What Could Be Bad?

The past week I have baked pot au feu in order to warm the kitchen and our bellies. I rinsed and soaked kidney beans overnight and then baked them in water and a bit of olive oil (don't add salt until they are cooked or they will never get tender!). After a few hours in the oven, when beans were tender, I grabbed a sampling of all of the veggies kicking around the fridge drawers. I threw in the dark outer leaves of a cabbage, a few onions chopped, celery chopped; with leaves included, a few potatoes, carrots chopped but unpeeled, salt, cheap port wine, Adobo seasoning, and my brother-in-law Marcus Barrow's homemade sausages. I baked it all for another hour, but you could let it go all day at a lower temperature.

A few days later I had run out of onions and cabbage but I made another pot au feu using black beans. I added a cup of brown rice, then carrots and celery and wine, sausage, olive oil, and Adobo seasoning as above and let it bake a few more hours, adding more water when needed.

Today I made another stew with pinto beans, carrots, celery, port wine, a whole head of garlic thrown in and cooked in the skin. Later I took it out and squeezed out the cooked garlic like toothpaste and added that back in.

Each kind of bean and the different assorted veggies and sausages made a completely different stew - all of them were delicious on these raw March days.