Postcards from the Mothership

You know what food I love on a cold winter weekend? A hearty beef stew. You know what else I love? Thick, salty oven fries that are crispy on the outside and perfect on the inside. In a flash of brilliance, I pulled the two of them together into my new favourite winter-time dinner: stew-tine! (Stou-tine? Probably better than pou-stew, at least!)

Here’s my “recipe,” such as it is. You’ll need:

500g of stewing beef
1/4 cup flour
2 tbsp canola or vegetable oil
1 small cooking onion
several garlic cloves
1 cup red wine (optional)
2 cups stock
2 carrots
2 celery stalks
1 turnip
handful of mushrooms
1 cup frozen peas
3 – 4 large baking potatoes
2 tbsp olive oil
sea salt
ground pepper
2 bay leaves
1 tsp paprika (optional)
1 tbsp corn starch
1/4 cup very cold water

Over medium high heat, add canola/veg oil to a dutch oven or stew pot. While the pot and oil heat, cut the stewing beef into small pieces, maybe 2 cm cubes. Toss the the beef in the flour to coat liberally. Brown the beef in the oil. Make sure it browns very well on at least one side – it’s hard for me to be patient and not touch it while it browns!

While the beef is browning, dice the onions and garlic cloves. When the beef is well browned, add the onions and garlic and saute lightly. If the pan is dry, add a touch of the red wine or a bit more oil. Brown bits sticking to the bottom of the pan is good!

Chop the carrots, celery, turnip and mushrooms into pieces of similar size to the beef. When the onions are translucent, add the carrots, celery, turnip and mushrooms to the pot with the red wine and/or stock and add enough water to cover the works. Bring to a high boil and use a wooden or plastic spoon to scrape up the browned bits of flour off the bottom of the pot. Add the bay leaves, salt and pepper, reduce heat to a gentle simmer.

Ideally, simmer the stew for an hour or so before you start the fries. Pre-heat the oven to 450F. Wash the potatoes but don’t peel them, and cut them into thick slices. I cut them into quarters length and width-wise, then cut each quarter into slices about 1 cm thick. I like to have some skin on each piece. Soak the potato slices for a few minutes, up to 30 mins, in cold water. Drain and dry, and then toss the potato slices with olive oil, salt and optional paprika.

Line a baking sheet (we usually need two for four potato’s worth) with parchment paper and place the potato slices on the parchment paper. Bake for approx 25 mins, until they are toasty brown on the down side. Flip and bake another 10 to 15 mins to taste.

While the oven fries are finishing, if you want to thicken the stew gravy, turn the heat back up and bring the stew back to a boil. Mix the corn starch into the cold water and add gradually to the stew. Finally, just before you serve, add the frozen peas and stir.

Place a serving of fries on each plate, and ladle the stew on top. If you’re not minding your carbs, serve with extra bread for sopping up the gravy!

The only thing I didn’t love about this was the texture of the gravy when I used corn starch as a thickener. Any recommendations to thicken a stew using options other than corn starch? The flour at the beginning certainly starts the job, but I think when you serve it as stew-tine, you want that extra thickness!

Mad props to Chef Michael Smith for the basics of the oven fries, from his Family Meals cookbook, and for teaching me the basics so I’m now comfortable freestyling in the kitchen!

My dirty little secret is that I love this with ketchup. There is something sublime about really good fries and gravy with ketchup, and having the beef and veg along for the ride justifies it as more than just a sometimes treat!

Beloved called me at work the other day.

“I feel so lost, so adrift. I’ve lost my rudder and I feel like we’re directionless.” Nope, not an existential crisis – he was upset because it was three days after grocery day and the chalkboard where I faithfully write our weekly meal plan was still blank.

I love my kitchen chalkboard. LOVE IT! It has taken almost all of the stress out of weekday dinners. Not only do I know what’s for dinner every day of the week, but so does the family. It used to drive me bonkers that each boy would wander through whatever room I was in and idly ask, “What’s for dinner?” about three minutes after I’d finished apprising the previous kid of our dinner plans, or that it would be the first thing they’d say when they saw me right after school, occasionally before “hello”. I swear, I’d answer that question eight times in an average afternoon. We have three kids. You do the math. But now, they know – it’s written in chalk for all to see. (They still ask me, though. You can lead a kid to a chalkboard, but apparently you can’t make him read.)

I used to think I hated cooking dinner, until I realized that it was not so much the actual cooking that I hated, but the conceptualizing. So many cosmic tumblers have to fall into place for dinner to occur: you need to be able to pluck the idea out of the vast universe of potential meals, you need to have the ingredients on hand, you need to have the required prep time, and only then can you get on to the business of actually making dinner. The struggle is real.

The weekly meal plan takes all of that thinking and planning of the arsenic hours when you’re hungry and tired and cranky (YMMV, but I know I am all of those things between 4 and 6 pm on a weeknight) and puts them into a happier Saturday morning context surrounded by coffee and breathing space, and possibly rainbow-farting unicorns.

Hand in hand with the chalkboard comes the shopping list. I actually enjoy my Saturday morning meal and grocery planning ritual. About 20 minutes before I go out grocery shopping, I sit down with a coffee, a piece of paper, and my PC Plus points app. (I love PC points!) I start my list with things that are featured on the app for points that I would likely buy anyway, and sometimes I add a meal idea or two based on featured ingredients. Then I flesh out six or seven meals based on a big list of “things we like to eat” that’s stuck on the fridge with a magnet. Sometimes if I’m feeling inspired (or lacking inspiration) I’ll flip through my collection of Chef Michael Smith cookbooks, and if I’m really desperate I’ll peruse my Pinterest recipe boards (I have one for ideas to try and one for things that I know will work.) I fill in a shopping list based on what I’ll need to make those things, plus a quick scan of what I need to replenish in the fridge and cupboards. This always gives me a reasonably robust shopping list, and while I don’t religiously stick to my list, it does a pretty good job of getting what we need for the week without too many impulse buys or food that goes to waste.

As soon as I get home from the grocery store, I fill in the chalkboard with the week’s meals. I need to fill it in right away, as I find myself glancing to the corner frequently as I put the groceries away (or, more likely, as Beloved puts the groceries away) and making decisions about what goes into the fridge and what gets frozen for later consumption. Stuff heavy on fresh meat generally gets put into the rotation early in the week because I am a little unreliable when it comes to taking stuff out of the freezer – but the chalkboard helps with that, too.

I thought when I first started planning meals like this that I’d come up against my own fickleness (“but how can I be sure on Saturday that I’ll feel like tacos on Tuesday?”) but that really hasn’t been an issue. Sometimes we have pasta on Monday instead of Wednesday, and my ideas for Thursday or Friday tend to be a little more nebulous and based more on pantry staples than fresh food, so if we are going to go rogue and grab a take-out family platter from our favourite shawarma place instead, it’s likely to be on one of these nights. But I’d say we stick to the plan more than 80 per cent of the time.

I might have laughed at this “system” a few years ago but I rely on it now, and there are hella less dinner-time meltdowns since chalkboard arrived to save our sanity and guide us through the chaos. Clearly Beloved likes it, too, and I had to laugh when my brother and his family visited a few months ago and I noticed that someone had helpfully crossed off each of the meals we had already eaten during his visit.

Do you do this sort of planning? Could a chalkboard save your sanity, too?