DRMacIver's Notebook
Beef and lentil stew “recipe”
Beef and lentil stew “recipe”
I was going through some dead drafts and found the following recipe that I’d forgotten about that I was regularly making in the instant pot during this past winter and had completely forgotten about, so I thought I would save it here before I deleted the draft:
- Olive oil
- Chopped white onions (I use frozen, which is honestly great), enough to cover the base of the instant pot so I guess a couple cups?
- A couple cloves worth of chopped garlic (frozen again)
- A pack of bacon (often frozen too, but that’s irrelevant here it’s just where I keep my bacon)
- Minced beef, about 750g
- A cup and a half of green lentils
- Chilli, rosemary, and thyme, to taste.
- Salt, also to taste
- Two cans of chopped tomatoes
- Three or four large carrots, sliced into coins
- A couple of potatoes, chopped into cubes
- Two beef stock cubes
- About half a bottle of red wine (I used what is probably a perfectly adequate Malbec last time but honestly I know nothing about wine)
To make it, pretty much do the obvious things. Put the instant pot on sauté, fry the onion and garlic with the spices, chop the bacon and add that at some point, then once that’s cooked add in the beef until it’s browned, then add in everything else, stir thoroughly, and add wine until the whole thing is covered in liquid. Put on a low pressure cook for half an hour.
I’ve written about this style of recipe before, in the context of an apple and cashew dessert dish I like (which reminds me, I should make it again), and I got the response from someone that it “wasn’t a recipe”. They’re probably just as angry about the above recipe, and in some sense they’re right. Certainly you won’t recreate the dish exactly based on the above explanation, but nor do I recreate the dish exactly each time.
But independently of whether or not it’s consistently the same dish each time, the result is delicious, and very satisfying as a winter meal, and I end up eating far too much of it every time I make it.
It’s interesting how easy it is to forget and lose the habit of recipes. I was making this extremely regularly, but utterly forgot about it.