I (and my flatmates) pretty much lived on vegetable stews in my youth. So, you prep some vegetables, add them in as you would, add herbs and whatnot (no affordable fresh herbs where we lived, but practically every week we'd splurge on a little bottle of dried herbs or spices). So, for Mulligan (hobo) inspired stew, cook down ripe tomatoes (Roma are best for this, but ripe and fragrant is essential) until syrupy, OR add a big dollop of good tomato paste to some warm oil and kind of melt them together. Meanwhile, sauté chopped onion, and build a sofrito or similar base to your taste. Combine and add in whatever good vegetables you have. This is important--don't let it become rattatouille unless that's what you want. It's too easy to land there by accident. Dice, brown and add fleshy fruit-veg, like eggplant and summer squash, celery, roots from carrots to potatoes (new potatoes are best in stew, unless as a thickener, but use your preference), plus large cuts of the stuff in the base, onions, tomatoes, peppers, etc. Add squished garlic and herbs and whatever seasoning you like. Hm... This order isn't right. As usual, start with the longer cooking stuff. You get the idea. Taste and adjust. Add wine to the sofrito or at the near-to-end.

Cassoulet and other bean stews lend themselves to vegetarian. Try mushrooms for heartiness and umami. Char them for flavor. Purée some beans to thicken. Carrots and other firmer veg can add texture.

Dried-pea soup becomes a stew with less water. Great with diced potatoes, shallots and herbs. I don't care for lentils, but they stand up to spices so well. There are plenty of great Indian spiced lentil stew recipes.

Etc. Just stop thinking about meat. ;)

My husband decided we were going meatless, It was a healthy choice. 👩‍🍳 I just added beef bouillon to what I was cooking...even when I use ground chicken or turkey to get the flavor I'm after. But...that's just me....👩‍🍳 I also tried adding fried Tofu...it wasn't a great substitute, more of an experiment.

I googled vegan stew and there are a zillion recipes that look good, whether you follow an exact one or just use for ideas.

Is a stroganoff a stew in your view? (My idea of what constitutes a stew is very broad.)

Mushroom stroganoff.

Btw goat stew is absolutely delicious. We make it a few times year.

^floral’s post made me think how I’d want mushrooms. A quick search brought up this. I do enjoy meat in stew but would be perfectly fine served with this.

Vegan Stew With Mushrooms

That's very similar to what's in the stroganoff I pictured, down to the smoked paprika. But mine didn't have wine and it did have yoghurt.

Mushroom bourguignon recipe is several places including Smitten Kitchen. Nice recipe, very satisfying.

Thank you everyone!

My stew efforts are delayed (SWMBO broke her ankle) until later this week. I will try some of these recipes later this week.

Yikes! Best wishes to her for speedy healing.

Hugh Fernley Wittingstall does a wonderful mushroom and red wine ragout served with a creamy polenta flavoured with lots of rosemary and parmesan. Absolutely delicious. A bit like this one https://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk/recipes/quick-mushroom-and-red-wine-ragu/

Sorry about SWMBO's ankle :(

I will add an idea that the aquafaba from chickpeas makes a lucious broth that might give a thickness to the stew. Also, I second tomato paste - I used to think, why use that when I have lots of time to cook down real tomatoes. But, I think I was wrong and I use tomato paste quite a bit now .

Also, I recently bought barley so that's on my mind to figure out how to use, so and thought toasted barley could give a brownness and depth .

I put pearl barley (untoasted) in every beef stew I make. Plus dumplings.

M y favorite version of the mushroom bourguignon was when I served it with polenta. Another stewy sort ofvegetarian entree that is delightful with polenta is caponata. I’ve mentioned this before, but if you plan to saute diced polenta, nuke it first. It will absorb less oil.

I made a chickpea stew that was delish! Don't remember the recipe, but I do recall it was rather hot! Served over rice.

Experiment in progress. Starting with a stock that is as intensely flavored as I can make it. Pressure cooked a bag of dried shiitake mushrooms in water with some “Better Than Boullion” vegetable stock concentrate for 30 min, while roasting turnip, carrots, radish, squash; added the roasted veg to the stock and pressure cooked another 30 min; result is very flavorful; now reducing with some red onion that I forgot to add; when reduced down I’ll strain out and discard the solids (the ratties might get to try a bit), thicken as needed, and add more diced veg and fresh mushrooms (maybe I’ll roast those a bit), plus whatever herbs seem promising. Not sure what thickening agent, but thinking about pureed cashews (if I have cashews, alternative is pureed tofu) and a little nutritional yeast. Plus some sherry or port or red wine, adjust texture and flavor with whatever else. Trying to be fully vegan with this one, with some color, and a spoon-coating consistency.

Dried mushrooms are very useful, and the cheapest way to get shiitake mushrooms. They reconstitute to a spongy texture which I don’t love (though I ate lots of it as a child), so I use them for flavoring stock and broth, then discard. Next bag I buy, I may process into a mushroom powder to see if that is useful.

SWMBO is not suffering. She spent the night on the couch, which is a big deep couch and a lovely place to sleep, watching movies and being attentively cared for by both cats. Yes, she was rich with kitties while the rest of us were bereft. She is not in much pain, but has been prescribed various pain meds including the blessed oxycodone 5 mg and the obligatory Narcan inhaler. The pharmacy has taken all day and still not filled the Rx but I, of course, have tons of every sort of opiod left over from my drug-hoarding gallbladder attack years. Hydrocodone, hydromorphone, oxycodone, oxymorphone, Tramadol, Percocet, Vicodin, you name it, all sitting around unused. She got fentanyl from the EMTs, propofol when the fracture was being reduced. Whee!

It is a bad break, triple fractures with some going into the joint, so she will unfortunately be laid up for some time. Working on scheduling surgery. Medical care is so complicated now. The ER referred her to an orthopedic surgeon, but he’s ”out of network” so that would be a $20,000 oops; her GP referred her to an in-network surgery and we are trying to get scheduled there. Even staying in-network doesn’t mean the bills won’t be substantial. When I had my gallbladder removed, it was supposed to cost me $5,000 after insurance, but by the time all the bills rolled in I’d paid $13,000 out of pocket. I guess I could have appealed and audited and so on, but I have a full-time job already. She could have started Medicare this month but what with one thing and another, alas, didn’t.

When our friends in France get medical care, even for rather significant procedures, they don’t seem to go through this.

Hmm, I thought I could toast the dry barley then food-process it into powder and use as a thickener. Barley, it seems, is pretty tough; it doesn’t pulverize easily. I guess I’ll just cook the barley in the stock then blend to smooth and, hopefully, the right thickness.

There Were No Cashews. DD said pureed tofu would mimic cream rather than be a good sauce thickener. I didn’t want to use flour or cornstarch because, boring. So barley was tapped.

Okay, here is what I have learned.

Barley thickens a stock *very* effectively. Toast barley, cook it in the stock, then everything in the Vitamix. Set some pre-barley stock aside in case you over-thicken. Most importantly, the sauce retains the dark color of the original stock; it doesn’t lighten up like a stock thickened with flour. Maybe a dark roux thickens without lightening, but the barley is easier and faster.

It is possible to make a veg stock that is *too* intensely flavored. I wanted to find how intense I could get it, and I did, next time I’ll back off. Less reducing, less red wine.

I made the same mushroom veg stew twice, once reducing then thickening with barley and intensifying with red wine, once thickening with flour and potatoes, no wine and no explicit reducing.

Flour-potato

Barley-wine

The traditional flour-potato stew was more popular with the hoi polloi at home. I think if I make the barley-wine stew again and dial things down a bit, it will win.

I didn’t use any tomato paste, anchovy paste, red miso, or other umami tricks.

Meat wasn’t needed at all - for flavor. I think the toothy-tugsome texture of meat would have been nice, and I will work on that. I accidentally froze tofu once and the thawed tofu had a texture much more like meat than normal tofu. I filed that tidbit away in “curious + useless” because I was a big meat snob. Now I’m going to experiment with that trick, which apparently everyone but me knew all along, says The Internet.

When I put pearl barley in a stew I simply add it whole. No faffing with toasting or grinding. It is a delicious integral part of the stew. It isn't just in there for thickening, although it does do that. It gives a lovely chew factor so you don't miss meat. It's 'toothy tugsome'.

A stew thickened with flour does not necessarily lighten. If you sprinkle the flour over the veggies in the pan and cook like a roux before adding the liquid the stew browns. I can't see that toasting and grinding barley is going to be quicker or less bother than chucking in some flour and stirring it a bit.

Your poor wife. It sounds awful. Send her very best wishes.

As for payent. Either in Britain or France, you wouldn't pay a penny for the treatment! We pay national health cover. In France, you also have to have a private insurance on top, but it only pays for everyday stuff. When you have a big problem like a break, cancer, chronic health problems, the state takes over everything. For example. I have a non serious blood condition at the moment; State is paying for everything - specialist docs everywhere, no waiting for appointments.

Sorry about your wife, John. $20K, yikes, I just checked my policy and my out of pocket max for out of network is $8K, and that’s enough! Hope she finds her way to surgery and recovery quickly, and that the missed Medicare enrollment doesn’t present a problem.

As for your stew, sounds like you’re well on your way to figuring out what you like, but I’ll just throw in that I’ve been very curious to try young jackfruit. Never had it, but understand it can be a good substitute for long-cooked meats.

Jackfruit, hmm! I have never tried it but now will.

Gotta be young/green from what I understand. Ripe is for sweet applications.

Duh moment. When you've concentrated the flavor in your stock so much that it's challenging, add water. ;)

Vaccines have become totally politicized and ideological, new vaccine development and technology is being choked off, availability of current vaccines is shrinking.

I’m convening the family to get our next and hopefully not last Covid booster while we still can. The next one, if there is a next one, won’t be tailored for the then-dominant variant.

I think masks may make a comeback, for me anyway, this winter.

If avian influenza takes off (becomes human-transmissible), we’re SOL - all those vaccine development programs have been defunded and as far as I know there is only a small stockpile intended for V-I-P use. And we will have no idea if it does, because the government is discontinuing much of the monitoring and reporting.

Sigh.

I hate adding water - feels like failure - I made more un-reduced stock and added that :-)

LOL!! Reducing takes water away. Adding water is just unreducing.

Chickpea and tomato stew. From "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone" by Deborah Madison.

Adding water should never, imho, be considered to be failure.

We're so influenced by tv programmes and chefs going on about depth of flavour, layers etc that sometimes we forget. Taste the ingredients. Do you want the ingredients to be masked by this stock that you've added your whole kitchen to and reduced to a thick gloop or do you want to gently enhance and make shine your main ingredient? Ask yourself. DO you want to eat your mushroom? Do you like the flavour of your mushroom or do you want to eradicate its taste totally by adding tons of other stuff? A hint of garlic, a sprinkle of freshly chopped parsley, a splash of red wine,a tiny squirt of tomato paste to make a nice thick sauce, a hint of seasoning.... that's all you need. If you don't like mushrooms, cook something else.

I'm personally so fed up with any kind of bean in a tomato sauce..... as a veggie stew, I would run screaming for the hills if I saw one on a menu.

A carrot stew. What do you like about carrots? I love their sweetness and texture. So I'd simmer whole, peeled carrots in a little light chicken stock, a splash of orange juice, again, fresh parsley and serve them on a bed of lovely, simple mashed potatoes or polenta. I guess I just have a simple taste for simple food.

Couldn't agree more, Islay.

Blame Alton Brown! In one of his “Good Eats” episodes he said to never use water if some more flavorful liquid was available, and that has stuck with me.

The kitty situation here has become critical. Now that SWMBO is spending all her time downstairs, the cats have abandoned the upper floors and thus the bedrooms and therefore everyone else has No Cat. This makes us very sad. Even after SWMBO resumes coming upstairs, we think the cats will have bonded with her to such an extent that we will still have No Cat. Being catless is intolerable because we are Crazy Old Cat Ladies, DD and I.

I have also been thinking of our late Himalayan, “Xiao Bao” or familiarly ”Baby Bao”, and wishing I had either another Himalayan or a Ragdoll, that being a breed similar to a Himmie but without the undercoat.

Here is Baby Bao cosplaying from her traditional seat of power, the living room couch, at the center of all the goings-on with a commanding view from defensible high ground. Coincidentally, where SWMBO now holds court, issuing commands for More Lattes and More Drugs.

Well well well, what should we find but a litter of adoptable Himalayan-Ragdoll mix kittens. DD and I went and saw them, and shockingly two stowed away in our car.

Names yet being provisionally tried on for size. Currently the darker boy on the left is ”The Xiaoest Bao”, “XiaoBao” for short, and the lighter boy on the right is ”Ramanujan”, “Rama” for short and “RamaLamaDingDong” for unshort.

Srinivasa Ramanujan is one of the most famous, enigmatic, and dare I say romantic figures in mathematics, and one of my childhood heroes. DD thinks it unfair that one kitten may be named after one of the greatest mathematicians while the other is a small dumpling. So the kitten will try on other names. We are thinking of “Grothendieck”, a famous French mathematician. I knew him when I was a child, in Montpelier. Someday I shall have a Citroen 2CV Fourgonette, like he had, in it carry goats, as he did, and drink milk from goats stabled in my house, as . . . oh wait, that was when I learned that I don’t like goat’s milk and that goats in the bedroom are smelly.

So now SWMBO will have FOUR cats?! They are adorable.

SWMBO will not be permitted to take these kitties! They will stay upstairs for a few weeks, both to control their introduction to the big cats and because they are still too little to be safely underfoot. She will stay downstairs for, well, until her surgery (in a week) and the novelty of Couch Life wears off. So they will be strictly separate.

When they are ready, I will take them to work some days. Baby Bao liked to go to work with me, he would chase a ping pong ball around the office then sleep on the conference table, guest armchairs, or my daybed. Next year, when my office is three blocks from my house, they may go to work with me more regularly.

We have vet visit, vaccinations, and chipping to do, kitten food and longhair brushes to buy, and more names to test out.

We have had as many as five cats in the past, but are drawing! the! line! at four now.

he said to never use water if some more flavorful liquid was available

My mother was of the same opinion, and also that flavorful liquids had nutritional value, which is great for cooking rice in stock, as she did. When you're adjusting a sauce or soup which is "right" but has over reduced by having too much of its water removed, it is perfectly acceptable to put some back. Use distilled water, even, so as not to add any flavor at all. There are exceptions to most rules.

The kittens are adorable! What long form will the potential G name take? Or have the trials moved on already?

“…he said to never use water if some more flavorful liquid was available…”

Agree with AB!

OMG…😻😻😻…so CUTE!!!

I make and freeze my own chicken stock. When I thaw and need two cups, if it is not exactly two cups, I just add plain water. Never a problem.

My father froze chicken stock in huge containers. If a kettleful wasn't needed, he'd put a new blade on a hacksaw or coping saw, and just cut off a piece and put the remainder back in the container, back in the freezer,

I think the grave unfairness may go unrighted. Xiaoest Bao - more correctly, Zuixiăo de Bao - appears to be a hedonist, impulsive, living in the moment, happiest when adorably hunting or mindlessly self-grooming. Not really the cereberal sort like Rama, who circles everything, figures it out, then executes smoothly on the solution, but also gets bullied away from food by the piggy dumpling. This piggy dumpling:

Who will hopefully grow up as ferocious and puffy as my former Himalayan.

Formidable kitties !

I'd like to add two additional thoughts: hominy and dried chili peppers. I made posole last night (admittedly with pork ribs and chicken broth) but I wanna say, what made it beautiful was the hominy and the dried chilis. I used a large ancho and 3 smaller guajillos and that yielded maybe 3/4 cup of blended chili paste - upon tasting, I thought wow too hot ! but in the process of adding, I ended up using almost all of it and it was not too spicy even for lightweight me.

The hominy is a highlight too; it takes awhile to get tender so start early - very satisfying.

I could see those ingredients crossing over into lots of other stews. The fun with the posole is all of the toppings , we used avocado, homemade 'crema' from yogurt with half & half, red cabbage, cotija cheese and corn chips.

AFA names go, I like Piggy Dumpling. 😁