Sweet Tea and Cornbread: beef stew

There is nothing any more comforting and wonderful tasting as a big pot of beef stew on a chilly day! We just love it! I just use the basics in my beef stew, stew meat, carrots, onion, potatoes and celery. You can add green peas or corn if you like though. This is one you need a good two hours to cook low and slow, but the results are well worth it.

So here is what you are going to need for the beef stew. Some recipes I see called beef stew have all kinds of mixed vegetables and tomatoes or tomato sauce in them. That is not beef stew, that is vegetable beef soup where I come from. This is beef stew:

2lbs beef stew meat or round steak cut into cubes, onion, 4 stalks of celery, a bag of tiny baby carrots, potatoes, beef stew mix, seasoned salt, Nature's Seasoning, and pepper.

Place 2 cups flour in a shallow dish or pie plate. Sprinkle with 1 tsp of seasoned salt, 1 tsp. Nature's Seasoning, and 1/2 tsp black pepper.

Mix thoroughly with a fork.

Heat 1/2 cup vegetable oil in a dutch oven.

Toss the beef stew meat in the flour coating lightly.

Place in hot oil and brown well. This will stick if you don't keep moving it around. You will need to brown the meat in batches because it will be too much for one pan full. Remove the first batch and place on a plate, then move to the next batch.

On the last batch, chop your onion (not too fine, just a rough chop) and add to the browning meat to soften it.

There will be browned bits stuck to the pan when the meat has browned. Keep the heat up on medium high and pour a cup of water into the pan to deglaze using a rubber spoon or spatula which won't scratch your pot. Get all of this browned flour off of the bottom of the pan or our stew will stick.

Now add your package of stew seasoning mix and 3 cups water. Mix it up well. The package of stew seasoning might say 2 cups water but it won't be enough.

This is the consistency you have. Cover and turn to medium low. Cook for 1 hr., but stir this every 20 minutes and make sure you scrape the bottom so it doesn't stick. It will stick and burn if you do not do this.

Wash chop your celery, potatoes and carrots (I like to use the baby carrots). Add them to the pot and stir with 3 more cups of water or more if needed, cook for 1 more hour. Taste at this point and you might need to sprinkle with a little more seasoned salt and pepper to your taste.

Make some cornbread and slice some sweet onions and you are ready to serve! It's delicious and the leftovers are just as good the next day!

Ingredients:

2 lbs stew meat

5-6 potatoes

3 cups carrots or bag of tiny baby carrots

1 medium yellow onion

4 stalks celery

1 pkg beef stew seasoning (I love the Kroger brand, but any will do)

about 6 -7 cups water

1 tsp Nature's Seasoning

1tsp seasoned salt

1 tsp. black pepper

2 cups flour

1/2 cup oil to brown meat

We are having a rather early fall here in southern Kentucky this year. The weather is much cooler and fall like than it usually is by now. Of course, we had an extremely early spring also so that may be why. The leaves are turning and my yard is actually already almost covered. As I have said before, I am not a cool weather person and I absolutely hate winter, but there is one thing I do like about the fall season...well there are actually several things, but the food and the holidays are the best things. I love soups and actually we eat soup all year round to some extent, but it's a little hard to enjoy a steaming bowl of soup when it's over 100 degrees out. It's the most comforting thing in the world when air is turning crisp and the days are getting so much shorter.

I get so many requests for various soups and I haven't nearly gotten them all covered yet, but I decided to condense some of the most popular ones in one place to make it easier to find them. These are some of our favorite soups, but not nearly all of them, so I will be adding to this.

Just click on the name of the recipe below the picture to go to the recipes for each. Let me know which ones are your family favorites!