Autumn is upon us, at least here in NYC and that means, shorter days, rainy weather, cooler temperatures and of course slow cooked, rich dishes like stew – in this case, beef stew. Now this is a really easy dish. In fact, in my humble opinion, the whole nature of stew – wherein you slow cook vegetables and meat basically in their own juices with the addition of maybe some wine or beer – means that it’s almost impossible to mess it up.  And equally awesome is that you can pretty much put whatever you want into it and it’ll probably come out delicious as long as you include the main ingredient: time – that is, time enough to let it slowly cook and meld.  Which brings me to a brief little aside.  I’ll let you in on a little production secret.  As with most of my videos, this was a spur of the moment thing where I just decided to film it. So while the video unfolds over about 6 minutes, factoring in the actual prepping, cooking and setting up the camera (since I shot this myself) the actual time it took to complete this stew was about 4 hours.  Now that’s totally acceptable for a good stew.  But perhaps instead of starting it at 6 pm (and finishing at 10 pm) I probably should have started sometime in the afternoon  – say around 3 pm- so as to more effectively feed Shefali at a reasonable hour.  You see unlike me, she actually works (and contributes something useful to society as a teacher) and has to wake up really early in the morning so she doesn’t like to eat so late. So what you don’t see on the vid is me cursing myself and the stew for taking so damn long.  But fortunately for all parties involved, the stew did not suffer. Indeed it turned out delicious.

Here’s what I put in it:
Ingredients: (as usual amounts are suggested)
2 lbs of beef (I used used a combination of chuck steak and beef back ribs. But you can use whatever cheap cut you have that has some bone and connective tissue because all that stuff will cook down really nicely. If you want it to be super rich and fatty, you can use shortribs)
10 oz mushroom
1/2 – 1 lb of squash (whatever squash you want)
4 – 5 medium sized potatoes (I recommend red or yukon gold)
3 medium sized turnips (with the turnip greens if you want)
3/4 – 1 lb of celery
2/4 – 1 lb of carrots
1- 2 medium sized onions
8 cloves of garlic
1 1/2 cups of wine
flour to cut the beef chunks
salt and pepper to taste
3-5 bay leaves

And here’s how I cook it: