Cooking: Tomato Beef Stew

Haven’t cooked anything new in a while, so I tried this dish that “looks complicated but is actually dead simple.” Tastes great too — goes perfectly with rice.

Ingredients:

• Beef
• Tomatoes
• Potatoes
• Sugar
• Salt
• Soy sauce
• Shaoxing wine
• Scallions
• Black pepper

Method:

• Cut the beef into chunks. Small ones are fine.
• Cut the potatoes into chunks about the same size as the beef.
• Peel the tomatoes and cut them into chunks. Blanching them in boiling water makes peeling easy. You can cut these a bit smaller too.
• Cut the scallions into segments.
• Heat up the pan, add a little oil, and stir-fry the beef first to brown it. Add the Shaoxing wine and keep stir-frying. Once the beef looks about half cooked, take it out.
• Clean the pan, add the beef and tomatoes back in, and simmer over medium-low heat. No need to add water. Let it cook for about 20 minutes.
• After 20 minutes the tomatoes should be completely broken down and there should be plenty of liquid in the pan. Add a little sugar (ketchup works too — I didn’t have any, so I used sugar), add soy sauce and salt, add the scallions, add the potatoes, add black pepper, then turn the heat to low and keep simmering for another 20 minutes.
• Done — dig in. Great with rice, especially with the sauce poured over it.

This dish is very easy and really hard to fail. If you like a strong tomato flavor, add ketchup. Gotta rant here: a lot of dishes that claim to be “rich in tomato flavor” are only that way because of ketchup, not the tomatoes themselves. Honestly, no matter how many tomatoes you add, it’s hard to get a noticeable flavor out of them…

Feels like I’ve been lied to for ages.