The by-product of cleaning out the fridge is tasty!

This past weekend I realized that I, yet again, had celery going soft, potatoes sprouting new baby potatoes and tomatoes that would have probably GROWN a worm because they were sitting on my bar for so long. There are no words to describe how lazy I was this past weekend so this girl wasn't getting dressed to go to the store for anyone. Not even me, because I was hungry. So I created... a simple stew! This was inspired, too, by a Facebook pal that posted her crock was broken and I realized I hadn't used mine since last winter!

After I washed and sliced the celery, dug out all the roots on the potatoes with my fingernails and cubed them then chopped up my tomatoes, I tossed everything in the crock pot on high. I opened a small can of diced tomatoes from the cabinet, pulled the rest of my baby carrots from the drawer and halved all of them, grabbed the red onion - on the bar - next to the bag sprouting potatoes - finely chopped, grated two large cloves of garlic, chopped up 2 tablespoons of rosemary and one basil leaf and tossed in three bay leaves and about 1/3 cup of sour cream. I remembered I also had left over cooked chicken from the enchiladas *ahhhh HAA* chicken stew, it is!

I ground in some sea salt, black pepper corn, tossed in about a tablespoon of cumin and chipotle chili powder. I poured in 50% less sodium beef stock just to cover everything, gave everyone a shimmy-shake around the crockpot and covered it - cooked on high for 4 hours. At this point, I checked my potatoes, made sure my tomatoes had burst, cubed the left over chicken and threw that in and let it cook for another hour. Now... at this point, I thought to myself, "self, this would be great over egg noodles... " So, as I'm scrounging around for egg noodles in the cabinet, I run across Lentils. WHAT A TREAT! I was so excited! I finally have a reason to cook these! Great source of protein so I popped those in a pot (these things take 45 minutes to cook!) and cooked them up while the stew finished up. When the lentils were finished I drained them, dumped them in the stew, gave everything another shimmy-shake and grabbed a bowl.

My friends, this was by far my best "just throw it in and see what happens" experiment. Ever. Most of these things do already go together in a beef stew. And I have to admit, I keep a lot of "staples" on hand at home - but this was by far my favorite, without having to leave the house!

Just do it. Left over meats, ripend veggies, herbs that are going to rot.... just do it.