Last Sunday we decided to cook for a friend coming over and had an interesting challenge, avoid gluten, yeast, and a few other gotcha ingredients, and ideally easy to chew soft food. Striking out on the interwebs I came across the following recipe on Food.com for a “sausage and potato bisque”. Well, it’s not a bisque, it’s a stew, but it seemed like it would be yummy and could be made to meet all of the dietary checkboxes.

In short the recipe was scrumptiously yummy, easy to shop for, easy to prep in parallel if a guest is willing to help in the kitchen (we had 2 chopping stations going in parallel), and leaves a good 40 minutes of simply cooking down on the stove while you hang out.

The recipe seemed amenable to some minor modifications, as well. We ended up putting in a whole clove of chopped garlic, tripling the black pepper, and substituting chopped fresh rosemary for the thyme in the recipe.

I also happened to learn a neat trick for dicing an onion, specifically the “radial cut” method shown here. It seems easier to me when you’re chopping only part of the onion to use this method than the horizontal slicing method you see elsewhere.