Monday, November 9, 2009

Saturday Stew

This stew was excellent! ...and probably deserves a better name than Saturday Stew...



I wanted to use up some of my veggie stores before going to the farmers' market. J and I put this stew together in the morning between making/eating breakfast, getting A to sleep for a nap, and heading out to the market, where we of course bought lots more vegetable goodness.

Ingredients
1 big tomato (mistakenly bought or given me by one of the farmers last week), chopped
1 cup cooked black beans
1 golden squash, sliced into rounds and then halved or quartered
1 small butternut squash, peeled and chopped
1 yellow onion, chopped
1 1/2 cups Brussels sprouts, halved
6 small red potatoes, scrubbed and chopped
1 cup wild rice mix
1 no-chicken vegetable bouillon cube
water
olive oil

What I did
I started by chopping the onion, heating up my huge LeCreuset, and warming the oil. Then I sauteed the onion for a few minutes.
J picked out six of our little red potatoes, which I then scrubbed, cut the eyes out of, and cut up.
I peeled the butternut squash, scooped out the insides, and cut it up. I then cut the rest of the veggies. I had already "peeled" (not quite the right word, but I'm not totally sure what to call it) the Brussels sprouts earlier in the week, so I just had to cut them in half.
I added the veggies as I cut them to the pot, where I had already add the water and two bouillon squares. This process took an hour or so, between all the other stuff we were doing. I kept it on low-medium heat.

Maybe 15 minutes before we left for the market, I added the black beans and J helped me add one cup of a wild rice mix that I got at MOM's last time we were down in Maryland. (I kept wavering on adding the black beans, because I really wasn't sure about black beans with potatoes and squash. I decided that I needed to use them, and they were the only cooked, non-frozen beans that I had on hand, so I put them in. I don't know why I was so wary about adding them -- they were excellent in this soup, and provided a nice contract to the whites, reds, and browns of the rice, and the orange of the squash.)

We left it on low heat on my simmer burner and spent 1 1/2 hours at the market getting all sorts of fall vegetables from Evolutionary Organics and a NJ farm (hello way too many green and yellow beans!) and some Freekah and spelt flour from Cayoga Pure Organics, listening to Cajun zydeco music (two fiddlers and one accordionist), and stopping off at the Brooklyn Public Library to drop off and pick up a book.

The apartment smelled delicious when we walked in. J asked for some more zydeco music; I didn't have any on my iTunes, so we settled for some South American, and got ourselves some stew for an early lunch (it was 11:40). Not only did is smell like it should be eaten again and again, it looked gorgeous! So many colors and textures! One bowl each of thick, filling stew later, J and A were ready for their naps. Ahh...sleep...full tummies...



I gave J this stew for lunch on Sunday, adding more water to it when I heated it up on the stove (the rice had soaked up all the broth). It was just as delish and possibly more filling the second time around (I ate the bit that didn't fit into J's bowl). She's got probably three more servings for meals this week. Yum.

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