Late Summer Pear Stew and Mish-Mash Ginger Potatoes

The real test of a grocery shopping strategy, at least in my book, is whether it cooks up into delicious meals. So far, our latest strategy for spending less at the grocery store is passing the test with flying colors.

The pork steaks that I saw in the weekly circular turned out to be much thicker than I’d imagined. I bought them anyway and just had to get creative with how to cook them. Since they were pretty fatty and I had no idea how tender they would be, I decided to braise them. Braising is a great method for slow cooking large pieces of meat, and it doesn’t take much attention. That was a plus tonight since four of the five of us are struggling with some sort of allergy or cold.

After I had started braising the meat I decided to add some carrots and celery….mainly because they were in the refrigerator and needed to be used. I also put some fresh green beans on to cook and boiled some a potato and a sweet potato. If you haven’t realize it already, I was just flying by the seat of my pants and trusting that the next step would become obvious =)

The meat was very tender once it was cooked, but still very fatty so I pulled it out of the braising liquid and let it cool so that I could pull it apart. I decided to add the carrots to the sweet potato and potato and them mashed them all and seasoned them with butter, salt, ginger and some of the braising liquid.

I still had some leftover braising liquid so I whisked a few tablespoons of sorghum flour into it to make a gravy and then added back the pork that I’d pulled apart. That didn’t look so great, so I added in the green beans which I had originally planned to serve by themselves. The resulting stew was good, but still lacking something, so I added sliced pears on top. The pears added just the right touch of brightness and sweetness.

I didn’t measure a single blessed thing….so no recipe on this for now. But given how many servings John ate, I may have an opportunity to measure later this week =)

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