Easy Old Fashioned Beef Stew

Amber starts high school today. I drove her to Grand Island Senior High at seven-fifteen this morning, and she sat in the passenger seat of the minivan with her new backpack and her color-coded notebooks and her quiet steady face, and I pulled into the parking lot and looked at the building and saw myself at fourteen, tall and unsure and walking through those same doors thirty years ago. The building has not changed. The bricks are the same. The gym is the same. The hallways smell the same, that particular school smell of floor polish and locker metal and a hundred years of teenagers. Only the people are different. The people are always different.

Amber got out of the car and I said have a good day and she said thanks Mom and then she turned back and said were you scared when you started here. I said yes. She said me too. I said that is normal. She said okay. Then she walked in, tall and steady, her backpack straight on her shoulders, and I watched her until she disappeared through the doors and then I sat in the parking lot for five minutes and breathed.

She looks like Darla. She looks so much like Darla that sometimes it stops my breath, and today, watching her walk into the school where Darla also walked, the resemblance was a knife. The same height. The same smile. The same way of tilting her head when she is listening. But Amber is not Darla. Amber is Amber. And Amber walked into that school with the confidence of a girl who has been through the worst thing and survived it and does not know yet how rare that makes her, but she will. She will know.

I drove to the truck stop, picked up my load, and hauled frozen beef to Omaha while my daughter navigated her first day of high school without me. She texted at lunch: it is fine. She texted at three: I survived. She texted at five, when I was outside Lincoln: I think I am going to like it. I read that text at a rest stop and I put my phone down and I looked at the Nebraska sky, which was blue and wide and full of nothing and everything, and I said out loud to nobody: she is going to be okay. And I believed it. I finally believed it.

I got home that night after nine hours on the road and all those miles of Nebraska sky, and Amber was at the kitchen table doing homework like she’d been doing it there forever. I wanted to make something warm, something that fills the house with the smell of home, something that says I’m proud of you and I’m here without saying any of it out loud. This old fashioned beef stew is that dinner. I’d started it in the morning before I drove her to school, and by the time I walked through the door it was ready—and so were we.

Prep Time: 20 minutes | Cook Time: 2 hours 30 minutes | Total Time: 2 hours 50 minutes | Servings: 8

Ingredients

2 1/2 pounds beef chuck roast, cut into 1-inch cubes
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 large yellow onion, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced
3 tablespoons tomato paste
4 cups beef broth
1 cup water
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon dried thyme
2 bay leaves
4 medium russet potatoes, peeled and cubed
4 large carrots, peeled and sliced into 1/2-inch rounds
3 stalks celery, sliced
1 cup frozen peas
Fresh parsley for garnish

Instructions

Season the beef. Toss the beef cubes with flour, salt, and pepper in a large bowl until evenly coated.
Brown the meat. Heat olive oil in a large Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Working in batches so you don’t crowd the pot, brown the beef on all sides, about 3 to 4 minutes per batch. Transfer the browned beef to a plate and set aside.
Build the base. Reduce heat to medium. Add the diced onion to the pot and cook until softened, about 4 minutes. Add the garlic and tomato paste and stir for 1 minute until fragrant.
Deglaze and combine. Pour in the beef broth, water, and Worcestershire sauce, scraping up the browned bits from the bottom of the pot. Return the beef to the pot. Add thyme and bay leaves. Stir to combine.
Simmer low and slow. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low. Cover and simmer for 1 hour 30 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the beef is starting to become tender.
Add the vegetables. Add the potatoes, carrots, and celery. Cover and continue simmering for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until the vegetables are fork-tender and the beef is fully tender.
Finish the stew. Stir in the frozen peas and cook for 5 minutes. Remove the bay leaves. Taste and adjust salt and pepper as needed. Ladle into bowls and garnish with fresh parsley.

Nutrition (per serving)

Easy Old Fashioned Beef Stew — The Dinner That Was Waiting When She Got Home