Pat does a marvelous beef Stew.  Now the entire concept of Stew brings to mind a long cooked pot with meat and vegetables where you can eat it with a spoon.  The kind of stew I knew as I grew up and the kind that you get in a can. 

I reflect to a scene in the movie The Good The Bad and the Ugly, where Lee Van Cleef calls on a peasant and intimidates him into telling him where to find the person he is looking for.  But the scene is set where he is sitting across from the victum with bowls of stew and Lee uses his wooden spoon to dip into the victum’s bowl and chews it.   That is a traditional stew

Many years ago Pat introduced me to a different variation.  The meat is cooked in a pot in a flavoured gravy and the autumn vegetables are roasted in a pan in the oven and they are only combined on the plate.

Over the years this dish has been so refined we could serve it to royalty. 

Tonight the veggies were parsnips, sweet potatoes, carrots, butternut squash, potatoes and brussel sprouts.  

The meat dish was made up of all the leftover beef and pork ends we have saved up in the deepfreeze in the last few months.  BUT HERE IS THE SECRET INGREDIEN T.

We regularly buy a slab of Parmesan Cheese and grate it on our pasta dishes.  In the end we are left with the rind which, in the past we discarded.  This time we saved it and Pat put into the meat stew mix.  As we never add salt, the rind added the right amount of salt for the dish and a great additional flavour.

So do not throw out the rind.  Save and add to a stew.