Simple Hearty Vegetable Stew | Perfect Cold Weather Meal

This hearty vegetable stew is the ultimate comfort food. It is next level savory with meaty mushrooms in a rich tomato base and loaded with parsnips, carrots, potatoes, celery, and more. It's easy to make in one pot. It's going to be your new favorite winter dish. If this sounds good to you, be sure you hit that subscribe button. Now let's get started. I've got a yellow onion here that we'll dice up. Slice it. Dice it. Two carrots. I've washed them well and I'm honestly not even gonna worry about peeling them. So I just slice them up. Now for our parsnip. Oftentimes in the grocery store they're coated with a thin wax so that they stay fresher longer. So I do recommend peeling a parsnip. And since it's a little wider at the top we can't slice it quite as easily as we did with the carrot. But we'll just dice the top of it. You know, think about hearty vegetable stew. You can kind of slice and dice to you, to you, to your desires. The parsnip is in the carrot family but they do have a really unique flavor so you don't want to add too much or it can really overpower your dish. One will do. Now for the celery. Just go ahead and slice it as you would. Now for our mushrooms. They've also been cleaned well. So I rinse them underwater and then I just wipe them. The mushrooms will be sliced. I like a thicker slice on these for the stew. Obviously whatever you prefer you can do. The last thing to prep is our potatoes. So I've got about a pound of Yukon gold potatoes here that I will dice up into a small dice. I'll cut it into planks. A stock. Starchy I guess. And then strips. About a half inch. The oil's hot so we're gonna put our first veggie mixture. Onion, carrot, celery, parsnip into saute. That sizzles just what we want. And a generous pinch of salt to help them start to soften. And this will create a really flavorful base for the stew. We'll let them start to soften down for about four to five minutes. Now for the mushrooms. Pop them in with another pinch of salt that will encourage their water to release. So if you've cooked a mushroom recipe with me before you know that I let the water evaporate out of the mushrooms so they get this really rich meaty flavor. So I'm going to stir them with the other ingredients and then spread them in an even layer. Let that water evaporate out and only stir once or twice as they cook down. Now that the mushrooms are ready we'll add in some butter and then minced garlic. So if you don't do that in advance you can just mince it right into the pot. And at this point we're also going to add the potatoes. And then our fresh and dried herbs go in. A pinch of red pepper flakes and some white pepper. That just adds a really nice depth of flavor. Stir that let it cook for a minute. One more pinch of salt. The potatoes absorb a lot. Our thickener for the stew is a little flour so we'll cook that down for a minute. And then some tomato paste. I'm just going to squeeze this right on in. It's concentrated so I'm only using half of what I would for a can. Stir it in as best you can. Let it cook for just a minute. All right two options for deglazing the pan. I'm going to use some apple cider vinegar today. If you have red wine this dish goes great with it. You can use some wine to deglaze it but I'll go with this today. Scrape up any brown bits on the bottom as you do and then we'll add in some worcestershire sauce. Make sure you're using a vegetarian version. That's a really great umaminess to it. And then some vegetable bouillon as well. And then our vegetable stock and two bay leaves. Stir it really well so all those layers of flavor that we added get combined. Let it come to a simmer then cover it for the first half of the cook time and then we'll take the lid off and let it simmer down until it's nice and thick and the potatoes are tender. It's looking good. It's smelling even better. It's nice and thick. The final touch, well touches, we'll take out these bay leaves. Okay and then we'll add in a cup of frozen peas and then some fresh parsley really just brightens it up. All right that's it. It's time to serve it up. All right let's give it a try. Get a little bit of everything here. That base, the tomato brothy base, is so thick and full of flavor from all those layers we added. I got a bite of that meaty mushroom. You're not gonna miss the meat even if you're a meat eater. And you got to serve it with some bread for dipping. It's the ultimate comfort meal. Leave me a comment. Let me know when you try it and I will see you back here next week for another meatless meal that everyone will love. Until then, happy eating! I'm an actress for a reason. I got a red pepper flake.