Stewette

Last week, I found the neatest little cut of beef chuck - a little roundish bone surrounded by about three inches of meat. It made a nifty diminutive stew-for-two, plus leftovers and enviable goozle.

I made this stew with the usual cast of characters - onion, garlic, potatoes, carrots - and had some nice button mushrooms so I threw them in to the mix, too, and they added a fillip that previous stews had not enjoyed.

I had read in Bill Buford's book, "Heat," that restaurants sear their meat harder than home cooks do and that's where they get all the flavor - on the razor edge between burning and caramelization - so I seared the bejeebers out of this meat before removing it, adding the onion, garlic and mushrooms for a quick browning, then added the liquid for a long, slow braise. I also simmered the stewette in beef broth rather than water - makes a fine difference when you add flavors to flavors, doesn't it? Some fresh thyme snipped from the garden, flowers and all, was the main herb.

My Beloved relished the marrow in the bone; my favorite part was the goozle, which I sipped and sopped up with some herbed bread. This little stewette was as much soup as it was stew, and delicious either way.

Aging

Hypertension. I have high blood pressure. It was diagnosed last week when I went to see my doc about a sore shoulder. I should know better than to go in there - they always find something else wrong with you that you didn't know you had, like hypertension.

I shouldn't be surprised - absolutely everyone in my family has it, too - but I had managed to escape the pill brigade until now. I felt blessed by being free of pills and doctor visits and emails with the medical community, except for my semiannual eye exams and tooth cleanings. This feels like the beginning of true aging.

I've been thankfully free of the arthritis, insomnia and irregularity that some of my friends complain about and I still walk with Cora at least a couple of miles per day. When the young man at the grocery store asks if I need help out, I am always able to say with a smile, "No, thanks! I'm stronger than I look."

Oh, my hair has been gray and my face wrinkled and my figure round for quite some time - it's not as if there were no signs of advancing years around here. I wear glasses and I really relish my afternoon nap. Somewhere along the line, however, I learned to equate pill taking with truly getting older.

What has this to do with beef stew? Nothing much, except that on a recent afternoon when I arose from my nap feeling a little weak from the side effect of my new medicine (my cheerful young doc assures me that once I adjust to it, I won't feel this way any longer), I decided to make stew instead of doing some laps in the local high school pool as I had planned.

I hauled out my new Staub dutch oven and thoroughly browned big chunks of grass-fed chuck roast in a little olive oil on top of the stove, added onion, garlic, red wine, beef broth, carrots, parsnips and mushrooms, placed the lid on the bubbling proto-stew and set it in a slow oven to do its magic. I have some really lovely thyme going gangbusters out in the garden, so I added that and a couple of bay leaves, too.

After it bubbled along for a few hours, I took it out, let it cool, and put it in the fridge. To me, stews always taste better the next day and taking this step allows the fat to rise to the top and congeal so it's easily removed.

The final step to this true comfort food is to reheat it, remove the stew to a warm platter, cook down the juices with a little tomato paste until they are thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, then serve it all with buttered noodles or chunks of potato cooked in the goozle.

Comfort food. Maybe that's why it seemed like a good idea to return to wintry fare when spring is bounding along outside - just needed a little comfort as I contemplate aging.

Winter Fare

Is there anything on earth more warming and hearty than beef stew? If there is, I can't imagine it. Rich with red wine and beefy broth, satisfying with earthy, tasty vegetables, it's the perfect meal for a winter dinner.

Inspired but not constrained by Julia Child's version, I browned the beef cubes thoroughly in olive oil in a deep pot, added a huge slivered onion still on high heat to get that stronger onion flavor that comes with high heat, added some sliced garlic toward the end of the sauté period, then poured roughly equal amounts of red wine and beef broth to cover by about an inch, added a couple of bay leaves and about a tablespoon of dry thyme, and simmered the bejaysus out of it, covered, for a couple of hours.

Once the meat was tender, I added chunks of orange, black and yellow carrot, separately sautéed whole mushrooms and shallots to the pot and simmered until they were nearly tender. When they were nearing liftoff, I melted about three tablespoons of butter in a small saucepan, cooked an equal amount of flour in it for a few minutes, then ladled in the juices from the stewpot, stirring as it thickened and continuing to ladle in and stir more juice until it reached a nice, smooth, pourable consistency. Then, back into the stewpot to mingle with the rest of the juices and make an incredible gravy.

Served it in a bowl over small, thumb-crushed, boiled potatoes. The only thing missing was some sort of juice soaker-upper, like bread or biscuits. Cora was happy, though, as she got to slurp up the rest of the gravy in our bowls. There wouldn't have been any if we'd had bread - it was too tasty to waste. Hearty, warming winter fare.

Beefy

This is the third and last installment of the potential disaster my neighbor Theresa averted by giving away her defrosted hoard of freezer meats. The beef ribs were browned and went into my crock pot along with some chunked onions and carrots and a cup or so of both beef broth and red wine with which I deglazed the browning pan.

They simmered and bubbled together for several hours, until the bones gave up their essence and fell out. This was a fairly fatty cut of meat so I refrigerated it while we ate the other two dishes, removed the congealed fat that had risen to the top and, a few days later, set it back into the base to cook for another couple of hours, adding chunks of red potato to the final cooking.

Spooned onto the plate next to some bright green broccolette, the stew was as simple as a wedge and deeply, richly beefy. The goozle I didn't use on the plate went into a container in the freezer - it will make the base for a wonderful soup later in the fall. Theresa's generosity has fed us five or six times in the past week - maybe I'll make her a coming-home gift of something to eat as delicious as the food she lost.