Beef Ewww

So my cooking blogs have not really been about cooking lately because, all of a sudden, I thought I could cook. I know, hilarious!

And also crazy things have been happening like my ex getting engaged and me almost burning my house down so I have been writing about those things instead. But it’s about time we get back to cooking. 

Seriously, the cooking has been going pretty smoothly. I mainly stick to the meals I know my kid will eat like tacos, my homemade gluten-free mac & cheese, and chicken breasts. Although, I have experimented a little and made homemade gluten-free lasagna, and even shepherds pie that my kid has actually eaten five bites of. Five bites is a success. He gets full really quickly, but if it’s bad, he very politely takes one bite and then tells me he’s full.

My kid used to love beef stew. I would make it in the crockpot and buy that McCormick beef stew seasoning and he just loved it. However, that seasoning is not gluten-free so I can no longer use it. I did buy some gluten-free beef stew seasoning about a year ago, but he did not like that.

I was feeling adventurous so I was just flipping through gluten-free recipes and found a recipe for gluten-free beef stew! There was actually a bunch of recipes. Why are there always so many recipes? How could there be 28 recipes for gluten-free beef stew?  How do you choose? What’s the difference? I do read the reviews and also, I look at the amount of time and the list of ingredients. If I pull up some recipe and has 27 ingredients, I already feel overwhelmed and give up on cooking, go take a nap and order pizza later. But seriously, can’t everyone just agree on one gluten-free beef stew recipe and that is what shows up on Google?  No one needs so many choices. 

I’ve also learned you have to start looking for the recipe early. And I mean hours and hours early. If you try looking for a recipe right before you want to start cooking before you know it it will be 10 p.m. And you will order pizza. Or just not feed your kid dinner.

But this one beef stew recipe I was looking at, it looked pretty easy. It had good reviews, I think had all of the ingredients, and I was feeling pretty confident after my edible cooking streak.

I kept putting off making it though. It takes over three hours so I had to pick an afternoon when I had the whole evening to cook. Every time I meant to do it, it would already be 6:00 before I knew it so I didn’t have time for it. How does time go so fast?

But last night was the night. I was home at 4 p.m., and had nothing really going on for the evening so I thought this was the night that I was going to make my beef stew. I could already picture my kid’s cute little face all happy after he takes the first bite and exclaims how delicious it is. I could already feel myself swelling up with pride. Looking back, I should’ve known that was a bad sign. 

I pulled up the recipe. Or was it this other recipe? No, I think it looked like this recipe. I really couldn’t exactly remember what recipe I used, but I found one that looked good. They all kind of look the same.

This one requires a Dutch oven. Who has a Dutch oven? Why is it called Dutch oven? Is it from the Netherlands? Does it speak Dutch? And can’t I just use a spaghetti pot? Who needs a Dutch oven when you have a spaghetti pot? I figured the spaghetti pot would do just fine. It’s just like a Dutch oven. But American. For spaghetti. Which is Italian.

I was grabbing all of my spices from the ingredients list, and it called for all spice. I went right to my little spice cabinet and grabbed the seasoned salt. For some reason, I thought seasoned salt could be used for all spice. I honestly thought they were the same thing. When I read all spice earlier in the recipe, my mind just said, oh, I have seasoned salt. I don’t know why in my mind I had seasoned salt and all spice being the same thing. It did make me pause for a moment, so I Googled it. Just up be sure I was right. 

But when I Googled all spice, I found out it was not seasoned salt. What?!?? It was not even CLOSE to seasoned salt. It was something that I definitely did not have. But through Google, I learned that I could make my own using nutmeg, clove, and cinnamon. Well, I had no nutmeg and no clove. Who has nutmeg and clove in their house? Why would anyone put nutmeg in beef stew? Isn’t nutmeg more of a dessert thing? Or a hot chocolate thing? I do have cinnamon though so figured I was 1/3 of the way to allspice. I consider the grocery store the worst place on earth, so I was definitely not heading there for nutmeg and clove. 

I texted my neighbor and she didn’t even have nutmeg and clove either so I figured it couldn’t really be that important. Who needs nutmeg, and who needs clove? So I just shook some cinnamon in there and called it a day. Still feeling very proud of myself.

I got super confident while it was simmering on my stove for two hours and I would just sort of add a spice here and add a spice there every time I would check on it. My brother-in-law cooks like that. He just kind of adds spices all the time wherever he wants and it turns out so good so I figured I could do the same thing now that I was not a failure at cooking any longer. So I shook in a little bit of that, and I shook in a little bit of this, and I kept sort of sniffing it and mixing it. I wasn’t exactly sure what it was supposed to smell like, but it smelled good. I think…

I felt like Martha Stewart or Betty Crocker or someone like that who whips up a healthy and delicious dinner just by throwing a few things together and having it simmer all afternoon so the house smells so good.

I wish I had an apron! I would totally sport an apron at that moment, skipping around my kitchen with my mixing spoon in one hand and my beef stew simmering on the oven. The funny thing is, I never understood aprons and I never wanted one but in this moment, I felt like I had to have one.

Last time I was visiting home, my mom tried to give me an apron because my aunt made a bunch of them out of all our old African material. I politely declined.  I don’t wear aprons! I don’t understand aprons. Do people get that dirty when they cook? Does food just fly at them? Why don’t they just wear an old sweatshirt or something? And why doesn’t the apron go all the way up to your neck? If I’m going to spill something while cooking it’s definitely going to be in between my chin and where the apron starts. Also, it seems like it would always come untied. Isn’t there a better way such as Velcro or even a buckle? But all you apron-wearing people, you do you. But honestly, at this moment, I was really starting to regret my decision of not being an apron person.

Anyway, I chopped the potatoes and I added them after an hour and a half of simmering just like the recipe says. No one wants mushy potatoes. I probably also added a shake or two of some spice or the other during this point thinking I’m a professional chef here. I’m picturing how much my kid will love it and how he will rave about it and I can tell the whole world that I made homemade gluten-free beef stew and it was a hit.

Well…. 

My son takes the first bite, and he screams, “EWWW!  EWWW! EWWWW,” as loud as he can, and he literally spits a piece of beef across the room. I watched the beef fly out of his mouth and land on the couch. My first thought should be I can’t believe how much he hates my food, but it was actually well darn, now I have to wash that couch cover because he spit his beef stew clear across the room onto it.

Now I have cooked some bad things. Really bad things. I have cooked some gross things. But I’ve never gotten such a strong reaction. Not from this kid. This kid is a polite one that tries not to hurt my feelings. Typically he’ll take a bite and pretend to think about it and then very nicely ask for frozen pizza or bagel bites or something.

I’ve never gotten a loud EWWW and a spit across the room. I’m kind of in shock, kind of mortified, but also feeling like this has to be a milestone or a great moment. It’s kind of like the rejection letters I got when I sent off my children’s book to publishers. It’s like, “Good try. You failed greatly, but you tried.”

Then he seemed super embarrassed and felt bad, and he said, “I just don’t know why it tastes SO weird.” 

Wow! An EWWW, a spit across the room, and an, “it tastes weird?” This might be my worst of all. How can that be after all these years of improving my cooking?

I guess the more you learn the less you know? The more you practice the worse you become? I wasn’t quite sure that’s how it went, but it’s definitely a humbling experience.

But isn’t that how life goes? Once we think we know everything and we have it all figured out, something happens to show us that we really have no idea what we’re doing. And isn’t that the beauty in life? Always learning? Always changing? Never knowing what you’re doing?

I promise that my brother and I used to know how to make bacon. A couple years ago we would make it all the time for breakfast, for dinner, and it came out fine. 

But the last two years, we have failed every time we have tried to make bacon. Oh I looked at recipes, I asked friends, I know exactly what to do, but still, every time the bacon is not edible. I guess life is about learning things and unlearning things and learning things again and then just accepting that you will never learn them. 

Today my beef stew turned into beef EWWW but there is always tomorrow. And tomorrow I could get it right. 

But this cooking thing is exhausting and I think I will just order Domino’s for the next week.