Basic Beef Stew on a Rainy Day

With one of the last awful rainy March days at hand, I took a cue from the book I’m reading that takes place in 18th century Scotland: Beef stew does the body and the spirit well. It sticks to your bones, wakes up your taste buds, and goes really well with a glass or wine or ale. Definitely a perfect end to a long deary day.

If I’d known beef stew was so easy to make and hard to screw up, it would have been  a regular item on my menu long ago. Plus I used my slow cooker so there was even less effort involved. I was very pleased with how this recipe I developed turned out. I looked over about 20 recipes from a variety of sources very quickly, watching for my key ingredients, rump roast, potatoes and carrots to pop up, and made mental notes about what else I should add. Most beef stews have some sort of onion or onion soup mix, a can of some kind of tomato product, a thickening agent and a combination of spices.

I served this plain, piping hot, but it would have been good over egg noodles or fresh biscuits.

Basic Beef Stew

3 lbs rump roast cubed

4 medium-sized red potatoes

2 cups chopped carrots

1 large onion roughly chopped

1 bay leaf

1 can V8 (12 oz, low sodium)

1 cup red wine

1/2 cup instant tapioca

2 tbsp worcestershire sauce

1 tbsp Montreal Steak Seasoning (McCormick)

First, I roughly chopped up the veggies (onion, carrots, potatoes) and tossed them in the bottom of the slow cooker with the instant tapioca powder. Then I cubed half of a rump roast (put the rest in the freezer) and placed the cubes on top of the vegetables. Then, I added the remaining ingredients, making sure to pour the wine and V8 over the meat before seasoning so that the seasoning would stick for the duration of the 5 hours. While I cooked on high for 5, if I’d had time to start earlier probably 8 hours on low would have been adequate. As it was, the beef was so perfect, flaked with the touch of a fork, that I am glad I didn’t cook it any differently.

My husband devoured this very typical ‘meat and potatoes’ dinner in a very 18th century fashion, so in the future I will probably double the recipe as there was so little left over. Maybe served over some kind of starch it might cut the need for doubling. We’ll see. A definite keeper.

Variations: I liked the ideas of using onion soup, stewed tomatoes, and celery, but the cupboard was bare on those counts, so I did without and the meal was hardly lacking. Also, fresh herbs would have been a nice twist, but my garden isn’t ready for that, yet.