Winter Stew

Once upon a time, I was a bad cook. With the arrogance of inexperience, I believed that instinct should guide my hands to add the right bits of this and the perfect spots of that. But nothing turned out and for good reason, I lost all confidence.

A wise cook nudged gently. “Just at first,” she counseled, “follow a recipe. Then switch it around.” Her advice worked and sure enough, slowly but surely, I learned to cook.

Still, even after all these years, there’s a special spot in my recipe box for ‘teaching’ recipes that are more launching pad than destination, more guideline than prescription, ones where concept trumps inexperience.

Enter Winter Stew, a concept recipe of high confidence, beef stew one week, the tastiest venison stew the next, chicken and then lamb. Last winter I recruited recipe testers to experiment with its endless variations, playing with different combinations of meat, vegetables, herbs, cooking liquids and sweeteners. Each reported excellent results, concluding, “Great stew recipe.” The last note read, “Writing about stew made me hungry! New batch simmering on the stove!” That, good cooks, is a recommendation.

ALANNA's TIPS For vegetables, my recipe testers and I tried cubes of butternut squash, chunks of carrot, wedges of cabbage, hunks of potato, a bottle of pearl onions, a pound of saut´ed mushrooms, frozen black-eyed peas, a can of diced tomatoes, slices of roasted pepper.