Beef stew?
Chopped up lumps of steak, braising steak or frying steak works well enough but basically get as good as you can afford. General principle being what goes in, comes out, quality speaking. (before you eat it that is, afterwards all bets are off)
Kidney beans (canned is easier and safer but with a slow cooker, boil first to ensure the toxic haemagglutinin principle is destabilized. It is proteinaceous, a lectin toxalbumin like ricin, abrin, sea urchin venoms etc. only not likely to prove lethal, just most unpleasant, and will be denatured as a result, boil them and toss the water if using dried ones, canned, just drain them and chuck em in')
Canned chickpeas.
Fry the steak with some chopped onion and garlic, then make up a broth with a beef stock cube
can of chopped tomato or two, depending on how many your cooking for, how much food your making, it helps add liquid, and with the stock you shouldn't need more.
Add some fried beef mince, and mushrooms. You CAN use the white Agaricus from the stores, but Shiitake work REALLY well. Much meatier and more flavourful rather than waxy and taste of naff all.
Now, heres where it gets tasty. Spices.
Couple of bay leaves, added during the slow cook, and fished out before eating.
Some worcestershire sauce, give it a splash or two, some dark soy sauce, a bit of tabasco to taste,
chilli peppers to taste. Black pepper, a good lot of pink peppercorns, pounded to bits (they have a lot of oil in them and powdering is difficult without a motorized spice grinder, although one is advisable for the mushroom portion of the spice mix), the latter if you aren't familiar with them, aren't hot, but have a camphoraceous but sweet taste. These, if you have neither spice grinder or mortar and pestle you can just lay out on a chopping board and use a mug like a steamroller, run the buggers over until they look like they've just gotten out of a car crash courtesy of car going off a cliff, squished up good to get the oils out to contribute to the flavour)
A few cubebs (these can be bought in good spice depts. in decent supermarkets), break the stalks off and chuck those [they look like black peppercorns with a stem, not hot, but an icy, cooling camphoraceous taste, perhaps 7-10 of the seeds, starting at the lower end first time you make it, you can over egg the pudding w/ these)
Szechuan pepper, ground if you can find it, got a weird numbing sort of sensation and a flavour I can't quite describe, these, the cubeb, the pink pepper help offset the fire of the hot peppers.
And lastly, you might only be able to find one, since they can be bought (through online stores catering for entheogens. You use only a little, a teaspoon or two, per pot of stew, so they cause no psychotropic effects, fly agaric mushroom. Amanita muscaria. When you buy them ready dried they are cured already, if you pick them you must cure them over a long, very slow heat, overnight, use the caps, the stems aren't worth having and dry minimum flame in the oven with the oven door propped open a tad, for the fluid expelled from the fresh mushrooms to escape when the heat drives it off. The heating is important for these, fresh, they are toxic although not fatal. Heating decarboxylates a neurotoxin, ibotenic acid, to muscimol, which in large amounts induces a type of hallucinogenic trance, a couple of teaspoons is all you need for cooking, less if its on say, a single steak, rather than a good number of grams to several caps depending on the content of ibotenic acid in the mushroom, which varies. The use in cooking has no such discernable effects. But it kind of draws out flavour in meat, like MSG does. And imparts a taste all of its own, its meaty and 'umami' as the japanese know such flavours, as with say, seaweeds, stock, shiitake mushroom, coupled with a distinct sweetness, honeyed almost but with a perculiar sweetness unique to these and perhaps a couple of closely related mushrooms. Red cap, white warts and rest of the mushroom is white, a ring, white spores, grows under silver birch. Sometimes under pine, forming a symbiosis with the tree host, providing sugars and other nutrients in return for a contribution of nutriment suited to the fungi through an intimately intertwined meeting of fungal hyphae and the finest of rootlets. Out of season, you can get them online through shops catering to psychoactive herbs though, as fly agaric/amanita muscaria. Don't forget the curing process if you pick your own (the family does contain some very, very dangerous relatives, but none of them have the bright scarlet cap of A.muscaria with its distinctive white warts on the cap. Albino strains exist but eat ye not of these, the chance of your making a mistake exists, but they aren't common anyhow, bright red being de regeur, to orangey but still highly distinctive, any mushroom guide will feature these, along with their more distantly related relatives in the genus Amanita. DON'T use the dark brown relative of it with similar chemistry called the panther, Amanita pantherina.)
If you go picking, keep an eye out for a tan-capped mushroom, look up in the guidebooks for details, with ruddy, wide, oval shaped pores and a fiery taste, called Chalciporus piperatus, the peppery boletus. Those can be dried and powdered in a spice grinder (leathery texture so you need a grinder, unless you dice them by hand with scissors), they are parasitic on fly agaric when they grow up under silver birch trees. Spicy and quite hot, with a savor different to other hot spices, unique. The two mushrooms paired up go real well together for meat.
Chuck the fried steak, mince, onions in with the stock, canned tomato, add a bit of sun-dried tomato paste, and the drained kidney beans and chickpeas in, add the shiitake last, just before serving fry them in butter and about 5 minutes before dishing up, in they go, when the meat is nice and tender, just to give the shiitake time to soak up the flavour of the sauce and spices.
DEFINITELY not vegan, and you'll come back for more, too. Lovely on a cold winter night. Fly agaric helps ward off the cold too as a tea in larger, sub-intoxicant doses as an herbal medicine, as well as possessing a peculiarly stimulatory relaxant kind of effect when used thus. Little guys are quite versatile, I'd never allow my kitchen to go without a tub or two full, at least, to last out the rest of the year from one season to the next.
Its the keystone in my beef steak spice blend. If you pick them
