Dinner

During the winter months, I start craving soups and roasts, warm comfort foods that can be eaten while snuggling under a throw on the couch. That being the case, we have a beef stew simmering away in a crock pot at home. I am trying to be less neurotic about leaving the crock pot on while I'm away, seeing as how it's designed to do that. Plus, ours has an automatic warming feature that shuts off once it's done cooking. It helps alleviate the worries.

I've never made beef stew before like this, so we'll see how it works. I just dumped in some stew meat, onion soup mix, cream of mushroom soup, celery, and carrots. I'll add potatoes when I get home, and I'll probably thicken the sauce by taking some of the juices and mixing it with some flour to make a gravy. Then, while the potatoes are cooking, I'll add the flour/beef broth mix into the pot and let the whole thing simmer and thicken.

I meant to get the rice all ready this morning, but we overslept and were running about 10 minutes behind. Our little rice cooker works well though so it shouldn't take but about 30 minutes to get the rice done.