October's new dish: Beef stew

This month I made beef stew, the first time I’ve ever used our Crock Pot to make a meal!  It’s not an awesome Crock Pot (I bought it for about $1 at a yard sale the summer I graduated undergrad hah) but it did the trick.  I followed this recipe for the most part, except I just bought two frozen bags of stew vegetables from the store instead of chopping all that stuff, but it turned out nicely!  There was so much left over that Keegan had lunches for an entire week, so that was nice.  I made this recipe because it’s getting chilly and also because stew beef was on sale at the grocery store.  I lucked out with timing for things being on sale because the meat, frozen veggies, and beef broth were all on sale.   I would make this recipe again but I think I’d scale it down a bit; there were a LOT of huge chunks of veggies in it so it took longer to cook than it should have.  I could also let them thaw more before starting this because the recipe was not for frozen veggies.  I also need to figure out the best amount of “browning” for the beef before I add it to the stew because this beef didn’t pull apart as nicely as beef in other stews I’ve had.  I guess now is the part of the marriage when Keegan gets to endure my cooking experiments! :)

This week I stocked up on chicken because it’s about 60% off; as a result of that and some crazy sales on Greek yogurt, this week we saved $38 and spent $56.  I’ve really been falling behind tracking our grocery spending so I’m missing about 3 weeks of information (basically since campout) but oh well.  The receipts keep a running tally of how much we’ve saved with our MVP card so I’ll just have to look at that the next time I think about it.  Then I can at least ball park what we saved in those weeks.