Who is Bia?

My name is Brenda. I am a wife and an aunt-turned-mom of an amazing 13 year old. My passion for cooking and recipe creating developed as an adventure in finding healthy alternatives to the foods I don't want to live without! I am an advocate for local farming and my recipes are inspired by what is in season. I strive for my ingredients to be from a mother or from the ground and minimally processed. Please try my recipes, critique them, and share them! Just stay home and cook tonight!

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Soup Marathon Day #3!

What is a soup marathon without beef stew? If you recall, my goal for this week was all my soups to be vegetarian. So how can I get a stew to taste like beef, but have none in it? By playing! So I used my imagination and combined red wine, worceshire sauce, and rosemary for the beef flavor and mushrooms for the beef feel! Here is what came of it: Non Beef Burgandy Stew!



Ingredients
1 Dozen small potatoes, peeled and chopped into bite-sized pieces
5 large carrots, sliced
4 large celery stalks, sliced
2-8oz. Packages of baby bella mushrooms, quartered
1 large yellow onion, finely diced
3 chopped cloves of garlic
1 sprig of rosemary, removed from woody stem and chopped
¼ cup Worcestershire sauce
1 TBSP freshly ground black pepper
2 TBSP chopped, flat leaf parsley
1/3 cup flour and 2 TBSP flour divided
2 cups vegetable stock
1 cup dry, red wine
2 hot cups water
1 cup tomato paste
1 cup milk
Salt to taste

Instructions:
Combine all the vegetables and herbs in a large crock pot, minus the mushrooms. Toss the quartered mushrooms with the 1/3 cup of flour before adding to the pot. Mixture will look like this:


Combine the tomato paste and the 2 cups hot water and whisk until chunks are gone. Add tomato paste mixture, wine, and stock to the crock pot. Cover and cook on low for 4 hours. After the 4 hours of cooking time, whisk together the remaining 2 TBSP of flour and the 1 cup of milk. Add to stew and cook on low for another hour. Salt to taste and serve. (Don’t add salt until cooking process is over. Slow cooking with salt can make the dish too salty in the end.)

So we discovered that this stew tastes amazing, but it is so rich! We don't really eat rich food often, so this was a bit much for us. If you love rich food, this is the stew for you. Also, if you want to meat it up, replace the mushrooms with stew meat and use beef stock. If you don't like cooking with wine, replace wine with either vegetable or beef stock. The wine gives the stew it's color and "ping" though.

Make it. Critique it.

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