I have some plates that I call them spaghetti plates. It's like a big shallow bowl. I use it with any dish that has sauces or is a bit watering such as stew. I also use it as a salad plate when the salad is the main meal. That way, I can pile it up in layers :o)

I use plates shaped like this....I have them in my everyday porcelain, my Christmas dishes and in the Mason's Vista.
Works for pasta.....and for strawberry short cake!!
Linda C

Here is a link that might be useful: rimmed soups

I cut everything up in the stew, so there is no need to do any cutting at the table. I tend to do this to everything - I even slice steak and arrange it on the plate for serving. It must be a Chinese thing. Hard to cut anything with chopsticks, so all food in that culture is served in bite sized pieces, or is intended to be picked up and bitten through, or is soft enough to pull apart with chopsticks.

When I was growing up we had soup mugs that were rather flat on the bottom (but so were our cereal bowls, really). I try to keep things more bite-sized like John. I'm still trying to imagine a stew thick enough to be served on a plate.

Thanks everyone! Keep 'em coming.

jessicaml - that's exactly the problem. Though our flat plates are rimmed, so they contain the gravy somewhat. But what you mentioned is why I am looking for alternative dishes for stew. As to making the meat into smaller pieces, I find my stew meat is more tender if I make the pieces slightly larger. Could be I'm imagining it, but that's how I've always made my beef stew. The larger pieces are tender enough that the spoon can cut into them, no need for a knife, but it still is clumsy to do in our cereal bowls.

Shannon:
I use my everyday soup bowls with a rim.

If I'm having company for dinner, I use my Harmony House,
" Sonata " Soup Bowls.

I have several [cough] sets of dishes and they all have shallow soup bowls. Some with rims, some without.

This is a nice porcelain set with platinum rims and stripe. Not microwavable, but great for serving soup, stew or pasta such as these gnocchi.

This is my cranberry set which has rims and the bowls are a bit smaller but also work well.

So, to me a shallow soup bowl works best. They seem to just call them pasta bowls now and sell them separately.

I started a thread of pasta plates/bowls about a year ago, and then I found some really nice ones on eBay. However, like John and others, I cut meat into bite size pieces before putting it into a stew, and then I serve the stew in a cereal bowl, since I intend for it to be eaten with a spoon. I use the pasta plates almost exclusively for pasta, and they are like the flat type of bowl with a wide rim on them that is perfect for holding pieces of bread after it has been taken from the bread plate. Pasta plates keep pasta hotter than dinner plates, but they do not keep stew as hot as a regular bowl, which is why I prefer a deeper bowl for stew. I never serve soup in a shallow bowl unless it is a cold soup.

I've noticed that some pasta plates do not have large rims, but I prefer the ones that do. I have wanted to buy new dishes but have not found any that I like, which is why I bought the pasta plates on eBay. They don't match my regular dishes (in fact they are nicer), but the colors match/blend. I don't have a lot of storage space in my kitchen for extra dishes.

Lars

Paper plates.

: )
lyra

Linda, are there large Mason's rimmed soup plates? Mine hold very little, maybe a cup. Much more rim than bowl. I like using them for apple crisp and strawberry shortcake, and anything else I put cream on. But if there are big ones -- oh no, not more dishes!

I prefer stew in deep bowls to maintain the heat and they add the element of casualness that I associate with stew.
Often, the bowl rests on a plate that holds the accompaniments.
I also only serve everything in bite size pieces.

Shannon:
Would ye be speaking of Irish Stew ???

I do my stew in larger than bite size also and brown them.

That was a throw together Chicken stew, in the Photo.
LOU

LOL Lyra!

Soup or cereal bowls here too. Like others mentioned my stew is for the most part in bite sized pieces. I'm slowing adding to my dish and serving collection now that I have room to store them. The pasta/soup bowls are on the list.

David

I also serve stews in bite sized pieces, and I shopped for a long time trying to find "pasta bowls" that I liked both the shape and the design. Finally Chrystal gave me these:

I have some Spode Floral Haven that are a similar shape, but we most often reach for these for some reason.

Annie

We usually use soup bowls here, or at least the cereal bowls that came with our set of dishes (Corelle Abundance).

Donna

We use regular soup bowls.
I also have some quite large soup mugs
That I like to use at times, too.

Either of the above are served on a plate,
So there is a place to put bread or whatever.

We also like our stew meat cut into bite sized pieces,
Before cooking.
And I do brown it before adding anything else.
It always comes out very tender.

While I love the appearance of soup 'plates'
AKA 'pasta bowls',
It always seems to me that the food cools off,
Much too fast.

Maybe I need to eat faster? :>)

Rusty

We serve stews in regular soup bowls also. It does keep it warmer longer and the handles makes for easy carrying. We like our stews rustic. The potatoes, meat, etc., are chunky sized. Small enough that you don't have to use a knife but big enough so you know what you are eating. NancyLouise

Wow, thank you all, there's stuff here I hadn't considered, particularly the part about soup bowls keeping the stew warm for longer (vs. wider, shallower pasta bowls). That's a great point. I think though that our cereal bowls, which we also use as soup bowls, have a cone-ish shape I hadn't thought about before. I.e. they have quite small-diameter bottoms that make stew-eating more difficult.

So, my shopping task is to find soup bowls which have a similar size bottom diameter to the top diameter. I wonder if Fiestaware makes something, I'll have to look. Their colors are so pretty.

As to reducing the size of the chunks in my stew - well I've always made my stew with big chunks of meat and big chunks of potatoes, just like my mother does, and her mother did before her. The chunks are tender enough to be cut by a spoon. I am absolutely not altering this recipe for fear my grandmother would haunt my dreams with disapproval. So chunk size stays.

"As to reducing the size of the chunks in my stew - well I've always made my stew with big chunks of meat and big chunks of potatoes, just like my mother does, and her mother did before her. The chunks are tender enough to be cut by a spoon. I am absolutely not altering this recipe for fear my grandmother would haunt my dreams with disapproval. So chunk size stays."

If it ain't broke,
Don't fix it!

;>)

Rusty

I have some soup mugs...I guess that's what they are. I bought at the dollar tree a few years back. I like my soup served in a rimmed soup plate or a coupe soup...because it DOES cool off faster. But I often have certain friends for dinner who like a deep soup bowl...these are about twice the size of a coffee mug, micro save, with a handle and came in white, dusty blue, yellow and lime green. I have 6 or 8 of the white....and find I use them a lot...not for stew but for cereal, beating up an egg and reheating soup just for me.

I like my bowls for stew and soup a little different.

I like them to be deeper and with a smaller diameter. This will keep the food hot a lot longer because there is less evaporation. I also like to have covers for the same reason.

Glass bowls are nice because you can see the ingredients.

I like to make stew bite-size. Kind of makes more sense to me.

dcarch

LincaC,
Thanks for the suggestions, I have soup bowls as you described but I hardly use them. I forget about them or don't have a use for them but I like the idea of using them to beat an egg or reheat something in the micro. Hopefully, I'll now start to use them more often.

I don't mind a deeper soup bowl, but I did get the pasta bowls because soup DOES cool off more quickly in them.

I have some cereal bowls too, Elery bought the set of dishes I'm currently using, and they are square. They are also deep and smaller on the bottom than the top. The blased things are nearly impossible to get the last bit of cereal or soup out of, and you'd need a long handled iced tea spoon to get to the bottom without tipping the bowl. Dumbest design ever, IMO. In fact, there's probalby someone sitting around right now, laughing at the thought of people trying to eat hot soup from "his" bowls without burning their fingers in the soup. Grrrr.....

I don't much care for the square coffee mugs that came with the set either, for obvious reasons. What rocket scientist thought a square coffee mug was a good idea? Oh yeah, that same designer with the warped sense of humor!

Annie

Annie, didn't you ever watch Star Trek with the square shot glasses? :) It's from the future!

I have some Corelle, actually received 2 sets as gifts from different people supposedly the same design and identical sets though they're not. The one set has a more conventional cereal or soup bowl. The preferred set (both for looks and function) have a plate/bowl similar in concept to the spaghetti bowls mentioned. They do not have a large rim on them and work great for stew, pasta, hotdish and a variety of things.

I tend to deliberately make my food very hot wanting it to stay hot throughout the entire meal in case of seconds, so I like them because it'll cool a bit, I usually don't have to worry about it getting cold too quickly.

And as for keeping the large chunks? You betcha! Heresy to do otherwise. And when I make stew, I want stew *not* soup. I want a meal, not a side dish. I want hearty chunks of meat and veggies in there and yes, good old gravy. Thick, rich hoity-toity gravy - not ketchup! :D

AFAIC I think it'd be a good thing for some grandmothers to haunt some dreams for the heinous crimes done to innocent food! Wouldn't bother me if some grandmothers (grandfathers, mothers, uncles or otherwise) would reach down and bi+chslap people when they open a blue box too! But alas, it's another to each their own.

Hey guys (waving my hand cyberspace-style). I just wanted to follow-up with what I ended up buying. I happened to be in Macys, and by chance, they were having a weekend sale on Fiestaware, buy one piece get one free. Their Fiesta display contained a bowl in several colors, called an "Individual Pasta Bowl". This bowl had everything on my checklist - wide enough to manage big chunks of stew beef/potatoes (yet not too wide), deep enough so nothing will slosh out, they stack nicely for storage, and are microwaveable. And of course, the BOGO-free sale.

It comes in a perfect yellow color for my kitchen. Actually the "yellow" I chose is what Fiesta calls "Ivory", but it's actually a soft buttery yellow, versus their "sunflower" color which is the bright yellow of, well, sunflowers. The Ivory looks very different on the Macys website than it looks in real life. The website also says it holds 32 oz. which it doesn't--more like 26 oz. if you fill it to the very top rim. I also ended up buying a few bowls in the Cobalt color, cause it'll also look good in my kitchen, and I love how the different colors look together on the table.

I've found out that Fiesta makes this pasta bowl style solely for Macy's, and it is not sold elsewhere. I don't know why. Anyway, I'll link them. The customer reviews re-affirmed all the reasons why I like them.

Here is a link that might be useful: Fiesta Individual Pasta Bowls at Macys