Hearty Winter Crock Pot Beef Stew

Since holiday time is definitely a busy time in the family household, I am posting a quick and easy recipe for a hearty and healthy dinner. The Crock Pot is such an ingenious invention! How wonderful–just throw a bunch of foods into the contraption and come home to the delicious aroma of a home-cooked meal! Naturally, I decided to do some research on the possible recipes…and to my dismay, most of the recipes are loaded with salt and fat! Don’t get me wrong–I love a little bit of both, but since it IS the holidays, I worry about putting on the “winter weight” and not being able to fit into the sexy black dress in time to toast in the New Year with some tasty Veuve Cliquot….
I figure this is not an unusual concern?
So, here is a little recipe nugget from me to you for your rushy-rushy season wintertime hunger-killing enjoyment!:

The first stew I decided to tackle was a hearty beef stew.

The Food Guide Pyramid recommends, 2-3 servings of lean meat each day. How big is a serving? It’s 3 ounces cooked, about the size of a deck of playing cards or a bar of soap.

This piece was selected to serve my husband and I for several meals (roughly 4-5 servings)

The amount of uncooked meat you’ll actually need per person depends on the cut.

• Boneless meat (ground meat, stew meat, boneless roasts or chops) — 1/4 to 1/3 pound per serving.
• Bone-in meat (steaks, chops, chicken pieces) — 1/3 to 1/2 pound per serving, (ribs) — 3/4 to 1 pound per serving.

Holiday portion sizes account for second helpings. You can adjust to fit the family.

I purchased a lovely beef sirloin tip from the hip of the cow.  However, the chuck or shoulder portion is also very tasty- just a bit fattier than I was going for.

• Organic Klamath Pearl Potatoes (a new potato variety grown exclusively by family farmers in the Klamath Basin of the California-Oregon border. Their small size, sweet flavor and firm texture makes them perfect for roasting, grilling and stewing–to avoid the “mealy” texture of a broken-down potato)
• Baby Carrots
• Cippolini Onions (you can use pearl or other onions, but cippolini are flat and sweet and tend to lend immense flavor to stews)
• Canned and chopped organic tomatoes with their juice
• fresh thyme

The other components of stewing are adding just enough salt to make it “taste right” and not too much as to make it seem like a canned soup. I usually salt and brown the outside of my meat in a pan with some oil to get some of the flavor started, and then add around a teaspoon of fine quality sea salt to the mix of liquids.

• 1 cup red wine
• all the juice from the canned tomatoes
• 1 cup Organic Beef Stock

Another stewing trick is to put a tablespoon of flour into the mix to help thicken the broth. Since many people are glutein-free nowadays, some rice flour (Mochiko) or some quinoa flour work equally well.

With all of this assembled, washed and chopped (prep time 10 or so minutes) and the beef seared, I place the chopped veggies in the bottom of the crock pot (my own affectation as I feel they become the bed for the meat), and then in goes the meat topped with the canned tomatoes and the rest of the liquids.