So...I had grand intentions to post about beef stew last night. I even wrote out my post and ingredients, waiting only for pictures to grace the post and get put up on regularly scheduled soup week timetables.
But then real life hit. Nothing tragic or upsetting or anything like that, but my inexperience cooking that particular dish over a gas stove versus electric, which wouldn't seem to create much of a difference, except everything changed, and my stew meat wound up carmelizing in a different way than expected, contributing an wild card flavor to the whole. It morphed the meat's texture, and I experienced moments of confusion in trying to determine what the stew was missing before I served it. This, of course, threw my beautifully written post into jeopardy.
I never did figure out what was missing in the stew. And rather than try a bunch of different ingredients to "fix" it, I decided not to risk ruining the stew--I had dinner guests coming over!--and I served it with apologies that it was lacking and my salt and pepper shakers on hand. There was also fresh bread that helped, and frozen custard for dessert.
What I find most interesting is that I've made this stew I don't know how many times before, and this is the first time the results have come out like this. It was a good lesson--sometimes food doesn't come out as expected, no matter how diligently the recipe is followed or even how often it's been made. And maybe it sounds trite to write about learning from mistakes, but that's what happened to me last night. And you know what happened? My dinner guests ate the stew, and our bellies were full, and we laughed a lot at the silly stupid movie we rented, and it was a fun night. So, no harm done, right?
However, this puts me in no mood to post my "recipe," as I'm now questioning it. Still, thank you for joining me for Soup Week, I hope you enjoyed yourselves (I sure did!), thank you for contributing and joining in to the festivities, and go out and soup!
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