiko sighs and gets back to work.  We need to relocate Tiko and Tika before we have a bunch of little Tikis running around our yard digging up holes that I will probably break my ankle in.

 

When you make these pork chops, make sure the pan is covered tightly when you put it in the oven.  The steam from all the juice and liquid will cook the rice.  If for some reason, you are nervous about the rice not cooking all the way, just put it on the bottom of the pan to absorb all the yumminess from the pork and veggies.

 

 

This dish is so basic and easy that you’ll be able to think of a thousand ways to change it up to fit whatever you are craving.  If summer veggies are no longer available, think about using fall fruits with the onion.  In the dead of winter, you can use some mushrooms and greens.  Hate pork?  Use chicken breast.  Have 6 people coming for dinner?  Slice another onion and another tomato.  Serving just you?  You can still make this.  It beats anything from the cookbook “Microwave Cooking For One”.

 

Share this recipe with your kids.  Have them make it.  This is the sort of food that you want them to be able to cook so that you don’t have to worry when they are on their own.

 

Tomato-Apple Chutney

I struggle with preserving.  I am a process person and need to be completely organized when I begin.  This was a struggle.  I often psych myself out of beginning because the workflow seems intimidating.  Canning is really not that hard.  It helps to have everything in place and set up before you begin, but the process is not overly complicated.  This is a place, however, where my training in project management and creating work flows helps.  I am able to visualize everything that needs to happen including timelines so that I don’t get in over my head.However, problems come in when in the middle of chopping everything, I realized I only had half the amount of celery that I needed.  And then comes the struggle.  I want to be true to the recipes, but there have to be some cases where substitutions are allowed.  I split the difference on this one. I went to the store and got the celery, but I did not go to Penzey’s to get cayenne pepper and used Berbere seasoning instead.  Berbere is an Ethiopian spice blend, the main ingredient of which is cayenne pepper.  When I consulted mom, she reassured me that great-grandma probably left it out all together.  Whatever.  We are talking about 1/4 tsp in a vat of tomatoes, apples, celery, and onions.

And since we are doing true confessions here, I used fresh tomatoes instead of canned.  I put a garden where the dog kennel used to be.  I grew a lot of weeds where I didn’t put down landscaping fabric, but I also managed to get some usable veggies out the situation including tomatoes.This recipe seems exotic for 1950’s Iowa, but I can see where it would be a good use for those vegetables that are still hanging on when the apples are starting to ripen.  Chutney, though, is one of those things that I sometimes have a hard time using up.  It’s a relish and goes with roasted meats.  It can be mixed into mayo and put on sandwiches.  Mix some into some veggies to make them more exciting.  I have no better ideas to use it and jars of it to use.  Please help.  This is a good basic chutney.  Not something you’d find in an Indian restaurant.  It might have a little too much celery for my taste, but it’s good.  It’s that nice mix of sweet and tart and spicy that chutney should be.