My Crock Pot Adventure

So, I buy a big thing of stew meat. A nice big onion. Cute little carrots. Big thingy of celery. 10 lb. sack o' taters. (Yep, 10 lbs., 5 lbs was almost twice as expensive. Maybe someone can 'splain that to me someday)

I get them home and put them away. Hubby is flat dying for a stew on Sunday. Sounds yummy to me!

Then I find out, after checking my pantry, that yours truly forgot to buy the stew mix seasoning. No matter, at this point, I can pretty much make a mix for almost anything. I got my handy dandy cookbook down but this is the one thing that, so far, I can't quite grasp what the recipe means. (Happens a lot to me, hence, this blog)

I pop online to check my favorest recipe site and found a fairly easy recipe. But it's still not right. Then I did something totally unheard of for me...I winged it. Combined my cookbook recipe with the online one and came up with something that looked pretty good.

Got down to biz of cutting up the onion and celery. Had the stew meat in my old skillet (the cast iron is too honored for such a menial task) browning up nicely. Then layered the carrots, onion, celery and meat all the way up to the top. Turned the crockpot on and went to the barn to have some horse-face time.

All this time, something is niggling at me. Got home and laid down (my allergy meds kicked into high gear and turned me off) for a while. Pretty soon, my eyes popped open and I told my hubby that I had forgotten the potatoes!!

I ask you, what is a stew without potatoes?? That's like Lewis without Martin, Hall without Oates, Simon without Garfunkel...okay, so that was a bad one but you know what I mean.

Put a pot of cut up pot.s on the stove and got busy making my new recipe for bread (read other posts). Forgot all about the friggin' pot.s. Pretty soon, I looked over and saw froth and all sorts of stuff on the underside of the glass potlid. Great. Turned off the heat and looked inside. Pot.s were really, really soft....

I made mashed potatoes.

Only trouble was...I added a smidge too much milk and they were toooooo soft and swirly. Added a bit of cornstarch and then to help it along a bit more, added some flour. Now it's about the right consistency. Of course, there was the real butter and salt/pepper too.

What can I say, life handed me potatoes and I made...oh, never mind.