Filipino Beef Stew with Sweet Roasted Carrots

I apologize for not posting for a while. I know that no excuse is ever good enough, but I truly have not wanted to cook during this pregnancy…not because I don’t want to eat, but because nothing I make sounds appealing. It’s a terrible curse. But I found myself craving this beef dish one lazy Sunday so I decided to go for it.

My first roommate when I moved to Washington DC was Filipino. He made this dish for me one evening and I fell in love with it immediately. It’s a unique combination of both Spanish and Asian cuisine – YUM! What’s not to love about that? The beef is cooked for so long that it practically falls apart the second you bite into it, feeling like a slow cooked beef stew (that’s the Spanish influence), and the soy sauce mixture that it cooks in for 3 hours brings the Asian punch. It is one of the best beef dishes out there - hands down.

Now I know the name reads beef stew – but be aware that this cooks for so long that the liquid reduces down to almost nothing. When you’re making this, you should expect the liquid to just barely be covering the beef at the end – and know that your once cubed meat will likely have been torn to shreds. It’s delicious…

Time from Prep to Eating: 3 hours

What You Need:
Large stock pot or Dutch oven
1 sauce pan

The Stuff (Warning, this serves 4 hungry adults!):
4 lbs stew meat (beef), cubed
4 large yellow onions, chopped into quarters
5 large beef steak tomatoes, chopped into quarters
3 garlic cloves, crushed
½ cup low sodium soy sauce
1 cup water

Here’s What You Do:
Preheat your stock pot or Dutch oven over medium-low (more towards the lower side) heat for about 5 minutes. Then add all of the ingredients putting the meat in first. Raise the heat to medium until it comes to a hard boil – stirring occasionally until that happens. Once it comes to a boil, reduce to medium-low heat and let simmer for about 2.5 hours, stirring occasionally.

Serve with sticky rice (that’s what the sauce pan is for) and sweet roasted carrots (recipe below).

Sweet Roasted Carrots

Cooked carrots get a bad rap.  I think it's because we were all force fed mushy, tasteless carrots when we were kids and that memory has stuck with us into adulthood.  Such a shame.  These simple roasted carrots, however,  are delicious and NOTHING like what I remember from when I was little.  So before you pass up roasted carrots as an adult, give this recipe a try.

Time from Prep to Eating: 50 minutes

What You Need:
Cookie sheet

The Stuff (Warning, this serves 4 hungry adults!):
1 bushel of whole carrots, peeled and cut into pieces about 2 inches long
Canola oil
Salt and pepper
1 to 1.5 tsp sugar

Here’s What You Do:
Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Line your cookie sheet with tin foil (for easy cleanup) and place your cut carrots onto the sheet. Drizzle the oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper and bake for 25 minutes. Take the carrots out, turn them with a spatula, sprinkle with the sugar and place them back in the oven for 5 more minutes at 400 degrees. Enjoy!