Dad's Beef Stew

the one with an entire bottle of wine

You heard me. There is one entire bottle of red wine in this recipe. Which, if you know my dad, makes sense.

This is one of those non-recipe recipes. The kind that my dad just throws together and afterwards half-forgets how. I made him dictate this recipe to me as he went so I (and you) could recreate it.

He learned how to cook like this in Paris, where he worked in restaurants for nearly a decade. The stew is hearty and simple, yet complex and sophisticated. The wine gives it a huge depth of flavour but it’s not too heavy or fussy. (A little bit like him, there are lots of sometimes contradictory reasons to love it.)

Most of the ingredients — stew beef, onions, carrots, wine, stock, bay leaf — are obvious. But the most important ingredient here is time. It needs to cook for hours but it also needs to rest. (The metaphors abound.) This is not one to make on the day you’ll be eating it. “The whole trick is letting it sit overnight,” says dad. Make it on a WFH Friday for Sunday lunch. Or…