I’ve decided if there’s one cookbook to cook-all-the-way-through, it would be Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food. Every recipe I’ve tried so far is delicious, relatively simple, and emanates knowledge about how to cook.

The other thing I’ve decided is making a stew once a week cuts down your meal-ambiguity-stress by about 50%. 

For Alice’s Beef Stew (link to a random blog that writes out the whole recipe), most of the work is browning the pieces of beef. She counsels you to take as much time as you need to get them all well browned. Everything else is fast, especially when she says stuff like “quarter the onions and carrots.” 

This isn’t supposed to be an effusive-food-blog but Joe absolutely melted over this recipe. And I’m not sure what it was: the skim of orange peel? the can of diced tomatoes? the 1 3/4 cup of reduced wine? the entire head of chopped garlic?

alert: I first posted this with a link to the WRONG recipe. It has now been corrected.