Delirshis Stewy Supper!

So, dummy me, I was WAY ahead of the game last week by making the cholent on Thursday afternoon. 

What a concept!  While the kids napped on Thursday, I made my new “magic” caramel onions, added in the rest of the ingredients for a pareve cholent, cooked it up with barley,  and stuck it in the fridge until Friday.  Smug little me.

So, of course, on Friday it was totally forgotten in the pre-Shabbos chaos.

So in the fridge it remained over Shabbos… and sat there all weekend because I glumly decided I would reincarnate it as “stew” and trick my family into eating it by serving it with good bread.

The bread, I decided, would be bagels.  Why not?  Bagels and stew; isn’t that what they ate in the old country?  Homemade bagels… from a new recipe, which I started last night.  Big-production yummy bagels, because the stew itself was essentially finished.

Indeed.  The stew was so NOT cholent; it’s almost impossible to believe how good it was.

I was not looking forward to this meal, but knew in the back of my head that cholent is so essentially cholenty because it’s overcooked into a gloopy overdone mass.  Which this cholent hadn’t had a chance to become.  So it WAS indeed perfect vegetarian (even vegan) stew.

I buffed it up a bit today by adding a tin of beans, a bit more onion soup mix, some merlot and finally, a bit of flour, mixed with water to thicken it up.

AMAZING!  I hope it shows here at least a little… look at that texture; glistening, substantial.  And the bagels, too, were perfect.  What a simple meal.  How wonderful.

I think I had to do pull off something both frugal and culinarily extraordinary today to make up for the fact that my drivers-license idiocy is costing us a fortune this week. 

Spent an hour paying the tickets themselves today; I was lucky Elisheva was off school, because I wouldn’t have brought the kids with me to the crowded office full of society’s bottom-feeders (ie people who don’t pay their tickets on time). 

And tomorrow, Ted’s day off, I’m off to try to reinstate my license.  And renew our health cards, which hopefully won’t cost any more money… cuz it’s almost all gone already.