Best Bites

Recipes from our kitchen

We at the Almanac love to cook. Between us, we have over 200 cookbooks, stacks of food magazines, and hundreds of cooking Web sites bookmarked on our computers. Good sources, all, but distant seconds to our favorite recipes, the ones from family, friends, and neighbors that we know are easy to make, will never fail, and always taste good. Those treasures— typed on index cards, scribbled on envelopes, jotted on napkins—have been accumulating in a box or drawer in our kitchens. Until recently.

Three years ago, we began gathering these reliable recipes and hundreds of others from the Almanac archive—soups, stews, barbecue, pies, pickles, you name it—to create The Old Farmer’s Almanac Everyday Cookbook. Picking favorites from this collection will never be easy but it will always be a joy. Here are a few we want to share. –The Editors

French Farmer’s
Baked Beef and
Barley

11⁄ 2 pounds stew beef

3 tablespoons vegetable oil 1 medium onion, chopped 5 cups beef stock

¹⁄ 2 teaspoon dried thyme

¹¹⁄ 2 teaspoon dried marjoram ¹⁄ 4 teaspoon dried rosemary 1 cup pearl barley

11 tablespoon finely chopped fresh parsley, for garnish

P reheat the oven to 350°F. Trim all of the fat from the beef and cut into ¹⁄2-inch cubes. Heat the oil in a large skillet and sauté the onion. Add the beef cubes and brown them on all sides. Transfer the onion and beef to a 3-quart ungreased casserole and set aside. Combine the stock, herbs, and barley in the skillet and bring to a boil. Pour the stock mixture over the sautéed onion and beef, cover, and bake for 1 hour. Garnish with parsley and serve in shallow soup bowls with French bread.

Makes 4 servings.

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