I like my meat boozy.

As I've discussed many o'times here, I've had an up and down relationship with meat. I still don't love touching it, but I think it's fair to say I'm full-on back on the stuff. I'm still (re)learning what to do with meat, other than cook up some chicken, so I was intrigued by the package of pre-cut stew meat I found while perusing the Meijer (gah!) meat aisle while waiting for my dad. Have I ever made stew? Nope. Am I huge stew fan? Nope. Let's consider this an impulse purchase. But I had it, and onto the week's menu it went.

I lost track of time today, so late afternoon I did a quick search online and found this easy beef stew recipe. I knew I'd have to modify it some, but it was the simplest recipe I found that involved ingredients I had. Around five o' clock, I hit the kitchen.

My favorite part about this recipe and the site it came from was the servings calculator. How cool is that?!?! I typed in 4, recalculated, and got started.

First off, I only had around a pound of meat -- something like 0.97 lb. Into the bag in went. To jazz things up, I dumped a handful of rosemary in the flour mix.

Meat in a bag.

Joining the meat in the pot were about a cup of chopped carrots, two or three stalks of celery chopped, and one small onion chopped. As for all the "remaining ingredients" part of the recipe, I added two large chopped potatoes, skins on, and I substituted a cup of red table wine for the dark beer. I also threw in some more rosemary, some marjoram (no thyme on hand), and some salt and pepper. All told, I think I cooked it for just about an hour and 20 minutes (tossing a few shakes of dried parsley in at the end due to lack of fresh).

Mmm meaty.

I must say, I am quite pleased with my first stew. I really loved it, actually, especially sopped up with a piece of buttered white bread (yeah, I said it. I like white bread!). The meat wasn't top quality by any means, but it did the trick. It was a little tough... Next time out, I might bump the quality up a bit and try a different cut. I'll need to research that one. I really liked the addition of the wine, too -- boozy meat. How can that go wrong? Overall, I say gold star for me!