One-Pot Beef Stew

What do you have on a work night when you make this one-pot beef stew? Your whole house will smell great, and there will be almost no dishes to clean! The best part of stews is that you can put whatever you have on hand in them- assuming it is edible. This tasty beef stew is sure to fill you up and have plenty for leftovers for work or when you don't feel like cooking. Onward to the Beef Stew Breakdown.

This is my first attempt at making beef stew, I just went to the store and grabbed what I knew to be the basics of beef stew. I then added a few things that I thought would taste good.

1. Basic Ingredients
   • Stew Beef
   • Beef Broth
   • Potatoes, your favorite kind
   • Carrots
   • A white onion
   • Garlic, fresh or jarred
   • Peas
   • Soy sauce
   • Salt and Pepper
2. Optional ingredients
   • Mild yellow bell pepper
   • Fresh Jalapeno Pepper(s)
   • Sliced portabello mushrooms
   • A dark beer of any kind
   • Dried Spicy Red Peppers

The Celery, Onions, Jalapeno(s), and Bell Pepper need to be cut and added to the pot at this point, but if you wait until the next step I'll show you a cool way to seed your vegetables.

1. Celery
   • Rinse and cut the celery down to the heart, throw the leaves into the pot with the celery. If you want, you can pull the leaves off and put them in right before you turn the heat off.
2. Onion
   • Cut up as much of 1 onion as you think you'll need. I only used ¾ of the onion.

Here's a pretty cool trick if you always have trouble getting the seeds out of your Bell Peppers or Jalapenos.. and end up getting them everywhere. This way of cutting seems to waste less of the produce as well, and you wont end up squirting pepper juice or seeds in your eye.. like when I tried using a spoon one time.

1. Jalapeno
   • Cut the top and bottom of the pepper straight off
   • Slit the little white things attached to the seeds, I think they are called placentas.
   • Turn the pepper over and poke the whole part of the seeds out. It came out for me just like the picture.
   • Cut around the stem of the top, and pull it off.
   • Slice and dice to your hearts content!
2. Bell Pepper
   • Cut only the bottom off of the Bell Pepper.
   • Cut the placenta, then flip it over and cut down around the stem.
   • Push down with your thumb, and if you did it right the whole placenta and seeds will come out cleanly!
   • Cut the pepper however you normally like to!
3. Dried Red Peppers
   • Cut the stem end, or both ends off
   • Roll the pepper between your fingers until all the seeds fall out
   • Crush and add to the pot!

At this point you can start cooking things!

• Drop a teaspoon of garlic in the pot
• Cut or tear your stew meat into the size you like, then add to the pot
• Put it on the stove and stir it up, while adding just enough oil to cover the bottom of the pot. To saute just stir every minute or so until your onions start to turn brown.
• Don't turn the heat off when you are done with the saute, just move on to the next step!

Here's where it all really starts to smell awesome. Turn the heat up when you start adding liquids to your stew.

• Add all 32oz of the beef broth
• Add a small amount of soy sauce 1-2 TBSP to your taste
• Crack open your beer and pour it in. I used some caffeinated stout that sounded much better than it tasted as a beverage.
• If the stew foams up because of the beer then just stir it back down, and keep doing this until it stops making foam from a light boil. It should take less than 10 minutes to stop.
• Once the stew no longer produces bubbles cover with a lid and reduce the heat to between simmer and medium.. I had to improvise here with the lid because everything I have was given to me in a box when I moved out of my parents and into my new house. That is a lid from a canning pot, it did just fine other than dripping condensate all over the stovetop.
• Leave the stew for an hour and a half to two hours while you finish cutting vegetables and do other fun things

I love a lot of potatoes. I cut a lot of potatoes up.. it really looks like a lot until you put it into the pot. The creole is not a part of this stew and never will be, I add it to a ton of stuff though when I am lazy.

1. Carrots
   • Cut up two - three carrots
   • I like to cut them diagonally so they are wider pieces
2. Potatoes
   • Peel a ton of potatoes
   • Cut up a ton of potatoes into 1 inch squares
3. Portabello Mushrooms
   • Honestly, there's nothing to do here. I just took some out of the package and saved the rest for another stew day.
4. Peas
   • Also nothing to do here, I threw them on the pile so I could rinse out my bowl
   • In my opinion there is not enough peas, but I think more would have made for a weird mixture of vegetables in this stew anyway

So, it has been a while and you're getting pretty hungry smelling that stew. Maybe you made a shot of espresso while you waited, or maybe you stared at it wishing you could eat it now. You're almost there! Now, you open the pot and see that a lot of the water has simmered off into steam, but that really is not a big problem. Add to the pot the Potatoes, Carrots, Mushrooms, and Peas. After that you can run some hot tap water into the pot until it just covers the solid ingredients. Maybe your mushrooms will float like mine are. At this point I turned my heat up to medium, stirred it all up, and placed the over sized lid back on- Stir occasionally.

What is this?! This is the wonderful view of almost no dirty dishes!! It really is crazy I know, but this is really nice, and I think anyone that cooks regularly will appreciate how few dishes this used... might as well clean this stuff up real quick while you are waiting on the stew to finish!

Check the stew about 45 minutes in by eating a potato and a carrot. If both are soft all the way through then you are FINALLY ready to eat! I ladled mine into a bowl and enjoyed with a glass of Apothic Red. This was also a homework night for me.

If you absolutely loved my Instructable then you should:

• Make some beef stew using my Beef Stew Breakdown
• Snap a picture and post it here
• Comment
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