Looking for healthier dinner choices, and off dairy for the moment, I found this recipe on a dairy-free site. Turned out pretty darn yummy, with only a few adjustments in italics below:
Ingredients
3 pounds beef shoulder, cut into two inch cubes for stew. ( I bought whatever was already cubed for stews at Ralphs)
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
6 cloves garlic, peeled (Eddie made me mince.)
2 cups dry red wine – not cooking wine! (I used an 01 lesser-than-average Bordeaux)
1/4 cup crème de cassis (We used Chambord. And it was a treat finding a recipe that required it.)
2 large tomatoes, diced small
1 tablespoon coarsely ground black pepper (no more pepper than this, but ADD SALT at the dining table as there is none in the recipe.)
6 bay leaves
6 sprigs fresh thyme, leaves only (or throw in the whole sprigs, and discard them at the end of cooking)
2 pounds very thin long carrots, scrubbed (One pound to 20 ounces is more than sufficient.)
2 dozen very small potatoes, scrubbed (Yukon golds were good.)
2 dozen very small onions, left whole (frozen, clean, pearl onions.)
Directions
On a stovetop: Place the beef, oil and eight cups of water in a heavy wide bottom pot. Bring to a boil. (Ignore how disgusting it looks.) Reduce to medium and cook covered 2 hours. Add all remaining ingredients to the pot, in the order they were given, and cook one more hour. The meat should be fork-tender. Transfer the meat and all the vegetables on a platter with a slotted spoon. (We just served with slatted spoon and put drippings in a bowl for dipping French bread into. Then skipped the rest of the recipe.) If the liquid left in the pot is too thin, reduce it on a high flame until it is thickened, the consistency of maple syrup (this will take just a minute or 2, so don’t leave the pot unattended). Pour the reduced liquid over the whole dish, and serve hot.
With a crockpot: layer all the ingredients in a 6 quart crockpot, in the order they were given. Set the crockpot on low in the morning. It will be ready for dinner (10 to 12 hours total cooking time)
This recipe is from the Levana Cooks newsletter. Levana is the author of the great cookbook, Levana Cooks Dairy-Free