Beef and Chorizo Stew with Roast Potatoes

Tucked into a corner of our kitchen is the door into the cellar.  Down there lives a number of spiders of varying size, my fluctuating wine collection, our sofa*, R's future stocks of Lego and our over-flow freezer.  There are days when retrieving food from the freezer can be like a trip into the Temple of Doom, fighting past toppling towers of timber and vaulting discarded furniture while trying not to be skewered on some tools that have not been put away properly.  Today, I gingerly made the trip into the cellar to retrieve a portion of leftover Beef and Chorizo Stew, for our evening meal.

I knew that the stew was down there because on the door in the kitchen, we have a blackboard which lists the freezers contents.  We are in the process of adding yet another blackboard to the kitchen but I'll get back to that later.  It transpires that I had originally cooked the stew to form the base of a Spanish inspired cottage pie.  I had forgotten this nugget of information otherwise I may have tried the same trick with the leftovers.

In the end I made a huge pile of roasties to serve with the stew.  The drawing in of the nights and the chill in the air made my mind up for me on that front.  The stew was delicious with the sweet, smoky Spanish spice flavours that I adore.  The roasted anya potatoes were that magical thing, both crispy and fluffy.  However, having now eaten the stew twice my quest for a Spanish cottage pie remains unfulfilled.

This is where the second backboard is going to come in.  We are going to have a blackboard of dreams.  The dishes I want to create, the challenges ahead, the ingredients untried.  All of these things will feature and hopefully, they will not stay on the wall for too long.

*we are decorating the living room and the furniture needed to go somewhere!