Beef Stew:

2 lbs chuck roast, cut into 1-inch cubes
cup of flour
1 tablespoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon ground pepper
3 tbls olive oil

one medium onion, chopped (pieces the size of your thumbnail).
8 garlic cloves, three of them very finely minced (wicked small pieces)
four potatoes, ‘Yukon Gold’, cubed (about the size of a Hershey’s Kiss)
four carrots, peeled, halved, and sliced ½ inch
four celery ribs, sliced ½ inch
two cups beef stock (get the organic stuff at the supermarket)

mix the flour, salt and pepper well in a large bowl, put the cubed beef in and mix to coat all of the cubes.
Heat the oil in a stewpot, medium high.
Pull the cubes up out of the flour mixture, shake off the excess, and put them in the hot oil.
Cooking in small batches, brown the beef on all sides in the oil. A batch should loosely cover the bottom of the pot…Add a little more oil each time if necessary.
Pull the cubes out and put them on a plate.

Take the pot off the heat and let it cool a little bit. Pour in 1/3 cup of dry red wine. Put it back on the heat, about medium, and as it boils, use a wooden spoon to scrape up the brown stuff on the bottom of the pot. This is the good stuff (you are ‘deglazing’ the pan). Now add the minced garlic to the good stuff and cook it until you can smell it. Now add the chopped onion, mix it all around, turn down the heat to low, cover the pot and cook it for ten minutes or so. Stir and watch that it doesn’t burn.

Now add the beef and all the juices, two cups of stock, a bay leaf, a few celery leaves, a tablespoon of dried basil, cover and simmer on low heat (this means just boiling, not a vigorous boil, ‘Simmer’ is truly onomatopoeic in this case) for at least an hour and a half.

After an hour and a half (you have just ‘braised’ this meat, it should be nice and tender) add the potatoes, celery, and carrots and cook until the vegetables are tender, probably another half hour. Add more of the beef stock if you need it. The flour and the starch in the potatoes will thicken the stew, but the liquid should come up to, but not completely cover, the vegetables.

Serve in a bowl over a piece of white bread.

There you have it.