Asian style Beef Stew with Potatoes and Tomato

This soup is wonderful for a cold wintery day. It warms you up so nicely and makes you feel very cozy inside :) I learned how to make this soup from watching my mom whenever she made it for us. I didn't use the exact same ingredients as she did and my measurements are probably way off from hers, but here's my version :) It's still tasty and filling.

Ingredients:

• about 1 pound of short ribs (or any kind of nice-quality beef. if it has a huge bone in the middle, that would be even better! unfortunately, i didn't :( oh well)
• about 2 inches in length of ginger
• 2 stalks of scallion
• about a cup of cooking wine
• about 8 small potatoes or 2 big potatoes
• 1 medium sized onion 
• whole tomatoes (or 14.5 Oz (411g) diced tomato can)
• 1 medium sized carrot (didn't have them on hand, but if i did i would've put them in!)
• 2 tsp potato starch 
• salt, sugar, pepper, hondashi
• ketchup
• water

The best way to cook this is with a slow cooker or a pressure cooker. Unfortunately, I didn't have any of those on hand, so I just use a normal pot and a stove.

Procedure:

Wash the short ribs well. Pat them dry. Trim away any excess fat (unless you want it). No need to cut them unless they are so big they can't fit  your pan

Heat a pan with oil until it's hot and place the short rib chunks onto pan. It should be sizzling pretty loudly now. Brown each side of the chunks. We're not cooking the ribs. We're merely browning the sides to give it some color. (This step is optional. You can put it immediately into the saucepan)

Transfer the short ribs to a medium sized pot/saucepan. 

Cut 2-4 chunks of ginger (peeled) and cut the scallion into 2 inch pieces. Put them into the pot. Add about 1 cup of cooking wine into the pot or until it reaches about an inch or so of the pot's height. Add water until it covers the beef.

Turn the heat on high and let it come to a boil. After boiling it for a few minutes, reduce it to a simmering level. Simmer on the lowest heat setting for at least 2 hour. (i simmered for almost 5 hours) 

Let it rest on the counter and cool down. Put it in the fridge over night. Remove the fats that float up the next day in the pot (you don't have to do this step unless you want to remove the fats from the soup)

Peel and cut the vegetables: onion, carrots, and potatoes into big chunks. Add them to the soup. Bring the soup back to a boil

In the mean time, heat a pan with the diced tomato in it. If you use whole tomatoes, heat it so that you can flatten it and almost make a paste into it. You want the liquid of the tomatoes. Add the tomato into the pot. 

Boil the soup on low to medium heat for about 20 minutes or until the potatoes and other vegetables become soft. Stir occasionally. Combine about 2 tsp of potato starch with enough water to mix the ingredients together. Pour that into the soup to thicken it. 

Add a good amount of salt, pepper and hondashi to taste. (Hondashi is a type of stock Japanese people use to flavor their soup. If you don't have it, skip it) Add about 2 tsp of ketchup (or 2-3 full squeezes out of the bottle)

Stir and combine everything well. Simmer for another few minutes and serve!

This recipe is very simple with only a few key ingredients. It's prefect for a chilly day and you can store this soup in the fridge for quick access to it whenever you're in a rush that day. This process may seem like it takes a very long time, but you are simmering the soup for majority of the time. That's why it's best to make this in a slow cooker. The point of simmering the meat for that long is so that it becomes very tender and juicy. If you have meat with a bone, the meat will become so tender that it will fall right off the bone! If you find the stew too salty, just add more water to dilute the flavor. You can skip the process where it requires you to cool the soup in the fridge overnight. I recommend you not to skip this step so you can make a much more healthy soup :)