Stewing

It's late Sunday night. I will be sorry tomorrow morning that I am awake this late tonight. I paid some bills (depressing), doodled around on the internet, and then found a stew recipe online. Once quite a few months ago I bought a box of dry onion soup mix to make onion dip for potato chips by mixing a package of the mix with a container of sour cream. But there are two packages in the box. I had heard onion soup mix was good to use in crock pot (aka slow cooker) stew recipes, so last week I bought some stew meat (beef).

When I looked up crock pot beef stews, I was dismayed that some of them wanted you to flour and then brown the meat, cook certain ingredients on one level for 1/2 an hour then add something else, use wine to make a gravy out of the fry pan residue, etc. I'm sure all that would taste fantastic, but the reason I want a crock pot recipe is so that I can assemble and turn it on in the morning before work and then come home to a cooked meal. I do not have time to brown meat and make gravy in the morning while I'm getting ready for work. But I found a recipe that did not require browning the meat and, better yet, suggested putting the stew together and letting it cook on low overnight, then adding water if necessary in the morning and letting it continue to cook all day. So I won't have to do anything in that part of the day that is definitely not my finest hour.

It's basically carrots, potatoes, onions, and meat, with a sauce made of dry onion soup mix, condensed cream of mushroom soup, and water. You just bring the water to the bottom of the meat, not covering it, so hopefully the flavor doesn't cook out of the meat. I did not know how to tell when the water was at the bottom of the meat except by sticking my finger down along the side of the crock pot interior. I hope I got it right.

Not exactly haute cuisine, but easy. We'll see how it tastes. The recipe also called for mushrooms, which I would gladly have added if there were any in my house, and for celery, which I don't like and so intentionally have none in my house. I knew a stew recipe would call for potatoes and carrots, so I had bought a package of tiny, peeled carrots to save myself the trouble of peeling and cutting those. All I had to peel and cut up were the potatoes and onion. I used a whole onion because I love onions.

And now to bed.