Around the world in a number of stews

Preparation: 25 mins Cook time: 3ish hours  ? Serves: 4-6 adults Serve with: rice Olivier's: ★★★ Me: ★★ ★ Much like the entire population of Australia, we have an ongoing disagreement about the validity of pineapples on pizza. I am a fan, Olivier is not. So, when I told him that we were to have caramelised pineapple in a stew, he was sceptical. I had a look at three recipes for this, BBC , Good Food and this other one . I'll get back to the first two, but only after I complain about the other one. 

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: 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...