Cooking Experiments: Apple Cider Beef Stew, and Whole Wheat Cheesy Biscuits

[tuftears]

I asked my mom and her caretaker what they might like for lunch this week, and beef stew came up as a suggestion. (well actually, that was several weeks ago, but due to falling ill for a bit, I skipped several weeks of lunch) So, I thought to myself, how hard could beef stew be? Let's make some!

I browsed about for some beef stew recipes, but to my surprise, most called for things like beef stock or cooking wine, neither of which I normally stock. I thought about picking up some cooking wine, but changed my mind quickly after reading the label in the store. Honestly, Tufty, I thought to myself. Who puts a whole teaspoon of salt into each cup of cooking wine?

However, I had looked up some alternatives. Apple cider vinegar had come to mind as a possible substitute for wine, since I do keep that on hand, so I'd looked up this recipe for 'Apple Cider Beef Stew'.

I felt like I needed some bread to go with the stew though. I asked about in my guild, and one friend suggested biscuits. Easy to cook, hardly any crust so not likely to be an issue for my mom's bad teeth.

The biscuits came out great, actually! I made them according to this recipe, though I didn't have any buttermilk, so I substituted a cup of greek yogurt instead, and then when the dough wasn't coming together, added a half cup of water.



It's actually pretty troublesome to knead the dough though, I need more practice with bread and bread-like things, I guess.

The beef stew was pretty easy to make, and the apple cider flavor makes it sweet, but not overly so. Still, I want to learn to make a properly rich and hearty beef stew, with the fully savory flavor that I've come to associate with such stews.



I didn't hew much to the recipe; there's probably way more veggies in mine than the recipe calls for, and when I saw that there was a lot of thin liquid, I added some barley (as I'd planned) to soak up the liquid and put the crockpot on for another two hours on low. But I think that works well enough, healthy, but still tasty.

I know, the lighting/color balance is terrible on these pictures. :/ I'm a terrible photographer.

Comments

[anher.livejournal.com]

We sometimes will use a stout or a porter when we're cooking beef stew. This week we're trying out meat loaf with a London Porter and bacon included in the recipe.

We're just big believers in cooking with alcohol in general.

[rowyn]

That looks very tasty, though. And I don't like stew! :)

[katepufftail.livejournal.com]

I don't think I've ever used cooking wine as such in any of my recipes, though I do cook with wine fairly often. I was always told that you should only ever use a wine that you would drink, which is problematic for me as I don't drink wine!

So I get cheap bottles of table wine from Trader Joe's. Some purists might cry foul at that, finding it just as offensive as cooking wine, but eh. I'm only cooking for my household here, after all, and they're not complaining :)

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

But how do you pick which wine to get? There are SO MANY! :O