Hearty Beef Stew with Mushrooms

I remember my first year here in New York City. I moved to NYC end of August. It was so hot and muggy, the air felt heavy around me. I didn't have an A/C for the first few days, so I had to suffer through that oppressive heat. By end of September, the temperature was already down into the 40s. Being from Los Angeles, I thought I was going to die from cold. 40s! That's colder than winter for LA! My classmates laughed hysterically when they saw me wearing gloves at 40 degrees. "Wait til it actually gets cold!" Boy were they right, that winter, the winter of 2003/04 was COLD! With wind chill it was subzero for about 2 weeks after New Years. I remember when the weather hit 14 degrees, I saw joggers outside cuz it was "warm" out!

Now that I've been here for a couple years, I've acclimated to the cold. I don't even wear gloves. I just shove my hands into my big puffy down jacket. But I still get cold pretty easily. My boyfriend is from Alaska, so we're polar opposites when it comes to weather. We can sit in the same room, (obviously) at the same temperature, but I'll get colder and colder, while he gets warmer and warmer. He would feel my hand and it'd feel like ice, while his felt so warm to me. We'd always joke about this fact.

As the weather has been getting colder, I've been craving warm hearty stews. We had a couple chuck steaks in the freezer from when I stockpiled it during the previous sale, so I decided to make beef stew. I also like making food in large quantities and throwing a couple aliquots into the freezer for rainy day. Beef stew was the perfect candidate for my rainy day freezer meal stockpile.

Recipe for Hearty Beef Stew with Mushrooms

3 pound Chuck Steak on the bone, deboned, cut into large chunks, keep the bones
Flour
Salt
Pepper
Garlic powder
Vegetable oil
4 T butter
4 or more cloves garlic, roughly chopped
2 onions, cut into large chunks*
1 carrot, shredded
3 ribs celery, finely minced**
2 cups red wine
1 can lager beer
water or beef broth
2 bay leaves
2 T tomato paste
1 t Worcester sauce
1 T Balsamic vinegar
5-8 potatoes, peeled cut into large chunks
4-5 carrots, cut into large chunks***
2 large packages mushrooms, cut in half

Mix flour, salt, pepper, and garlic powder in a bowl. Dredge beef in mixture. Heat vegetable oil over high heat in large dutch oven (at least 5 quarts) or pressure cooker. Brown beef in small batches, careful not to overcrowd, place in separate bowl. Lower heat to medium, throw butter into dutch oven or pressure cooker, and saute garlic, onions, shredded carrots, and celery. After this has softened, add the meat back into the pot along with the meat bones. Then add red wine, beer, and water until it barely covers the beef. If you are using a pressure cooker, bring to high pressure for 12 minutes and then use natural release (Tho I got impatient waiting for the pressure to release, so i ran it under cold water after waiting 15 minutes). If you are using a dutch oven, cook over medium heat until the meat has softened but not melting, approximately 1-2 hours. Add the remaining ingredients and allow to cook until the vegetables are cooked and the stew has thickened. At the end you can season to your liking.

Generally the stew is best when you use a drinkable wine for the recipe and stew always tastes better the next day. Serve with crusty bread. Or if prefer, serve it over rice with an egg on top, which is how we had it for breakfast the next day. Also if you decide to freeze leftovers, I would keep the size of the carrots small and fish out any potatoes before freezing because the texture after freeze thawing is not appealing.

*If the onions are too small, it'll completely melt into the stew.
**I don't like eating celery, but I like the flavor it imparts on the stew, so i finely mince it, so I get the flavor, but don't have to eat celery. It also melts nicely into the stew making it thicker.
***I added shredded carrots to the earlier cooking with the meat to melt into the stew, and larger chunks later so they don't get too soft and mushy.

Spicy Glass Noodles with Beef

More than a dozen years back, I took a year off undergraduate to "study" in Tokyo. While my Japanese reading and writing abilities aren't at a level where I can work at a Japanese company, I can read enough to eat at a standard izakaya (Japanese pub). My parents are so proud that I went to Japan for a year, and learned enough Japanese to sing karaoke and read bar food menus! I can read the kanji for "love", "heart", "tears", "pork", "tofu", "noodles"... Luckily since I can read minimal Japanese to feed myself at a bar, it also means I have the skills to figure out recipes written in Japanese. See, Mom and Dad, my year wasn't wasted! My favorite page to get recipes off of is Orange Page, which is the website to my favorite Japanese cooking magazine.

I had all these leftover ingredients from when I did seafood hot pot with my friends visiting (we had a mini Waseda reunion!). I bought a bag of glass noodles (mung bean noodles) for the hot pot that I never used, so I wanted to try a new recipe since I never worked with this ingredient before. Obviously I used some of it in my nikujaga recipe. So when I did a search through Orange Page, I found this recipe for spicy glass noodles. I adjusted it slightly since I wanted to use up other veggies in the frig ... and I'm not a fan of ginger, so I tend to cut that out of my recipes! Shhh! Don't tell my BF!

Spicy Glass Noodles with Beef Recipe

200g Mung Bean Noodles (dried)
1/2 lb thinly sliced sirloin, chopped to bite sized pieces
3-5 garlic cloves, chopped
1/2 onion, thinly sliced
10 baby carrots, thinly sliced
4 leaves napa cabbage, thinly sliced
2-4 tsp Toban jan (depends on how spicy you like it)
2 tsp chicken stock granules
4 T soy sauce
4 T sugar
1 T cooking sake
2 T mirin
3-5 T roasted sesame oil
2 T cooking oil
4-6 stalks of scallions chopped
3 T white sesames

Boil a large pot of water. After the water is boiled, turn off heat and put the mung bean noodles in the water to allow it to soften. After 4-5 minutes, drain noodles.

In a large wok, over medium heat cooking oil, 1T of the sesame oil, toubanja, garlic, and onions until fragrant. Make sure to turn on a fan because the air will become pretty spicy making it hard to breathe! Turn heat to high and add sliced beef and allow to brown. Then add carrots and napa cabbage allow to soften slightly. Turn the heat back down to medium, then add the flavoring ingredients, chicken stock granules, soy sauce, sugar, sake, and mirin. Rinse the glass noodles with water to loosen, and add to the wok. Mix until all the ingredients to coat the noodles and simmer for a bit until the noodles absorb the liquid in the pan. Toss with sesame oil, white sesames, and green onions. Taste the noodles, and adjust according to taste. This actually taste better next day since the noodles get an opportunity to absorb the sauce.

Nikujaga

In Japanese there is a term for food that Japanese men love ... "Otoko ryori" ... which literally means "Men's food". If you can cook any item if not every item on this list, you will make a Japanese man very happy! Men love home cooked food. Standard food on this "otoko ryori" list is Curry, Tonkatsu (Bread and deep fried pork cutlet), Ramen, and ... NIKUJAGA ... Nikujaga translates to Meat and Potatoes. I remember reading somewhere that Japanese tried to make Beef Stew and came up with Nikujaga.

My boyfriend, being a Japanese male, adores Nikujaga. I recently made a huge pot of nikujaga. I am very glad that I ate my portion and packed my own lunch before he came back from the bar. He didn't eat dinner, so he devoured a good 2 quart container of nikujaga at 2am. He insisted it was delicious. Though, since he basically inhaled it, I'm not very sure if he tasted any of it.

Nikujaga Recipe

1 lb thinly sliced beef
2 lbs potatoes, peeled and cut into 2 inch chunks
2 small onions, thickly sliced
15 baby carrots
50g harusame (glass noodles)
cold water
hondashi granules
soy sauce
sugar
mirin
sake
roasted sesame oil
cooking oil

Saute the onions in oil over medium high heat in a large pot until softened. Add thinly sliced beef, sprinkle about a teaspoon hondashi granules and a teasoon of soy sauce. Cook until browned.

Add potatoes and enough water to cover potatoes. Keep heat at about medium to medium high, we want the potatoes to heat and then cook evenly. If you have the heat too high, the outside of the potatoes will cook and melt before the inside is cooked. Season the water with approximately another 3-5 T of hondashi (the correct amount of the amount of water added to the pot), 2 T soy sauce, 3-5 T of sugar, 2 T mirin, 1 T mirin, and 2 T of roasted sesame oil. Taste the cooking liquid. It should be fairly aggressively salty and sweet, since the meat and potatoes will absorb alot of the flavor. Adjust taste according to liking. I actually never measure these ingredients, so these are approximations. The most important thing with cooking is to taste your food as its being made. Add carrots after the broth is seasoned. Since the carrots are smaller than the potatoes, it will cook mush faster. You don't want mushy carrots.

Skim any foam that arises. The nikujaga is done is when the potatoes are done cooking. Pierce the potatoes with a sharp knife to check for doneness. Turn off heat and add the harusame glass noodles into the broth. Allow it to soften and absorb the sauce for about 15 minutes before serving.

Roast Beef Sandwich

I've never been a big fan of plain sandwiches for lunch. I get bored. I rarely want a PB&J, its just not nostalgic for me. Though, I can't complain when my BF makes me a PB and Fluff ... even if I never grew up with it. But I have always loved fancy frou-frou sandwiches with all the bells and whistles. One of my favorites is a Roast beef on sourdough bread with blue cheese, balsamic marinated onions, lettuce, and tomatoes. I also like using a tangy whole grain mustard and lots of mayo. I love marinating onions in vinegar with a little salt and sugar to eat with fatty meats, it helps balance out the flavor.

Recipe for Balsamic marinated onions*:

1/2 of onion, thinly sliced
1/2 t salt
1/2 t sugar
2 T balsamic vinegar

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl and allow to marinate for appx 30 minutes.


Assemble sandwich:

2 slices sourdough bread
whole grain mustard on bottom slice
1/6 pound prime roast beef, thinly sliced**
crumbled blue cheese*** to taste
balsamic marinated onions
Thinly sliced tomatoes
Salt and pepper the tomatoes
Lettuce
Mayo on top slice of bread
Cut and half
Eat!!!!

* I like to do variations on these onions depending on what I'm eating the onions with. You can choose between different vinegars: white vinegar, white wine vinegar, red wine vinegar, etc. You can also add some grainy mustard to the mix.

** My favorite place to get good quality prime roast beef is from Milano Market in Morningside Heights. You can definitely taste the difference in quality!
*** I don't like really strong blue cheese, so I use a creamy danish blue cheese.