Oddball Stew

I am teaching myself to cook new things, nothing fancy, just things I have never learned to cook before. I have never really learned to cook beef stew, having always been a pot roast sort of feller. A while back though, I was at Wally World just after they had put "yesterdays" meat out, marked down and there was some really pretty looking stew meat. So I bought it and pitched it in the freezer, along with a couple bags of stew vegetables, a couple of extra potatoes and some onions, the stew veggies never have enough potato and onion.

There was also the little envelope of stew spices, probably McCormick. In reading the directions I discovered that we are supposed to put some flour in the water, that is why our pot roasts were never like Momma made, I reckon.

So I poured a little oil into the big pot and started browning the beef, added the water and then some flour, too much it turned out, so I added more water until it was still too thick but manageable,cooked it for a while, then it was time for the veggies. Trouble is, I had added so much water that the right amount of veggies made it a soup, not a stew, no problem, I added more veggies.

So I ate it until the beef was gone and I still had a lot of juice and veggies left. I was wondering what to do and then I dropped into the little "supermarket" nearest my little house, a Brookshires in Quinlan. Linda Lou wanted the Sunday paper and I wanted a can of black eyed peas to eat for good luck, it was just after they closed the deli and so they had a bunch of stuff marked down including about a foot and a half or so of smoked sausage. Did I mention that marked down tastes better? Next month sometime the brand new WalMart is opening, no more driving twenty-six miles, one way, just to go shopping! Bet the prices come down at the Brookshires, too. Ooh! And the first race of the NASCAR season! Woot!

So I cut up the sausage and dropped it in the stuff in the stew pot. I boiled the whole mess for a little bit and now I have another couple of days rations.

Of course, the real trouble is that with just the two of us anything we cook it too much for us, so we eat it until we are just tired of it and then the dogs get it. We have fat dogs. So anyway, here is a new recipe, beef stew with all the beef gone and a batch of smoked sausage toss in. I shall call it oddball stew. It tastes pretty good.