This little roll of stuff can be your best friend!
Who doesn’t love a great bowl of chili or stew? Whether you are a carnivore, carnivale (chicken & turkey people), or vegetarian a good hot cowl of something lovely is great when it’s really cold outside. BTW, I was just kidding about the carnivale – I’m happy to be back and am in a joking mood.
Around here, it doesn’t generally snow very much. Last year it didn’t snow at all – but when it does, you can can’t on two things: Most of the schools will close and there will be a run at every grocery store in town where you will see people with 10 loaves of bread and 6 gallons of milk fending off others, who weren’t as quick as them, as they stand in line to pay with their bag of gold. Funny thing is, it’s never snowed us in more than a week here and I have never heard of anyone starving to death during said time.
One such time I got off work late and ran to the store only to find the shelves totally bare and the people at my house were whining for some stew. I had no stew meat and there was none in the refrigerated case or in the back. But, the guy led me over to the “Reduced” section of the case telling me this was physically sound meat, just not perfect to the eye – which is what is expected in the competitive world of groceries these days. Laying there right in the case, marked down to 1/2 price was some Chuck Eye steak begging me to trim, cut into chunks and put together for stew.
And………….so I did.
I thought the people in my house were actually going to lick the bottom of the pot! I must admit, it DID taste so much better! When it came time to chili, I decided to use Rib Eye and T-Bone, both from the reduced meat case section. Ummmmm….what a huge – and more lean – meal THAT was and I’ve never made it any different since! I will share the recipe with you next month but right now I want to show you how you too can prepare for chili/stew season too. Here we go:
First you pull out the Rib Eye and put it on a clean cutting board:
Then I trimmed off that hard connective tissue:
Now see? Here is the same Rib Eye all trimmed:
Then you cut off a big piece of that freezer paper and put about 1 and 1/2 pounds of chopped meat in it, wrapping up like this:
Stew meat is cut in bigger chunks and for both, I go to the Farmer’s Market during this time and buy fall tomatoes or end of season summer ones, bring them home, cut out any bad places – and then as soon as the tomatoes soften, with just enough water in the bottom to keep from burning, pul them out. then you will bag them up in freezer bags and freezer to pull out for chili and stew later. Here’s a picture of some grape tomatoes I got at a great price this weekend:
