Around the world in a number of stews

  Preparation: ? mins Cook time:  Serves: 4-6 adults Serve with:  Olivier's: ★★★ ★★ Me: ★★ ★ Update coming.  I did make this, but didn't find time to write it up and now I have forgotten. Olivier loved it, even more than the Bigos.

Preparation: 25 mins Cook time: 4ish hours (including marination time) Serves: 4-6 adults Serve with: polenta Olivier's: ★★★ Me: ★★ ★ After the previous beigeness of Sweden's meat and carrot stew, it has taken me a while to summon the motivation to try something new. Plus, we moved house and it was terrible. 

Preparation: 15 mins Cook time: 1.5 hours Serves: 4-6 adults Serve with: Pickled beetroot and steamed potatoes.  Olivier's: ★★★ Me: ★★ (not disgusting, but edible) I felt a bit bad, having abandoned Finland so many months ago, so thought I could at least try another Scandinavian country.  Unfortunately Sweden's stew is not much of an improvement on Finland's meat and onion broth, BUT, it did have carrots, bringing it closer to the kind of stew my nan (English) used to make. So, not amazing, but, edible.  Having checked a few recipes, most of them had a combo of  meat, carrots, onions, all spice, water, peppercorns and bay leaves.  One  had wine AND garlic in it, making it, on the whole, sound a bit too flavoursome for a traditional rendition of this meal, bringing about some comments to this effect at the end of the recipe: "As a swede, I disagree with adding wine and garlic to kalops. Otherwise it’s as we normally do it. " a

I am stuck.  This recipe, everywhere, has a combination of pork, beef and/or lamb, onions, allspice, pepper, bay leaves and water.  AND NO OTHER INGREDIENTS. The website, The Spruce Eats , has a picture of a meal which is clearly not the stew, since the sauce in the picture looks like it has tomato and some kind of thickener in it. I am fairly confident that the recipe provided will produce a thin, grey soup with meat lumps. And also, olive oil doesn't seem very authentic in Finnish cooking.  I'm going to delay in the hopes that I can eventually find a better recipe. 

Preparation: Day 1: 20 minutes; Day 2: 5 minutes (working silently while the children napped) Marination time: 24 hours Cook time: 2.5 hours Serve with: rice or noodles, and coriander Olivier's: ★★★ This was a bit of an interesting stew, as the flavours and aromas of it are completely different to most things I've smelled, except for in restaurants and markets of suspect hygiene while travelling.   My search term was "Vietnamese stew" and Google kept throwing up this caramelised pork thing, so while it didn't seem to need a long cook on most of the recipes, this one  had a two hour cook time after everything was in the pot, so I used it. Plus, the long marination period kind of counts as a stew, if one thinks of something "stewing in it's own juices."  I also looked at this recipe , which had less of a stew thing going, and fewer flavours, so I didn't really use it as much. Unfortunately, I had to leave the slow-co

Preparation: 2 hours (with a 3 month old strapped to my front) Cook time: 4 hours on high in the slow-cooker Serves: 4  Serve with: Ethiopian Greens , Stewed lentils (Mesir Wat ) and  Injera Olivier's:    ★★★ The stew was nice, but after commenting that I could "smell through time" to Olivier during the preparation, it was a bit disappointingly bland. I suspect there are several reasons for this, the first being that I didn't have a lot of the spices as seeds, only as powders. It's possible that grinding them after toasting might have improved the flavour a bit. Secondly, I didn't have enough smoked paprika (a kitchen travesty), so we almost certainly lost some flavour there.  I also wondered if it was because we ate the stew on the same day of cooking it, but, it hadn't improved much by lunch today. It even looks a bit sad.  Contributing to the disappointment was the sheer amount of preparation that went into it all.  It h

Preparation: 15 mins Cook time: 7 hours Serves: 3 adults with seconds; two young teenage boys, with seconds; and Olivier, with thirds and two lunches. Serve with: Crusty bread, but since we didn't have any, boiled potatoes were fine too. Olivier's: ★★★★ The name of this one is kind of compelling, since most stews have the kind of meat that you might put in it somewhere in the title. Hunter's stew - well, it truly is whatever kind of meat that you managed to hunt. Plus sausage. And cabbage. Lots and lots of cabbage. Because of the variations of meat that you could use, the recipes had a pretty wide ranging list of ingredients - red wine, Madiera, juniper berries, prunes, tomato, veal, lamb, venison, bacon, beef and pork, stock or no stock, grated apple, brown sugar, thyme, bay leaves and so on. I can only assume that the non-meat ingredients were intended to match the meat used. The common ingredients tended to be sauerkraut, extra cabbage, d

Preparation: - without a blender: 35 mins - with a blender: 20 mins - with a toddler and a baby in a front pack: 50 mins, faster with a blender, probably Cook time: 3 hours Serves: An adult per chicken thigh cutlet Serve with:   sliced avocado, jasmine rice, fresh coriander, and if you have the ingredients handy, some kind of delicious holiday cocktail. Olivier's: ★★★★ The first thing that I want to say about this chicken stew is: Even if you have never been to Ecuador, or anywhere similar, but need a holiday, cook this stew! The first thing that Olivier said was "This tastes like holiday." The second thing about this recipe is that the chicken alone, while tasty, has some difficulty standing in isolation. It is nice, but not amazing. BUT: add a bit of rice and some avocado as sides, and... [imagine the sound of exploding happiness]. The sides really bring out the flavours of the stew. Anyway, having no real idea what Ecuadorian flavours are like, it seeme

Preparation : 10 mins With toddler : 15-20 mins Cook Time: 30 mins in a slow-cooker Yield: Makes about 5 dumplings Ingredients: 125g plain flour 1 tsp baking powder (or just use self-raising flour)  1 tbsp butter 1 egg beaten with 3 tbsp milk salt and pepper Method:  1. Mix dry ingredients,and make a well in the centre 2. Add egg mixture 3, Stir until combined, use immediately, and drop small tablespoons of batter into the stew about 30 minutes before serving the stew

Preparation:  35 mins - with a toddler and a baby in a front pack:  50 mins  Cook time:  6 hours Serves:  several hungry adults Olivier's: ★★★★ ★ I ended up asking my brother about this one, being that he lives in Ireland with an Irish wife, and his response was "potatoes."  He also told me of the eternal stew that his wife's parents have, where they just add new stuff to it everyday.  I am uncertain as to whether he was exaggerating, but, it is an interesting way to not really have to cook, except for once, to "seed" it, right at the beginning.  I have to say that the stew I cooked did improve with age, and by the third day, it was truly delicious. After comparing several recipes, the common ingredients tended to be lamb, onions, carrots and potatoes.   Some recipes called for garlic, which I didn't feel was very traditional; some had a weird gratin-style layering ( including one of the recipes that I drew my stew from); and

Preparation: 15 mins With toddler: 30 mins Cook time: 5 hours Serves: 4 hungry adults Olivier's: ★★★★ According to my search, there seems to be at least 34 Spanish stews to choose from, and they mostly seem to be variations of delicious pork products, seafood, and beans.   I ended up going with Fabada Asturiana, mostly because I was in the mood for chorizo. After looking at several recipes, I ended up basing my recipe on  this one .   I didn't, however, have a giant cast iron pot; nor was I able to get hold of dried beans from my local online supermarket (I have a two-month old and a toddler and no time to go to the good shop); and I wasn't sure what cured pork belly was, except that maybe Nigel meant something like speck? Hard to say. I used speck anyway.   Here is my adaption, with a slow-cooker, tinned butter beans, speck, and a bored toddler. Ingredients: 2 x 425g tins of butter beans, drained 400g speck 1 large onion peeled