Beef Stew

Barb, Steve and Kent came over for one of our traditional pre-ZAP dinners. We're all volunteer leads for the January festival, so we get together a few times over the year to meet and brainstorm. This was easy to do on a weeknight because everything was done ahead of time. The only thing I did tonight was re-heat the stew, make the mashed potatoes and assemble the salad.

The stew is my usual bastardized version of this old Julia Child recipe. I grind up the veggies into a thick gravy, and only add mushrooms and pearl onions as vegetables. The pound cake was okay. I think I baked it too long. It wasn't my favorite thing from Whole Grain Baking, that's for sure.

• Goat Cheese, Pesto & Sun-Dried Tomato Terrine (Fine Cooking #61, Holiday Baking 2003, p. 98c)
• My Best Beef Stew (Food & Wine, January 1996, p.34)
• Butter Lettuce with Poppy Seed & Tarragon-Crème Fraîche Dressing (Fine Cooking #86, July 2007, p. 49)
• Buttermilk Mashed Potatoes with Chives (Fine Cooking #81, November 2006, p. 61)
• Chocolate Pound Cake (King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking, p. 387)
Wine: Valdez 2005 Simoncini Late Harvest Zinfandel. We are big fans of Valdez and picked up this bottle at a wine shop in the city. It was delicious. We also had wine that Kent and Barb and Steve brought... but I'm too lazy to note those here.