Stewed In Its Own Juices - and someone else's

You must never, ever, under no circumstances, no matter what, throw away any goozle. It is forbidden, from this time forward.

Because of this stew.

I know that good cooks everywhere already subscribe to the Ultimate Goozle Rule, but it was hammered home to me yet again last week when I made beef stew.

I'm not going to go into all the steps of beef stew - you probably have your favorite, anyway, and there are plenty of killer recipes on the web. What I am going to do is witness that, if you have some goozle, any goozle, left from a previous meal, you can add it to your stew and take it by that simple action, to a whole new, higher and finer plane.

A case in point: the juices that I saved from the lamb shanks that I made a few days before. We thought the shanks were as close to ambrosial as it is possible to be but, in fact, this stew was even better.

I saved that carnal, lusty goozle from the bottom of the crock pot and, after the usual browning stages of stew construction, added it to the red wine-and-simmering stage. The resulting stew was, quite simply, the best I have ever tasted or ever hope to taste. Oddly, it didn't taste of lamb - it just tasted like SuperBeef, as if I had doubled down on the beef in the stew, when in truth there was less meat than usual.

Stewed in its own juices, and those of the lamb, well, oh heavens, it was as close to erotic as one gets, fully dressed.