I'll never be a chef. Really this is no major surprise. If you look at my background of life experiences...this is kind of a given. The first thing I ever learned to cook was scrambled eggs. I was seven years old and pretty jazzed to have picked up this life skill. I felt EXTREMELY grown up knowing that in a pinch, I could provide myself with a hot breakfast and not burn the house down in the process. It was the beginning of my training as a self-sufficient latch-key kid. For those who do not know what that is, it was a title given to quite a few of us kids in the 70s when it was not quite the norm to have a mom who worked outside the home.
Anyway, I learned to make scrambled eggs. From there the repertoire mainly consisted of heat-up meals like TV dinners (back when they still came in an aluminum tray), frozen burritos, Minute Rice, and Ramen noodles. I was ready for feeding myself in college by the age of 9. :)
Real meals came to me after I became a mom. Before then, even though I had aged, I really didn't make anything much more difficult than hamburgers and chili. I remember my horror the first time I made an actual meal for a boyfriend. I was 24 by then! I remember wigging out because I didn't know what a scallion was. I learned a little more as the years went by, and I became comfortable with cooking just about anything as long as I had a recipe to follow.
Recently I started paying more attention to the recipes in magazines that I get. I subscribe to stuff like Woman's Day, Family Circle, and things like that which have fairly easy to follow recipes. This is a huge leap from my magazine reading of the past, but that is not what I am writing about anyway. My husband gets Sunset among several other magazines. Sunset has recipes too. One magazine caught my eye recently that had a FABULOUS looking stew on it. I mean the picture really made me want to just dig right in! I decided that I would make this for my husband. MISTAKE. First...the spices were all really weird sounding like smoked cayenne pepper (I have used cayenne pepper ---but SMOKED? More strangeness from there. The stew meat had to be cooked "just right" if it didn't take you an hour to prepare the meat according to the specifications (one such specification -- do not let the meat touch the other meat) you were doing it wrong. Seriously the magazine told you that if you were doing it right it would take an hour. That was an hour just to brown stew meat! There were four steps to follow in cooking this stew. You could go all the way through three and then do the fourth on another day if you wished for time's sake.
Guess how long it took me to get through to the end of three...FOUR HOURS! Four hours for STEW! And it wasn't even ready yet! I don't want to spend four hours cooking. EVER! At least not four hours of active cooking. After the meat was browned correctly (slightly crisp on the outside), I still had to cook two chunky chopped onions, bacon (in a pot not a pan), and cook everything up in wine. It took me 2 1/2 hours to get it ready for the final step of step 3...the oven. The oven was another 1 1/2 hours which I could just check on. So to be fair...I probably actively cooked for three hours. That is still a lot of active cooking for a meal that isn't done. The next day I did the last two steps which were to peel about four pounds of potatoes and chunk up and add to the pot to boil in the stew and once those boiled add clean chopped carrots (long chops not round chunks) and boil again. That part of the cooking took another two hours before the veggies were soft enough yet not too soft. OY!
On the bright side...the meal was really quite good. All the time it took to cook that meat showed. It was really great. But after cooking and cleaning, I probably put in a full day's work into that one stew. I don't think you should put in a day's work on stew. A fancy Thanksgiving feast, a rack of lamb...maybe. From now on, I am making my stew in crock pots like I used to.
Unless my hubby really wants this one...I could never refuse him. ;)
Kelly
