Week 11: Hearty red meat stew

This week, we're making a hearty red meat stew!

I like stews. They're a good, strong winter food. It's great if meat is expensive where you are, because you can use cheap cuts of meat and you can add a lot of bulk with vegetables. And they're more versatile than people think! This recipe is for quite a basic stew, obviously using the vegetables given in the GW2 recipes. A stew like this is great for using up leftover vegetables (you know, you buy a whole cabbage but only end up needing 3/4 of it, that type of thing). No flour or corn starch in this stew: the potatoes serve as the binding agent here. Nevertheless, if you find that the stew is a bit too liquid, just sprinkle a bit of flour over it and give it a good stir.

I only found out while making this recipe that the type of pan I have always used to make stews is called 'Dutch oven' in English. Which is pretty appropriate, as I'm Dutch. Anyway, I do recommend a Dutch oven, in particular because of the heavy lids, but don't fret if you don't have one.

Hearty red meat stew
Ingredients (4 servings):

450 g stew meat (beef)

2-3 onions

500 g potatoes (floury)

300 g carrot

3 stalks (ca. 200 g) celery

2 bay leaves
1/2 tsp dried thyme

500 ml meat stock

Peel and halve the onions, then slice. Cut the celery stalks in half lengthwise, then slice. Cut the meat into bite size chunks. Heat some oil or butter in a large pot/Dutch oven and brown the meat on all sides. Add the onion and celery to the pot. Fry for 3 minutes while stirring. Add the meat stock, thyme and bay leaves. Bring to a boil, then turn the heat down, cover the pot and simmer for an hour*.

Peel and dice the potatoes. Add to the pot and stir well. Bring back to the boil, then simmer for another hour. 
Stir the stew well, breaking up the potato chunks to bind the stew. Clean and slice or dice (depending on their size) the carrots. Add to the pot and stir. Bring back to the boil, then simmer for another hour.

Finally, remove the bay leaves from the stew. Season to taste. Enjoy!

*: For some types of meat, you may want to simmer for a bit longer at this stage. The tougher the meat, the longer it needs to simmer.