Linagang Tadyáng - Filipino Beef Rib Stew

If there's anything I love about cooking, it's easy cooking. Now, what's easy cooking? For me, it's taking a bunch of really good ingredients and throwing them in the pot. Less than an hour later, voila, food that will last you the whole day.

My mom made this today. I normally cook, but it seems that she and I take turns especially after what I made yesterday. My brother had wanted to make some rotisserie ribs but I highly discouraged it with the sole reason that we needed to eat vegetables. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the potatoes in the garlic and cheese mashed potatoes are vegetables but, I really prefer colorful vegetables.

This stew has cabbages, onion leaves, beans, mushrooms, potatoes, carrotes, onions, a little garlic and a fourth of a bell pepper. Now that sounds like it has some colorful vegetables to me. You don't necessarily have to put all of these vegetables in the stew but you do have to stick to the basics. Now the basics are, onion and garlic for sauteing the meat, cabbages, potatoes and onion leaves, everything else took time to be incorporated into the dish. It began with the green bell pepper, and then the beans and later the mushrooms. How it happened, is pretty clear. A friend of mine loved using bell peppers when cooking so we began to take that up. The beans, my mom's co-worker, Juana, always made very interesting vegetable concoctions. Based on my mother's recount, she loved to half cook all kinds of vegetables. And from the looks of things, she sounded vegetarian. Anyways, enough about that, the mushrooms got in the pot because we didn't know what we were going to do with the mushrooms that were just sitting in the refrigerator.

Linagang Tadyang (Filipino Beef Rib Stew)

1 tbsp olive oil
3 cloves of garlic diced
1/2 a large onion diced
1/4 of green bell pepper diced
10 cups of water
1 lb of beef ribs sliced
1/2 a whole cabbage
3 stalks of onion leaves
1 cup uncooked beans (black, pinto, your choice)
1 cup of roughly sliced mushrooms
4 red medium potatoes cut in half
2 carrots cut into 1/2 inch pieces
Salt and pepper to taste

With the beans, you can either cook them in a separate container or just throw them in the pot when the water is added. But, if you are using a darker bean, like black beans, it is better to cook them in a different pot with a little bit of salt and pepper to taste, just because color incorporates into the soup making it dark. However, if you don't mind, then just go on right ahead and throw them in there.

Sautee the garlic, onions and bell pepper with the olive oil. Once this is done, it should only take about five minutes or less depending on the heat ( I can tell when it starts smelling really good), add the ribs to brown. About eight minutes later, add the ten cups of water and let it simmer for fifteen minutes or until the meat is almost tender. Add some salt and pepper to taste. Keep adding water if it seems too low, try to keep eight to ten cups of water in the pot. Add in the potatoes and carrots and cooked beans.

Once the meat is tender, just adjust the flavor of the soup based on your taste and add the onion, leaves, cabbage and mushrooms. The pot should be covered for 5 minutes or less and let the little steam half cook the leaf vegetables. Quickly uncover and set aside where there isn't any direct heat. Just a reminder, the pot should mostly be covered while cooking.

Have fun!