Beef stew eww

I had Cafe Rio yesterday, their pork barbacoa tacos. I really wanted the pork salad but my son loves the rice that accompanies the tacos and is all but lost in the salad. So tacos it was. Today, I thought, I bet there are knock off recipes online! Cause that sweet Barbacoa is like crack and the dressing for the salad..I could drink it by the cupful.

And no this isn't some pregnancy craving as the pork and dressing have been an ongoing obsession of mine since I discovered it last year.

So I googled my taste buds away and found recipes! I was so excited. Still an excited and salivating.

But alas hubby had to deliver the bad news. No barbacoa and no cilantro dressing because we had been shopping. This week was to be steak and beef stew. Beef stew? Barf stew or beef eww is more like it. I have never been much of a beef fan and have nightmares of my mom's "stew" or "pot roast" (interchangeable terms in my house) which was more God awful than even boiled dinner. She would sear an unseasoned beef chunk, drop it into a pot of water, add an onion and a few potatoes, a grind of pepper, and let it boil all day. It was super brothy bland ands gross.

Sure, I was excited to learn stew and pot roast could be edible. Gravy like. So I ate it a few times, relishing it in its glory of, well, edible-ness. And then, I got over it. I am just not a meat and potatoes girl. It took me 20 years to even eat more than one bite of beef, and to touch a potato that wasn't fried or mashed into a butter and cream stupor and suffocated in a cat of gravy. I have come a long way.

But upon hearing that I was to make beef stew this week, an inescapable fate since we have all the ingredients which can't go to waste, I sulked. Barf. Even in a stewy-gravy sauce, boiled meat and potatoes is just no fun. I pick at the stringy meat and weird fatty sinews and stab uninterested at the potatoes without flavor. I have tried many a recipe but beef stew and pot roast always taste like beef stew or pot roast. When they are as exciting to my taste buds as pork barbacoa or lamb gyro or vindaloo, cool. Until then, you will see a happy hubby suck down a bowl of meat and potatoes and a sullen girl who forces herself to eat enough not to go hungry.

Oh pork barbacoa, how I long for you.