It’s that time of year. I love my crock pot and even loading it up with random vegetables and some stock invariably results in something healthful and edible by the end of the day. (Worst case scenario, we hate it, the dogs like it, so they eat crock pot stew and we order pizza. )
I’ve made this Colombian beef and lentil stew twice now and it’s amazing - I’ve shared this recipe with friends and nobody dislikes it. For heat, instead of tomato puree I added some canned adobo chilies (warning: HOT! So adjust as necessary.)
It can be a bit of a bother getting the right spices (I have an Indian grocery store) but once you have them, you have enough for lots and lots of delicious batches of this!
That recipe doesn’t look right to me. It calls for stew meat to be cooked 4 hours, yet my experience with slow cookers, even on high, is that it takes more like 12 (or 16 on low). And they say cook the potatoes, diced, for 30 minutes. Mine take more like 4-6 hours. If their cooker is hot enough to do that, it hardly qualifies as a “slow” cooker, IMHO.
I make a slow-cooker goulash that cooks for four or so hours on high; with the meat cut up like that, four hours is plenty of time. Thirty minutes before end of cooking, I lob in some dumplings and they’re done by the time the goulash is ready (ditto for any stew, really). The beef and lentil stew recipe looks very much the same–everything’s already at temperature, so you only need open the lid briefly to put the spuds in, which means it gets back to cooking temp quickly.
Welp, like most things online I take things with a pinch of salt. Very good call on your part.
Actually the first time I made this I follwed the recipe right on, except I added the potato initially because I figured that 30 minutes simply wasn’t going to cut it for slow-cooking spuds.
Second time I made it (yesterday) I followed directions exactly but added the potatoes about an hour before done and they came out perfectly. Which surprised me because I assumed they’d take several hours.
But I maintain that this is one of the tastiest crockpot recipes we’ve tried, ever.
I sort of take it as a given that online recipes are not going to be precise and assume others will regard them as suggestions, not gospel…I read, and tweak as I see fit. But seriously, that was a good call!
I am taking notes and saving recipes, peeps! Thank you and keep 'em coming!
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Very good call on your part.