Hotel Cooking Meal 2: Beef Stew With Sweet Potatoes, Mushrooms and Smashed Garlic

We had a little help for our second meal in the hotel and it was a smashing success!

May I introduce my Great Aunt Marie's Crock Pot...

I have fond memories of this old girl keeping my Aunt Marie's wimpies (sloppy joes) warm during her Christmas Eve parties. It still works great, if not better, than my newer slow cooker. It's HUGE and low seems to be "lower" than I'm used to, not causing anything to burn or stick to the bottom.

For our second hotel meal I decided to make a simple stew using basic ingredients. The result was fantastic! Sweet potatoes cooked to perfection, tender chunks of beef and yummy whole button mushrooms.

As a reminder (or if you missed the first post in this series) I did a grocery store trip to stock our hotel room for 3 meals.

Total cost for this trip was $26.21 and we've already gotten 2 meals (plus leftovers) out of it.

Here's what I did yesterday...

Ingredients

• 3 onions, quartered
• ½ bag of baby carrots
• 8-ounce package of button mushrooms
• 1-1.5 lbs of stew beef (mine was 1.3)
• 9 cloves of garlic, smashed
• 4 sweet potatoes, halved
• 2 cups of beef broth

Instructions

Put all ingredients in to the crockpot in order.

(You can sear the beef first if you like. Searing here in the hotel just wasn't convenient. )

Cover.

Cook on low for 7-8 hours.

Voila!

Things to note:

• This older crock pot cooked much slower than mine would have at home. This may be best for 6 hours in a pot that runs hotter.
• I left the potatoes rather large so they wouldn't turn to mush. I also left them on the top so they would not be submerged in the liquid.
• I used baby carrots for convenience being in the hotel room. By all means, "regular" carrots would be fine.

Total cost of meal: $14.38, which includes total cost of ALL items used for this dish but many will be used for other meals as well like the onion, garlic and bell peppers. This one came out to only $3.60 a serving!

📖 Recipe