Beef Stew-My First Beef Dish EVER!

I went to the Beacon farmer's market this morning looking for some locally grown meat. I discovered Walnut Grove Farms . As former pseudo vegetarian, I asked for some help and the purveyor gave me a basic recipe to follow.

I used the ingredients pictured below:

A bunch of garlic, onion and stew beef, root vegetables and herbs of your choice. Here's the deal:

1. Cut up your root veggies. Here, I sliced carrots and cubed potatoes and turnips.

2. Toss these in the crock pot.

3. Toss your herbs in too. Bay leaf, parsely, thyme, rosemary anything you like.

4. Put a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a pan get it nice and hot. Brown your beef with garlic and onion. Salt the whole damn thing and dump it in the crock pot. You can even deglaze the pan with wine. Which leads me to mention, that you can add wine to the pot to provide liquid for everything to cook in.

5. Here's where I ran into trouble. My stew was more like ingredients in flavored water. So I quickly made a roux of butter and flour and added some balsamic vinegar and water. I let it cook down and dumped that in to thicken the mix.

In the end. I wound up with a tasty and healthy meal that I served in bowls over wild rice. It needed a lot more salt than I thought, so I added it at the end. (Pepper too!) However, I recommend figuring out how to make your stew sauce thick before hand.