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Stew

Ingredients
  

  • 4 carrots (cut into 2-inch pieces)
  • 3 shallots (finely chopped)
  • 1 white onion (finely chopped)
  • 1 meaty slice of smoked pork belly (diced)
  • 2 tomatoes (Roma) chopped (no seeds, no skin)
  • 1 cup black olives (pitted)
  • 6 tbsp olive oil
  • 1 tbsp flour (all-purpose)
  • Salt and pepper (for taste)

Notes

Prepare your stew:

The next morning you grab an iron pot or electric crockpot to start off with your stew mixture by adding the olive oil and get your pot going with medium heat. While this warms up, remove the marinated meat and put these pieces into a strainer that sits above your marinade. When your pot is warm enough, add your onions and shallots to get them to sweat.
When they get glassy, you can add your diced pork belly and sauté this for 3 minutes. Add your tablespoon of flour slowly and mix this with a wooden spoon. Now, this is when you can add your tomatoes, and salt, and pepper. From your marinade liquid, you take out the celery stalks and leeks so they aren’t in this mixture anymore. Now you add the entire marinade and its remaining ingredients to your pot.
Raise the heat to boil for one minute and then down to simmer. It’s better if you have a pot that can be put over stovetop heat. You can’t do this easily with an electric crockpot, so you might need to transfer this into a different cooking pot to get a good starting boil. After you have your initial boil, you can now add your beef to the liquid and let this simmer for the next 5 to 7 hours. In the last two hours, you can then add your stew carrots and olives.
Check on your stew throughout the entire time to make sure the liquid doesn’t totally boil away. So keeping it covered for most of this period is a very good idea. You can have a lid that allows steam to escape, or prop your wooden spoon at the edge of your lid. If you want to add other bits of meat that you’ve marinated, these can be stewed as well. Pressure cookers can cook your meat faster, but you do need to monitor the temp setting carefully.