Oven stew

Oven stew

Adapted from “Casserole Crazy” by Emily Farris. The premise of this cookbook is all casseroles, all the time, divided by degree of how bad they are for you health-wise. It doesn’t give nutritional information, but really, if you can’t tell that a cream-laden dish falls into the not-so-good-for-you category, nutritional information is irrelevant. I was intrigued by the preparation method of this stew.

Ingredients:

2 pounds beef roast, cubed

6 medium potatoes, cubed (unpeeled)

1 large onion, chopped

2 carrots, sliced

2 parsnips, sliced

2 stalks celery, sliced

1 teaspoon chopped fresh cilantro

1 teaspoon chopped fresh parsley

1 teaspoon each salt and pepper

1 16-ounce can pureed tomatoes

½ teaspoon sugar

¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper

½ cup water

Method:

Combine all ingredients in a 4-quart oven safe dish. (I used a 24-cm Le Creuset pot, which worked fine.) Bake, covered, for about 8 hours at 250 degrees.

Rating: Fairly fast fix in terms of prep time, but not as good as I had hoped. None of the rich broth I associate with a good stew. Fairly dry, despite the fact that I upped the liquid called for, and it’s relying on the tomato puree for its chief flavorant. I suppose one could try again and add red wine, thyme and other traditional stew flavorants. But the only reason to go this route is if you don’t own a crockpot, in which you can accomplish that same hands-off while at work cooking with vastly superior results when it comes to stew. (Like the beef stew in Lora Brody’s “Slow Cooker Cooking,” a really good reason to own a crockpot.)

Tip: When cutting up beef for any stew, aim to have chunks at least twice as large as what they sell in packages labeled as stew meat. You’ll have much more moist, flavorful beef instead of small hockey pucks of meat.