Around the world in a number of stews

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 a...

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...