Vegetable Stew

I made a vegetable stew recently. A quick Google’ing shows a fairly common set of ingredients: onions, zucchini, eggplant, green beans, mushrooms, bell peppers, etc. Another commonality is the preparation: sautéeing the veggies together. Many reviews complain of the resulting stew being “tasteless”! One browns the meat beforehand when making meat stew, so why not brown vegetables? I sautée and brown the vegetables separately before assembling them into a stew. Sweating and then browning the vegetables brings out more flavor.

Also, sautéeing vegetables separately allows me to cook them all to the same doneness, though if one cooks all vegetables at the same time, one can probably achieve that by cutting the vegetables to different sizes according to their required cooking time: bigger pieces for vegetables that cooks quickly (zucchini, mushrooms), and smaller pieces for vegetables taking longer to cook (onions, eggplant, bell peppers).

I used:

• 1 onion
• 1 eggplant
• 3 zucchini, two yellow ones and one green one
• 1 lbs harricots verts (a slimmer, firmer, version of green beans)
• 8 ozs crimini mushrooms, pre-sliced
• 14 ozs canned diced tomatoes
• 1 Tsp tomato paste
• 1/2 tsp dried thyme
• 1/2 tsp dried oregano
• salt to taste, about 1 – 1 1/2 tsps

The onions was the only aromatic.