Winning Tips for Winter Stews

Five winning tips by Uri Shavit for making a delicious, rich, nutritious, and healthy winter stew. Pull out the pots and get the secret tricks! 

With the first drizzle of rain or when the temperatures start to cool down, we all pull out the pots and make casseroles and rich stews. They both have common features: they cook for a relatively long time, have a delectable depth of flavor, they create a long-lasting sense of satiety, and add a scent that envelops the whole house and opens up the appetite. For the next pot you make to be successful, tasty, and nutritious, we’ve gathered some tips and tricks for you to help enrich it even more. 

1. Use several varieties of the same vegetable. Suppose you have mushrooms and you’re making a tomato stew or onion soup. The more varied the vegetables, the deeper and richer the flavor will be – combine round tomatoes with tamarind and cherry tomatoes or portobello with champignon and berry mushrooms and feel the difference. 

2. Don't Give Up Root Vegetables.  The richest vegetables in flavors are the root vegetables, with the onion heads and carrots that star in almost every stew. To stews, add whole or cubed celery root, parsley root, turnip, fennel, and more. 

3. Begin frying.  High heat will deepen the flavor and color of the ingredients, so always start cooking with heating the olive oil and frying the vegetables in the pan. Of course, you should not burn them, but only brown and soften them slightly before adding the liquids. The oil itself is also important for enriching the pot. 

4. Add interesting flavors.  Herbs such as thyme or sage, red or white wine, vinegar of various kinds, curry paste, dried porcini mushrooms and of course spices will add to the flavors of the pot you make, allowing you to diversify with different flavors at a time. 

5. Add legumes. Simple vegetable soup can also easily be upgraded thanks to the addition of legumes, which enhance and enrich the texture and of course add a lot of nutritional values. For vegetable soup, I would add orange lentils, to white vegetable root vegetables and tomato and bell peppers – chickpeas. The processes of using pre-cooked legumes can be shortened. 

* Picture is for illustrative purposes only

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Uri Shavit is a veteran food journalist who has been specializing in healthy nutrition in recent years. Shavit runs the successful blog Better Vegetarianism, which is considered the leading site in Israel for the vegan, vegetarian and interested audience. Among other things, she develops recipes, guides cooking workshops, and lectures nationally and internationally on the importance of conscious eating, among other things as part of TEDx.