The first step was to obtain some meat. She calls for stewing meat, so I went to Whole Foods (Whole Paycheck) and amazingly, they had some chuck blade steak on sale for $3.99/lb. Chuck works for a stew, heck, any cheap cut of meat works. This wasn't cut into pieces yet, but I have a sharp knife, I'm up to the task.
The recipe called for 2" pieces, I don't know 2" but I do know bite-sized, so I went with that. I should have made my pieces about twice as big (and thereby made them ~2"), because it would have been fewer batches to brown them. Anyway, Julia says its very important to dry your meat or it won't brown properly, so, here is the meat sitting on its paper towels drying out.
The first actual step was to take a 6oz chunk of bacon and cut it into lardons. Now, I have regular bacon in the fridge, so I went with that. Sorry, deviating from the recipe, but I figured the flavor it gave to the dish would be similar, although I'd miss simmering the bacon rind in the stew. It was amazing anyway, so thats alright. The first step, once you've cut your bacon into lardons, is to boil it for 10 minutes. Boiled bacon... um, alright. Once its boiled, you take it out, and cook it with some olive oil in your "casserole" (I used Ed's dutch oven, I suppose thats the same thing) so that it browns. Here it is boiling away...
Once the bacon has browned, you pull it out of there, and start browning the beef. This ended up taking me ten batches, because she says to not crowd the meat - and I agree with her, can't get a good sear if there is too much meat in the pan. You're supposed to heat the fat until its almost smoking, and then start browning the meat. I used tongs to put it in there, but the oil was spattering a bit, so I used a longer-handled wooden spoon to rotate the meat. You should also hit the oven at 450F so it can pre-heat while you do this.
You can see the fat and extra beef bits burning to the bottom of the dutch oven. I still haven't cleaned that thing yet. Whoops. 
As the beef browned, I added it to the plate with the bacon on it (this plate at one point had a paper towel on it, but once the towel had soaked up the grease from the bacon, I removed it, so that I could collect the juice that was coming out of the beef - mmmmm, blood!), you can see my setup... Eventually, you'll finish browning all the meat. Yay! You'll also probably be covered in little burn marks from the hot oil splattering, this is ok, because chicks dig scars. (pain is only temporary, glory lasts forever, chicks dig scars. It applies in the kitchen, too). Put your chopped carrot and chopped onion in the pan, and saute them until they're brown too. Then, pull the pan off the heat and drain off any excess fat. I didn't have any excess fat, in fact, I'd had to add more oil to keep browning the beef - this probably has to do with the fact that I cut it into pieces that were too tiny. Whoops. Now for the flavoring. Add the beef back to the pan, and toss with 1/4tsp pepper and 1/2 tsp salt - table salt. Then add 2-3 tbs flour, and toss to coat. Supposedly, this gives a crust to the beef, but I think more importantly, it'll thicken the stew. I could see just stirring in the flour once there is liquid in there... but thats for another recipe.
Once the beef is coated with flour, put the dutch oven in the oven (which is at 450F) for 4 minutes. After 4 minutes is up, take it out, toss it around, and put it back for another 4 minutes. Supposedly this will brown the flour, but I didn't really see much browning happening. Once the second four-minute stint is up, take the dutch oven out, and turn down the oven to 325. Add the bacon and vegetables back to the beef, and add 3C of red wine (I used a merlot, as that was what I had on hand), and 2-3C of beef stock (I used water with 3 chicken boullion cubes... sometimes, you just don't have any homemade beef stock on hand) until the contents of the pot are just barely covered. In goes 1 tbs of tomato paste, 2 cloves of smashed garlic, and a crumbled bay leaf. I was out of bay leaves, so added some rosemary instead, because I like rosemary.
Put the top on the dutch oven, and bring it to a simmer on the stove. Then stick in the oven for 2-3 hours. The sauce tasted pretty wine-y before I put it in the oven, but when I checked it after 3 hours, it was definitely done and the sauce had lost any of that overly wine-y flavor - now it was just delicious. I couldn't stop licking the spoon. It had thickened up a lot, you're supposed to drain off the sauce, but that was really hard to do, I only got about 2C of sauce, and that was after adding more water to it to thin it out (they say to add beef boullion, but I didn't have any of that.
I poured the sauce through a strainer into a saucepan, and put the beef in a bowl for later. I sort of scrubbed out the pot, to use for the veggies.Then it was time for the vegetables. You're supposed to make Julia's braised onions, and I sort of did that. I sauteed onions (I had about 8 little ones left over from something, and added another one big one, chopped up) in olive oil for ~10min, until they were just starting to caramelize. Then I put them in the dutch oven, covered with water and chicken boullion, and left to simmer for ~40min. The mushrooms were next. I had a pound of white mushrooms, I quartered them and salted them, just to get out some water. Then I cooked them in ~1.5tbs butter and 1 tbs oil, as called for, but I totally crowded the pan. Whoops. Forgot about that one. Julia says if you crowd the pan the mushrooms will steam in their juices, and they were definitely doing that.
Well, all wasn't lost, as I poured off some of the mushroom juice, and turned the pan up to high, tossing them around every once in a while - they browned. So, at this point, you are supposed to skim off the fat from the sauce. I didn't see any obvious fat, I sort of half-heartedly spooned off some stuff that looked like it might just be fat, but it wasn't like when you make chicken stock and the fat comes to the top and congeals. You're supposed to boil the sauce for a bit to make it thicker, I did that, but then you're just supposed to serve the stew as is. Since I knew I'd be serving it to more people and I was worried there wouldn't be enough, I'd added two potatoes, a parsnip, and three carrots to the braising onions. This ended up diluting the stew so that it wasn't quite as delicious as it had been before dilution. Damn. It was still darn good, though. Two of the four people who were over (and one of the four was a vegetarian, so technically thats 2/3) wanted the recipe. It just had been better before I went and added a bunch of vegetables - velvety, rich, bursting with flavor. I just started drooling again just thinking about it.
So my plans for this stew are to take the basic idea and make it something that takes a lot shorter to prepare and doesn't have quite so much bacon or oil in it. Stay tuned for variations along those lines...
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