Sunday Night Dinners: Beef Stew

Good morning & Happy Monday! I hope you all had a great weekend! I am nursing a bit of a cold so was in the mood for some comfort food. So what did I make? Beef stew! Soups & stews are a total comfort food - and so far the recipes have all been gluten free without making any modifications!

My aunt Barb made the recipe last week and blogged about it so I just had to give it a try. Click here for the recipe - here is the recipe in photos!

I took the recommendation of the author of the recipe and bought 3 lbs of boneless beef chuck and cut it up myself. This is a major accomplishment for me because I am extremely squeamish when it comes to touching raw meat, for some reason. But like the recipe said, if you cut it up yourself, you know what you're getting!

So after cutting it up, I browned it in some olive oil in my trust dutch oven (which is becoming my new favorite thing in my kitchen!). You have to brown the meat in two batches so as not to over-crowd the meat (which once again reminded me of the scene in Julie & Julia where Julie Powell exclaims - 'don't crowd the mushrooms'! Can't wait for that movie to come out on DVD).


You then set the meat aside and brown the onions. I made one modification to the recipe and added celery because I love celery in soups & stews!


After browning the onions until they are nice and soft, you add the flour (I used a GF mix and it worked well!)


That cooks for a couple of minutes and then you add the beef broth, garlic, thyme, bay leaves, and the stew meat.


After it comes to a boil, you cover the dutch oven with foil, cover it, and put it in the oven.


It then bakes for an hour at 325 degrees and you then add the carrots & potatoes.


Let it cook for another hour and - voila! Dinner is ready!


Similar to last week's recipe, this yields A LOT. So I now have my meals planned out for the week!


I can't wait to heat this up for supper tonight. It will be a great improvement over the boring baked potatoes I was kind of living on lately. Baked potatoes are great, but I'm not really doing the food pyramid justice by eating them every night. Which is why I've been making more dishes with meat lately.

I love recipes that make great leftovers - do you have any 'go to recipes' that are great as leftovers that you would recommend?