I'm Stewin'

On the way home from work, I was listening to NPR. Yes. me hard-core Conservative that I am. I am so ashamed.

Nonetheless, there was a piece aired about French Shepherd's Pie and a new book called "Around My French Table" . The author mentioned some ingredients and I began to envision what our fridge had in it to see if I could whip something up like it when I got home. A couple of days ago I had taken a 4 lb pork shoulder out of deep freeze and was thinking a stew. So, I had the meat. If you have the meat, like solid doctrine, you can go from there.

Butter, yep, onions, yep, heavy cream, nope (but we did have some cream cheese, close enough), garlic, yep, carrots, yep. Although we have a pile of potatoes, I passed b/c I am trying to cut carbs. When I arrived home, I did a quick search for a pork shoulder stew recipe. I found something called Bavarian Pork Tenderloin Stew, just so I could check measurements. Not much into the slacker French these days.

I also added some additional ingredients like some green peppers, still around from our CSA a couple of weeks ago which were not collectively long for this world, and a vegetable dip to supplement the cream cheese (we were low on cream cheese) .

Man, I have to share, the stew--with copious amounts of pepper, a dash of homemade hot sauce, and salting, turned out magnificently. I feel like a threw a strike by knocking down all of these individual ingredients that were chilling in the fridge with no greater cause than to rot away.

Community is like a stew....throw like-minded people together, who want to do some good, into a cause greater than themselves, and turn up the heat....and see what magnificent things happen.