/ck/ - Food & Cooking

Okay, so soup/stew.

First, take a couple pounds of beef, cube it roughly 3/4 - 1 inch. Dredge in flour and black pepper and salt.

Cut 4 each of medium oinions, potatoes, medium carots, and celery stalks, into pieces similarly-sized to the beef. finely-cut 8 large garlic cloves.

Toss 4 tbsp olive oil into a pan, get it near-smoking, quickly sear your beef on all sides. (sorry for this not being in the vertical. It totally slipped my mind.) Remove beef to your stew/soup pot, deglaze pan with a little wine, pour the mixture into the beef. re-heat the pan, whip out another couple tablespoons of olive oil, heat it up to near-smoking, toss in your onions and garlic. Cook for roughly 2-3 minutes, until fragrant, add your other vegetables. cook for roughly 5-7 minutes, until all scents have mixed nicely and are not too strong (onions should be translucent at this point) and put into the soup/stew pot. At this point, dump the entire bottle of red wine into the pot (That's a 1.5L bottle, mind you) and get it up to boiling, add a 1.5"x" strip of orange peel, 3-4 fresh small sprigs of thyme (I used lemon thyme, here,) one or two anchovy filets (to enhance the beef flavor) and 1 tablespoon freshly grated ginger root. Boil for 2-3 minutes, add 2/3 cup of barley. Mix well, reduce to simmer, cover. Let cook covered at least 90 minutes, stirring roughly every 10 minutes.

Serve with a little chopped cilantro for garnish and a zesty enhancement to flavor. Of course, salt as needed. (I omit salt most times as I'm on a heavily sodium-restricted diet.)

Also, timestamp in next pic. Totally forgot it, remembered after eating and starting to make this vertical.