Stew, Chapter 1

Today is a stew day. I've been muttering about making stew ever since the air here turned autumnal, but today I've actually got the ingredients, the time, and the energy. Stew is an important kinda dish for me - it's the first thing I learned to cook, and I'm good at it. It takes so long that you've got to set in and do it properly and there's a feeling of ritual about it too. So at this stage I have the frying pan, the big big stew pot, the peeler, the knife (big enough to qualify as a small sword, possibly named "The Cleaver" or "Overkill"), the fridge is bursting with meat and vegetables, I'm about to light a few candles, and I have the laptop back in the kitchen.

There will be updates throughout the day on the State of the Stew, together with semi-philosphical musings about Stew, Ingedients, and the Manly Art of Cooking.

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Stage One: Coating the meat. I'm not sure if this is a normal thing or a Shiel thing, but my father always did it, and it works. You mix flour with black pepper and salt, and roll the chunks of meat (beef, today - I've like to have some game to throw in as well, but game is expensive, and not available in the supermarket) in it, before frying them quickly in olive oil on a very hot pan. For proper hotness, you need an iron pan - ours is cast iron, and heavy enough that I'm the only one in the house than can handle it in comfort. The flour acts as a thickener for the juices coming off the meat, and the salt and pepper start the seasoning. The frying helps "lock in" the flavour of the meat, meaning that by the time it's cooked, it still tastes like beef, not stew-flavoured chunks of soya. After frying, the meat goes in the stewpot, and is covered in cold water, and the heating begins.

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The potatoes are now peeled, chopped, and in the stew, and it's coming back to the simmer. It's important in stew not to boil it. "A stew boiled is a stew spoiled", as my father would intone in the direction of my youngest brother (the usual designated stew watcher). So it has to stay at a steady simmer rather than a boil. I'm now looking in the direction of the other ingredients, over a turkey sandwich and some apple juice, which seem to be lunch. The essential ingredients, without which you cannot have stew, are meat, potatoes, carrots, turnips and onions. Optional extras are just about any solid vegetable or legume. Nobody else around here seems to like the legumes, so they won't be going in here, but there're celery, leeks, and possibly some apples going in this one. There are peppers there too, but that just seems wrong. And I know from experience that courgettes can foul up the whole stew.

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The onions, the carrots and the turnip are now in; I forgot parsnips from the list of stuff I have to go in. Trouble is that it's looking very full already, and will need to boil down quite a bit before I can much more to it. I'm going over the available herbs, and seeing what would suit - I'll probably stick with fairly conservative stuff; pepper, thyme, a little basil, parsley, some chives. And by the way, anyone who's in the Dublin region, or could make it to the Dublin region by this evening, is invited to partake of stew. :)

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And a final update on the state of the stew. It became evident a couple of hours ago that it was expanding too much to fit into the one stewpot, so I halved it and continued to add equal measures of the remaining ingredients to each. We're now at two full-size stew pots, each nearly full, which are cooking away happily, and will continue to do so until eight or so, when we're expecting help in consuming it in the form of wyvernfriend and her husband. Although given that there's, at a guess, around twenty litres of stew there, it won't all be gone tonight. We got some half-precooked petit pains as well - the kind you stick in the oven for a few minutes to finish them off. So there's fresh bread to go with the stew.

I've been very good about cleaning as I go today, but there are still a few odds and ends that could do with attending to, so I'll go and take care of them. Stew-making makes for a good day.