When the weather is bone-chilling cold with gray skies, there’s nothing I crave more than a big bowl of steaming beef stew!  There’s just something warming and comforting about the smell of a slow-cooked stew that warms up your body and puts you in a calm mood.

Yeah, that’s great, but it’s a pain to make, right?  Wrong!  Beef stew is probably one of the easiest things in the world to make.  And, minus maybe a little bit of flour for browning the meat, it’s fairly healthy as well.  Come check out how we make snowy day beef stew on the Suburban Steader Suburban Homestead.

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Recommendation

Beef stew is one of those “stick to your ribs” meals that almost everyone loves.  It’s a pretty easy prep and can be a ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ type meal, freeing you up to do other things around the house.  The one tip I have for prep is to make sure you keep the heat quite low when browning the meat and sauteing the onions and garlic.  You want the bottom of the pan to be brown, not black, when you deglaze it.  Another thing to note is that sometimes this recipe can come out a little watery.  If what you end up with is a little too watery for you, take a few cups of the broth out, make a roux (try 2tbsp flour to 2tbsp melted butter), add to the broth and return to the stew.  That should thicken it up.

The recipe above is for a basic beef stew.  Feel free to change things up as you see fit.  Replace the onion with shallots, add other root vegetables like parsnips, turnips and even turnips if you want.  My wife says the mushrooms give it an earthy flavor so, if that’s not your thing, don’t add them.  What I’m getting at is that the recipe I provided is a fairly basic canvas.  Feel free to experiment and tweak it to make it your own.

In terms of serving, I go very simple.  Beef stew is, at its core, a simple dish and does not need a lot of flash added to it.  A nice piece of buttered sourdough bread goes quite well with it.  I recommend a glass of the red wine you used to deglaze the pan or a good craft beer be served alongside it as well.

Give this snowy day beef stew a shot and let us know how it worked out for you!

I spent some time this weekend cooking for the family and decided to make one of my favorite dishes – penne alla vodka. While it’s not one of the most rustic dishes I’ve ever made, I did use a cast iron skillet to make it so it has some ‘suburban homesteading credibility!’

I have made this dish a few times, slightly tweaking the recipe every time. This weekend’s version was the best yet and I decided to share it with you.

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Recommendations

This penne alla vodka dish is always a crowd-pleaser – whether you are cooking a romantic dinner for your better half or making dinner for a house full of guests.  Hearty and filling, it really hits the spot and goes great with a nice cabernet sauvignon or pinot noir.  Add a little fresh grated parmigiano-reggiano and you have a restaurant quality meal that you can make on a budget in about 45 minutes.

Even though this dish is great the way it is, there are a few ways to tweak it.  The first tweak is the amount of sausage you use.  Personally, we like a meal with a lot of meat so we use a full pound of sausage.  If you want more of a pasta dish without meat, try using a lesser amount like 3oz (2 links) of sausage.  Secondly, this dish has a slight hint of heat thanks to the red pepper flakes.  If you want a milder meal, remove the red pepper flakes and if you want a bit spicier meal, use hot sausage and take the red pepper flakes out of th recipe.  Whatever you do, don’t use spicy sausage AND red pepper flakes.  I made that mistake once and it caused the dish to be super hot and not very enjoyable.

Go and try this spicy penne alla vodka recipe and let us know how it worked out for you!