Beef stew

I got a hankering to make beef stew over the weekend. My wife’s been making stuff in the Instant Pot lately, and my mother always made beef stew in a pressure cooker, too, but I always do beef stew in my trusty Le Creuset Dutch oven. It just feels cozy to set up a big pot of stew on a January Sunday afternoon.

I use a pretty basic recipe. I’ve made Julia Child’s boeuf bourgignon a few times over the years, but I feel like that recipe tries to do too much for a beef stew. I did include some parsnips in this batch. I love parsnips, especially roasted along with some carrots to go with a roast beef or chicken. We had a bag of them in the veg drawer that I wanted to use up, so in they went, along with the usual potatoes and carrots, and some frozen peas as well.

Now that our daughter is back at college for the semester, I am the only one eating this. I liked it well enough on Sunday to go back for seconds, but I anticipate having this as a leftover for dinner tomorrow night as well. Maybe I will make some drop biscuits to go with it, since I kind of wished I had some on Sunday.