Cowboy Cooking

Now as a mother, teacher, wife, ranch hand and the various other "jobs" I have there are just nights that I don't want to cook. So one night, shortly after moving to the ranch I figured that the hubby could help out and fix dinner. He's a good cook, I mean he did manage to feed himself during the years before I came along and he runs a mean grill. Well I asked him what he wanted to cook and what he needed out of the freezer for it. His answer was stew and not to worry about it. I thought 'Cool, night off from the kitchen!'.

Yeah, what I did not know then was that when my hubby cooks "stew" it is Son of A Gun Stew, the same recipe that his grandfather use to cook. While this sound harmless, in my book stew should not contain beef kidneys, heart and what ever else strange meat was put in that night. Now I had been smelling this stew cook all day and I will admit that it did smell good and I was hungry by the time we all got around to sitting down to dinner. At that point in time I still did not know what "mystery" meat was contained in the dinner. It was not until I sat down with the bowl and started looking for my usual large chunks of beef that I thought to ask what was in Son of A Gun stew. It was then that my hubby, somewhat sheepishly, told me exactly what was put in to make this stew. While I am normally an adventurous soul when it comes to trying new food, that night the girls and I had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner and hubby had enough stew to last him a week.

Now when the those nights come about where I'm too tired or still busy to cook I pull out leftovers from the fridge and everyone gets to pick what they want. It is safer that way. I have also learned that when you ask a cowboy to fix dinner and what do they need to fix it, if they tell you not to worry about: Worry about it, no telling what you are going to get.