Recipe of the Week - Savory Homemade Brunswick Stew

Autumn beckons, and for me that's soup season. This recipe is a winner for us because it's very flavorful, reasonably healthy, and makes a HUGE amount for delicious leftovers which somehow taste even better when reheated! Our version is based on a recipe from Southern Living magazine years ago, but with lots of tweaks over the time we've been making it. Feel free to customize it yourself and call it your own. This makes anywhere from 8 to 16 servings depending on how hungry everyone is!

1 whole chicken (small to medium size is good, say 3-4 lbs) 1 large onion, diced 2 green bell peppers, chopped 1.5 Tbs olive oil 1 large (28 oz) can and 1 small (15 oz) can of whole peeled tomatoes, undrained, coarsely chopped (I use kitchen shears to snip them up while still in the can to save some mess) 1 small (8 oz.) can tomato sauce 1/4 cup sugar 3 Tbs white vinegar 2 Tbs Worcestershire sauce 2 Tbs all-purpose flour 1.5 lb. white or red potatoes, peeled and cubed 1 tablespoon Cholula or similar hot sauce (if you like it spicy, add more!) 1.5 teaspoons salt 1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric (Don't skip this! And watch out because it'll dye your wooden spoons yellow.) 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper 16 oz. frozen or canned corn, drained 16 oz. frozen or canned lima beans, drained

Instructions:

1. Rinse the chicken and remove any giblets, etc. Place in a deep pot and cover with water. Boil for 45 minutes or until done.
2. Remove chicken from broth and place on a plate to cool. Allow the broth to return to a boil over medium to low heat, and let it cook down until it is quite concentrated, boiled down to about two cups.
3. Skin, bone, and chop chicken. Don't chop it up too small or it will all disintegrate later when reheated. One inch cubes are good.
4. Cook the onion and bell pepper in the oil in the bottom of a large soup pot (this is a great recipe for a big enameled cast-iron pot if you have one, but any large pot will do, really, even the one you boiled the chicken in). When softened, add the chopped cooked chicken, both undrained cans of tomatoes, the tomato sauce, sugar, vinegar and Worcestershire sauce.
5. Carefully scoop about 1/2 a cup of your reduced chicken broth from the pot it's been simmering in, into a glass measuring cup. Add the flour and whisk until smooth. Stir into the chicken mixture. If there are a few lumps, don't worry, just stir things around and it will incorporate.
6. Add the rest of the reduced chicken broth, as well as the potatoes, hot sauce, salt, turmeric, and pepper.
7. Cover and cook over medium heat until the potatoes are fork-tender. This can take anywhere from 20-40 minutes depending on your potatoes. When this is done and you are about 10 minutes away from serving, add the drained corn and lima beans, and continue to cook for the remaining 10 minutes or so. This is fairly forgiving if you need to leave it on the stove on low for a bit.

Serve over rice or with warm crusty bread.

Again, this reheats beautifully. We have frozen single servings of it to have as a quick go-to meal for later, and it's one of my favorite things to see a stack of these in the freezer!

If you have a favorite recipe you'd like to share with our readers, please submit it here or email us at: submissions@themotherhoodcollective.org

You Just Never Know (Until You Know)

 

I want to talk about my five-month-old, and pee, and the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Nine years — almost my entire adult life — I have worked as an educator. My husband is a college professor too. Education, facts and research are a big part of our lives, and we were willing suckers for every baby book and doodad that claims to be somehow educational. Black and white brain stimulating mobile? Check. Baby sign language? Alphabet sheets to somehow ooze literacy into his wispy baby head? Check check. But even after just a few months with our little boy, I feel like, cliché or not, really it's I who have most to learn.

Most people are familiar with the paradoxical phenomenon called the Dunning-Kruger effect, even if they’ve never heard of it before. Basically two Cornell researchers did a bunch of observations indicating that in general, the more you actually know about a topic, the more you worry that you don’t know enough. And, not coincidentally, the less you truly know, the more likely you are to overestimate your own expertise! Now, if you're like me, you can instantly, snarkily think of one or two people in your life who this just perfectly applies to. But maybe it’s more useful if we each were first to try applying it to ourselves.

Raising my hand right here: I was a classic Dunning-Kruger parenting “expert” before my baby was born. Reading and note-taking are kind of my favorite thing ever, so I researched the very soul out of every single newborn issue I could imagine. Nine glorious months of page-turning and highlighting! I knew that parts of my pregnancy, birth, and parenting journey would be out of my hands, and parts I could do my best to control. Statistics and anecdotal evidence alike were ready and confident on the tip of my tongue. I spent time reading birth stories of every possible variation of experience. And I don't regret any of that reading, or thinking, or planning. It helped me do pregnancy my way, and made so much of the unknown feel safer to me. Yet within a few weeks of my actual son’s actual arrival? Even though in fact I suddenly had much more experience, I felt so much less of an expert.

Despite having great support, I found there were so many things that felt harder than I had anticipated. It isn't that nobody warned me; on the contrary I had several honest mama friends who shared their hearts and tried to prepare me for the changes newborn life would bring. But nothing really could. So many of the shortcuts, tips, and tricks that had been “lifesavers” for my mama friends didn’t work for me, or for my baby, at all. Even some of the issues I thought I would feel most passionate about, in my prenatal fits of highlighting, ended up falling away as I found myself with a new, smaller set of certainties. Here are just a few of the things I held on to in those early days:

• Things will get easier. Even though every age will have its challenges, newborn life is a tough adjustment for almost all new parents. The roller coaster cliché is true. But it will be okay.

• It’s only a little pee. Let’s just say my standards of what constitutes a true midnight laundry emergency have… evolved.

• Don’t mess with happy. Whether it’s the baby’s happiness, or my own, I have realized how much I tend to over-meddle. He's asleep with his head flopping to the side? That can't be comfortable... maybe if I just "fix" it... You see where this is going, right? It’s not always wise to try to perfect something that is already working out okay.

• Let him see you smiling. He looks to me so often in this phase of his life. Okay, at first he mostly stared at my hairline or maybe the ceiling fan, but pretty soon he realized it's the parents who are the first center of his universe. So I don’t want to always have my brow furrowed, to always be worrying about the next thing that could somehow be better. I want him to see me smile, because really? We have a lot to smile about.

And even any of these, I know, might not ring true for any one reader in particular. My point is: Not one of them would have seemed like an important idea to me back when I was an expert. And it's this change, from the researched knowledge to the experienced, that no one could really prepare me for.

I still read a lot, when I can fit it in. I still care about doing the best I can to make reasonable decisions on issues that come up. But as my little boy grows, I continue to realize how much is probably out there that I still really don’t know. There are times when I imagine all the questions ahead of us, all the things I don't even know I don't know yet, and within me anxiety starts to rise. But when it does, I try my best to remember good old Dunning-Kruger, take a deep breath, and remind myself that maybe, just maybe, the less I feel like I confidently know “for sure” as a parent, the more I’ve actually learned.

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