I usually decide what’s for dinner, but the children do much of the actual cooking.  When I was food shopping the other day, there was a good price on cut up beef for stew.  Since Greyden and Emery had recently harvested our sweet potatoes (a key ingredient for my beef stew), I bought some.

Jim is our marinade king around here and he got the meat marinating for me.  A few days later, I set Fletcher and Greyden to making the stew with the kid friendly recipe I made for them. 

Fletcher worked hard washing the sweet potatoes.

I admit, at this point there was a slight miscommunication.  Normally we peel our sweet potatoes.  But when Grandma was watching the children while Jim and I were in San Francisco, there was apparently an incident with potatoes.  I wasn’t there, but the story I heard went something like this…

Grandma decided to make mashed potatoes.  She set Greyden and his friend Joey to peeling them.  Apparently it took them 2 hours to peel the potatoes and they got potato peels everywhere.  Needless to say, my mom didn’t handle it very well (although the boys would have eventually cleaned it up).  

When I heard about it, I just started laughing and told my mom and Greyden, “We don’t ever peel the potatoes.  We mash them with the skins on.”

Apparently Greyden remembered that part, so he didn’t peel the sweet potatoes.  And you know what?   They tasted great with their skin on.

 Greyden drained the marinade off the meat (he could have added it to the stew).

And added it to our roaster.

Then they started cutting up the other veggies.

 They put all the veggies in the roaster.

Do you like the celery stalk he just dumped in there?

We just keep adding cut up veggies til we have as much as we want.  Then we cover it with liquid.  I use a mix of about 25% chicken broth and 75% veggie juice (low sodium V8 or plain tomato juice).  You can also add wine or marsala as well to add more flavor.

I set the roaster at 300 (350 if it is later in the morning) and leave it all day.  I would set a crockpot on low if it were early or high if it were late.

Just before serving, I season it with salt, pepper, and garlic powder to taste.

We often add coconut milk to our our stew.  You could add it to the roaster just before serving, but I have two children who aren’t crazy about coconut milk, so instead we add it to individual servings.

Coconut milk adds a great flavor to the stew. You can serve the stew with good bread, but I don’t usually bother.  We just eat it all by itself!

Beef stew is an easy recipe for the children to make because they don’t have to be exact.  I just have to be careful because if I ask Colter (who loves celery) to make it, he puts about 3 times as much celery in the stew as anybody else!

Recipe

Printable (kid friendly) version

In a crockpot or roaster add:

• Cut up meat (marinated or not)
• Chunked sweet potatoes
• Chunked regular potatoes
• Cut up celery
• Cut up carrots
• Diced onion
• Cut up tomatoes
• Any other veggies you have on hand

Cover with liquid (choices: chicken broth, tomato juice, wine, veggie broth, veggie juice)
Cook all day at high in a crockpot or 300 in a roaster.
Season to taste.
Optional: add coconut milk just before serving. 

Enjoy with your family!