Weekend Food Blogging - Brunswick Stew

This is far from a dish that I am testing. It is a very old recipe that seems to be largely unknown outside of the middle Atlantic and Southern US. Since it is the middle of January and cold cold cold in these parts (Note that little homey touch) I thought that this would be the perfect weekend to hunker down and stir the stew pot.

Brunswick stew isn't so much stewlike as it resembles thick soup. One suspects in the early days, and perhaps in some parts still, this was made with squirrel or whatever varmint was easily available. These days it is mostly made with chicken. In fact it is a quite decent use for leftover rotisserie chicken from the local food mart. Anyway, this is an approximation of how I do it.

Take a chicken. Or chicken breasts. Cut it into stew-meat size pieces, maybe an inch and a half squarish. If raw, dredge in flour and brown the pieces. If pre-cooked, just leave it lying around. You'll use it soon enough.

Now what you're really going to do is to take a soup/stew pot, saute some onion, garlic, and green pepper if you like it. I don't. You know how to do this, over a medium heat until the onions are translucent. Now toss into that pot (Watch, I'll do this like a recipe)

• 1 bay leaf
• 1/2 tsp thyme which you should leave out if you hate it or use something else if you prefer
• a crapload of freshly ground black pepper. You decide how much you like. I like a lot.
• 1 of those big honking cans of tomatoes that you would use to make spaghetti sauce
• 1 package of frozen lima beans -- I like the baby ones so they don't have that consistency that puts people off
• 1 package of frozen corn -- I like white shoepeg but it is up to you

I didn't tell you what size package, did I? You can use the box size if you like tomatoes more. You can use a plastic bag size if you are trying to eat more veggies. Or you could see what is in the back of your freezer and use it up.

Oh, and throw in the chicken.

Simmer this for 45 minutes to an hour, take out that nasty bay leaf, and eat. I like it with cornbread but that's up to you.

(A real recipe would tell you to cook it with the chicken and put the veggies in later, but that seems too much like work. And now you know what I don't write cookbooks.)