An unctuous Mexican Beef Stew with a touch of heat made with a Mole-style sauce and tender beef cubes served with tortilla chips, corn and parsley. I was browsing the Web last week and saw lots of stews and Mexican food around… it made me want them both badly… so I’ve decided to merge them into one nice stew meal; a Mexican Stew. The two are comforting and fabulous dishes for winter times, but this stew version is double the comfort; it’s a “French” way stew with the usual; carrot, potato, beef, and mini french onions merged into a spicy Mole-style sauce for a Mexican flair; adding Chipotle peppers in Adobo, tomato puree, chocolate, corn and some cinnamon, cumin and coriander powder. Result: A fantastic Mexican Beef Stew! Chipotle Peppers The mole sauce is a thick spicy Mexican sauce made with chocolate and hot peppers. Since my maximal tolerance toward “spicy” is medium-hot, I’ve aimed at medium-hot for…
Bouilli or pot au feu québécois is a traditional beef stew from Québec, Canada inspired by the famous dish ‘pot au feu’ from France. A simple stew made of root vegetables, beef and pork belly cooked slowly until tender. As a kid, I used to visit my grandparents once or twice a year. They were living in a small and remote village far away in the forest called Lac-des-Aigles (Eagles lake). We would always arrive in the late afternoon and the cast iron pot would already be doing its magic on the stove for hours… leaving behind this fantastic homey, comforting stew smell. In the pot was a succulent and traditional meat stew called Bouilli in Quebec. A winter dish to warm up the bones This recipe is a flashback to those nice visits to my grandparent’s place. My grandma would make this recipe starting from when the root veggies would be fully grown in September…
Coming back from holiday in Germany and I got myself some nice cooking books, my german isn’t so good yet, so it takes forever to understand a single recipe. But the one recipe I’ve always wanted to reproduce is the famous Knödel. This potato dumpling is in so many meals up in Germany or Central Europe for that matter, it’s accompany to perfection any meal with some type of gravy or sauce, even soups. There are tons of different styles of Knödel, for example with mushrooms, meat, spinach, etc. Also, I don’t want to make the easy kind Knödel made with bread or eggs… no…no… I want to learn the difficult one made just with potatoes (cooked and raw). I have to say in those 3 books I bought, I took the version of this recipe that had the most steps. I’ve learn this isn’t so easy to make so better be…
Beef bourguignon is French people’s favourite beef stew made from a lot of red wine, bacon bits, mushrooms, carrots, onions and aromatics. This version comes with a twist; it is Served on pasta instead of potatoes, Because why not? Beef Bourguignon pasta or spaghetti is a “mashup” dish between France’s beloved ‘Boeuf Bourguignon,’ served with potatoes and Italian Ragu pasta. I like potatoes… but my husband does not so much… so he always asks me to make his boeuf bourguignon on pasta. I agree with him; pasta and a little extra parmesan give the dish a new dimension. The pasta soaks up all the goodness from the stew better than potatoes. Boeuf Bourguignon on pasta But either way, the base of the recipe stays the same; braised beef cubes in a dutch oven simmered in a red wine sauce. So you decide which pasta or potatoes makes you salivate more.…