Cheddar Chicken Chowder

Soup season continues, this time with a hearty, thick, decidedly UNpaleo offering that I shamelessly ripped off of Cooking Light and modified to be healthier.  Cooking Light's schtick is to "lighten" up recipes to make them lower calorie and lower fat.  Often, this means that they use low-fat products which, as we all know, as just horrid conduits of synthetic or processed sugars (among other issues); so, while you're calorie count goes down, your glycogen process goes all to heck.  Now, let me clear up something about this soup: There are corn and potatoes in the recipe, which doesn't do your glucose levels any favors.  Unless your body is accustomed to starches and carbohydrates it's quite possible you may experience an insulin spike and resulting crash with this soup.  For anyone who is fully dedicated to eating Atkins, paleo, or South Beach this is a soup to avoid.  For those who embrace the clean eating and everything-in-moderation position this is an awesome addition to the soup season repertoire.  Whenever I have guests in the winter this is one of my favorite things to prepare and serve with a warm, crusty bread.  It would even serve beautifully in bread bowls if you have that option.

All that said, I didn't take pictures of the preparation of this soup, so all my pictures are acquisitions off the internets, including the final picture of the soup output.  That's just the way the Adventure Cooker rolls, sometimes.

Cheddar Chicken Chowder

5 c. chicken broth
2-3 lbs chicken breast or chicken tenderloins, cut into bite-sized pieces
4-6 slices thick cut bacon, chopped
10 oz frozen corn (or similar size - whatever your grocery store has)
4-5 small-to-medium red potatoes, unpeeled and chopped 
1 red bell pepper, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, pressed/smashed/diced/what-have-you
12 oz can coconut milk (or 2 c. whole milk or heavy cream)
8-12 oz sharp or extra sharp cheddar cheese, shredded
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
Arrowroot or cornstarch to thicken

In a large soup pot on high heat, brown the bacon pieces.  Remove the bacon pieces and leave the rendered grease in the soup pot.  The bacon bits will be used as a soup topping later (unless your spouse finds them first and eats them all).  Add the chicken to the bacon drippings and brown the chicken for 5 minutes or so.  Add bell pepper, onion, garlic, salt, and pepper.  When things get aromatic, add the chicken broth and potatoes.  Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer for 45-60 minutes.  When the potatoes are thoroughly cooked, increase the heat, add the frozen corn and bring back to a boil.  Add the coconut milk (or cream) and, with the soup at a good boil, thicken with your chosen starch.  Reduce the heat and stir in the shredded cheese, one handful at a time until it's thoroughly blended.  

Serve topped with bacon bits (if there are any left), a little more shredded cheese, and green onion.  Roasted green chile goes with this amazingly, too! 

This soup reheats well, but doesn't freeze nicely.  


To avoid falling into process armageddon, I've found that doing all the chopping up front makes putting this soup together a lot easier.  Be mindful of cross contamination issues, since you'll be horsing around with raw chicken.  What I do is chop all my veggies first: Onion, pepper, garlic, and potatoes.  But, Adventure Cooker, won't the potatoes go black as they oxidize? Oh yeah.  Well, if everything is prepped with sufficient alacrity, AND if you toss a damp paper towel over your chopped produce you'll slow that process down some.  If you're really worried about the potatoes going black chop them up and submerge them in a bowl of cold water until you're ready to use them.

Next, chop your meats up. To prevent cross contamination problems with the raw chicken, chop your bacon first, and make the last thing you do on your cutting board the chicken.  To even further avoid cross contamination problems, use a completely separate cutting board for the chicken, but for those of us who cherish minimal clean up and are good at thoroughly disinfecting our cutting boards, this process works, too.  So, bacon first.

Chicken second.  

Any cut of chicken will work in this recipe, really, but if speed is of the essence, I found that using chicken tenderloins was easiest because it was only one chopping exercise, instead of using thighs or breasts where you'd have to slice it up and then chop the slices.  And, really, who needs all that noise?

Brown the bacon up, being sure to leave the bacon grease/rendering in the soup pot.

After you've removed the bacon pieces, add the chicken and brown that up.

It's painfully obvious that I stole all these pictures and I'm feeling vaguely ashamed about that right now.  Well, not really, but still.  Onward.

Add the bell pepper, onion, and garlic and stir up until the delicious smells of bacon-seared chicken and veggies starts to waft out of the soup pot.  Dump in the chicken broth.  This is where you can take advantage of your previous soup efforts wherein you also socked away chicken broth in the freezer!

Add your potatoes to everything, bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, cover, and leave it alone for 45-60 minutes, or however long it takes for the potatoes to be thoroughly cooked.  Bring the soup up to a rolling boil and add your corn niblets.  It's important to use frozen corn here because it is still basically raw and crisp.  Canned corn has had the ever-lovin' life cooked out of it already so to add it to a soup would be the equivalent of running over a dead cat: it only gets deader.

Corn is one of those things that is best bough organic, since it is one of the chiefly GMOed products on the market currently.  That said, only do what your budget can handle.  Go ahead and drop in the coconut milk or dairy cream, depending on what your preference is.  I use coconut milk because it's something I almost always have in the pantry (see inadvertent plug for buying things on Amazon there?).

 The corn and milk will drop the soup's temperature, so bring the soup up to a boil again so it can be thickened.  As a dominantly paleo eater, I use arrowroot powder to thicken things, but the tricky thing about arrowroot is that heat breaks it down, so you can't endlessly keep your soup simmering with an arrowroot thickener because eventually it will thin again.  But, for this soup, arrowroot works just grand.

Tapioca starch, non-gmo corn starch, or even unbleached white flour would also work as optional thickeners.  If you're going to go the flour route, mix it into the coconut milk or cream, and then slowly whisk the cream into the soup.  Once the soup is thickened, reduce the temperature a little to avoid scorching or sticking and start to add your shredded cheese, one handful at a time.

The cheese should smoothly blend into the soup changing the color of it from a creamier white to a pale orange/yellow.  Delicious.  Served up, it should look something like this:

It tastes so good.  The heartiness of the thick soup with the chicken and potatoes contrasted with the sweet snap of corn and the saltiness of bacon and cheese.  The gift of the senses is something to be thankful for with this soup.  Enjoy!

Chicken Chile Verde With A Side Of Chicken Stock

It's January (Happy 2013!), so that means it's been winter for a while.  Everyone has different standards of what qualifies as winter, but for the Adventure Cooker, winter means any day that is less than 70 degrees fahrenheit.  So, what does one do when the temperatures dip, the clouds roll in, and winter plops its generous unwelcome butt in our favorite chair? We make soup.  Chicken Chile Verde soup is an excellent way to kick off soup season, but despair not if you don't have fresh chile in the super market or in your freezer.  Most grocery stores carry it in their canned food section, and while it's not 100% marvelous it's certainly better than no green chile at all, am I right? Huh? >nudge nudge< Huh?

There's a bonus feature to this recipe, that that's a quick side note about making chicken stock from the chicken bones.  Most of the ingredients necessary to make the soup are also necessary to make chicken stock, which can then be frozen for future use.  You can make six to eight cups of chicken stock for just a little more than the cost of one can of store bought stock, but healthier since you can control the sodium content, oil, and other factors.  Piggy backing cooking efforts like this saves time and save a lot of money in the long run.  I don't think I've had to buy chicken broth in over 6 months since I started this practice.

I made this soup back in October, so I had access to fresh chile which I roasted on my grill and chopped up in large meaty chunks.  If you can buy whole chiles in the can, just do a rough chop so you get nice hearty chunks of chile in the soup.  First, though, let's look at the recipe.

Chicken Chile Verde

1 chicken, roasted, boned, and chopped
5 cups chicken broth
1 cup chopped green chile
10-12 smallish tomatillos cut into bite-sized chunks. 
3-4 celery stalks, chopped
1 medium white or yellow onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, finely diced (or run through a garlic masher)
2 TBSP coconut oil (or olive oil, or butter)
1 TBSP dried oregano
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp salt (or more, depending on your preferences)
1/2 tsp ground black pepper

In a large soup pot over medium-high heat, add the coconut oil. When the oil is hot (but not smoking) add the celery, onion, and garlic.  Sautee until the onions are getting translucent and the celery is bright green. Add the chicken broth and bring to a boil. Add the oregano, cumin, salt, and pepper, followed by the green chile, chicken, and tomatillos. Simmer for no less than 30 minutes, or as long as 2 hours (keeping an eye on the moisture level in the pot).  

This would also work in a crockpot by omiting the oil and sauteeing step and just adding all the ingredients into the crockpot. Turn the crockpot on low for 6-8 hours, or on high for 4-6 hours.

Serve topped with freshly chopped red onion and cilantro leaves.  


Chicken Broth
8 cups of water
Bones from the chicken
The remaining celery stocks chopped into large pieces
1 large onion (or 2 medium onions) chopped into large pieces
6-8 cloves of garlic - peeled or unpeeled makes no difference
3-4 whole bay leaves
2 whole cloves
2 tsp dried thyme
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground pepper

Add everything together in a large stock pot and bring to a boil.  Reduce to a low simmer, cover and let simmer for no less than 1 hour. The longer it simmers the stronger the broth will be, but with boiling comes evaporation/reduction which produces a smaller yield, too.  Strain the broth through a very fine mesh sieve, or through a cheese cloth. The broth will be cloudy and delicious.  It can be saved in the refrigerator for 1 week, or frozen.  

My grocery budget isn't infinite, so more often than not, I'll buy a whole, raw chicken and roast it in the oven, since it usually a few bucks cheaper than buying a rotisserie chicken from the deli.  That said, a rotisserie chicken from the deli would work in exactly the same way as I'm about to describe with the raw chicken.

I don't want the chicken to fall apart in the cooking process which means I'm going to truss it up.  I also don't have any cooking twine so I'll use the chicken itself to serve as the binding tool.  In the flap of skin along the gaping chicken hole between the breast and leg, I'm going to pierce with a knife enough to push the chicken leg through it. 

  

Repeat with the other leg.

Viola! Trussed chicken.  Granted, this leaves the wings unattended, but my pan is small enough to keep the wings pinned in place.  I sprayed my 9"x9" glass pan with cooking spray and put the chicken there in.

I dusted the chicken with some salt, pepper, and put it in the oven at 325F for 2.5 hours. For a moister chicken that doesn't have the lovely golden skin, cover it for the same cooking duration.  This is where my available time to document things and life conflict, so the only picture I have of the completed chicken is this one, after it had been refrigerated for 24 hours.

Obtain your soup and stock pots

Skin and debone the chicken.  Toss the bones into your larger stock pot for making chicken stock and rough chop the chicken meat and set it aside.

Since the goal is to make broth and soup in this exercise, let's get the rest of our basic ingredients together: celery, onion, and garlic.

Here is where you, the cooker, have two options.  You can cook your stock fresh and use it to make your soup, OR, you can use chicken stock you already have on hand.  This all depends on your available time.  In my case, I had stock already in the freezer so I was doing these activities in tandem.  Because the stock takes longer I got that working first.  In the stock pot where the chicken bones rested I added the rough chopped celery, large onion, and whole unpeeled garlic, along with the other spices listed in the above recipe, and started it to simmering.

While the chicken stock simmered, I did the rest of my chopping and gathering of spices.

Then, with great fanfare and with the delicious smell of simmering chicken stock to motivate me, I began to sauté the onions, garlic, and celery.

To this I added my chicken stock, green chile, and spices.

And, to that I added the chicken.

I like using both the light and dark meat of the chicken.  Partly so I'm not wasting food, and partly because I can fish out the dark meat pieces which my children are more willing to eat, saving me the hastle (and bad habit) of cooking them food that is separate from the general evening meal.

OOO! Lookie! Simmering chicken broth!

Here's the part when everything is going along nicely and I grab my ears and yank in alarm because I have very nearly forgotten to add the tomatillos to the soup.  These are very important.  Don't forget the tomatillos.

Peel and chop these little veggies up and add them to the soup.

Let the soup simmer for no less than 30 minutes, but obviously, the longer it can stew together the better the overall taste will be.

I served this soup up paleo style, thusly.

But, if you're clean eating, gluten free, or otherwise able to consume dairy you could also top it with sharp cheddar and/or sour cream.  Matthew and I ate a leisurely dinner, or as leisurely as Matthew ever eats.  I cleaned up my kitchen and put the kids to bed all the while the chicken stock simmered.  Ultimately, my stock cooked for 4 hours before I strained it.

I got this sieve at IKEA (where else?) for less than $20 and it works very well for this purpose.  The resulting broth yielded 6 cups of stock that I froze in 1 cup increments.

Try this.  It's really not much extra work if you're already messing around with the foundational ingredients of chicken, celery, onion, and garlic.

Green Chile Chicken Enchiladas

I think we can all agree that there is very little point to eating any kind of diet lifestyle if it means that enchiladas are suddenly off the menu.  Unlike sugar-coated chocolate caramel cake nobs that are, by design, for the strict purpose of building fat asses, enchiladas are sufficiently flexible to modify for most eating plans, except for strict paleo.  The mantra for this recipe is this:

No. Corn.  More specifically, no corn tortillas.  But, Adventure Cooker, what about organic corn tortillas? To which I would reply that genetically modified corn seeds grown organically are still genetically modified and therefore unfit for healthy lifestyle food consumption.  I could go on and on with the damage done to our American food supply by the propagation of GMO seeds, but I'll leave that to the food supply conspiracy theorist folks.  Besides the risks of GMO foods being largely unresearched and therefore unreported, corn is also a huge source of starch and sugar that the body doesn't need if the expectation is for it to function optimally.  Corn and cake belong in the same category: very rarely, if at all.  

Allergen Notes: Dairy

Lifestyle: Clean Eating, Gluten Free, Lacto-Paleo (with modification)

Green Chile Chicken Enchiladas

1 rotisserie chicken, boned and chopped

12-16 ounces of shredded sharp cheddar cheese

1 1/2 cups quinoa flakes

1/2 onion, chopped

Green chile sauce

Green Chile Sauce

16+ ounces of roasted, chopped green chile

1 cup chicken broth

3 TBSP arrowroot powder

1 TBSP coconut oil

1/2 onion, finely chopped

1-2 tsp ground cumin (this is a to-taste kinda thing)

1 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp oregano

Preheat the oven to 350F. 

To make the sauce, heat a sauce pan with coconut oil.  Add the chopped onion and cook until starting to look translucent.  Add the green chile, chicken broth, cumin, garlic powder, salt, and oregano.  Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and let simmer for 20-30 minutes.  Mix the arrowroot powder with 1/4 c - 1/2 cup of cold water (or cold chicken broth).  Bring the chile sauce to a rolling boil and whisk in the arrowroot powder to thicken the sauce.  Be judicious to not over-thicken because, unlike corn starch, arrowroot powder can make your sauce into a pudding by overuse.  Once thickened, remove from heat.  

Spray a 9x9 inch baking pan with oil.  Sprinkle 1/2 cup of quinoa flakes on the bottom.  Place layer of chicken, and top with chopped onions and a generous portion of cheese.  Ladle green chile sauce over cheese and chicken, and repeat the next layer: quinoa flakes, chicken, onions, cheese, and chile.  Top with remaining quinoa flakes.  

Cover and bake for 30-45 minutes. Let stand for 10 minutes before serving. 

Now, let's spend some time reviewing the ingredients list, starting with the chicken.  If you are truly into the know-where-your-food-comes-from crowd, then find yourself one of these: 

 And, turn it into one of these:

Or, just buy one from the store.  A lot of times I will buy a whole roaster and cook it myself, but more often than not, since time is often a commodity, I'll buy a rotisserie chicken from the store.  Here's the thing about chicken: Vegetarian fed chickens are nice and non-hormone and non-antibiotic treated vegetarian fed chickens are even better.  But, what all those lack are the natural vitamin and mineral content of a chicken that is pasture raised on a normal diet for chickens.  Vegetarian fed usually means corn and soy, which, as we all know from corn fed cows, makes for a fat chicken but one with very little nutritional value.  Finding pasture raised chickens is tricky, not to mention expensive, so most of us will have to content ourselves with our best available commercial options.  

 
Cheese.  SHARP cheddar cheese.  Sharp cheddar and green chile are together a combination fit for the palates of royalty, which is to say, you.  Since awareness is 90% of the cooking and eating battle, cheese is a perfect example of how to start learning to exercise awareness.  Read the labels:  Orange cheeses are food dyed that way, so check to make sure your cheese is dyed with anatto and not a chemical yellow food dye.  If you are trying to stay completely dye free, look for naturally white sharp cheddar.  Also, check for labeling that ensures the cheese was made from cows not treated with rBST.  One last word on cheese, give strong consideration to shredding the cheese freshly from a block.  Commercially packaged pre-shredded cheese is coated with a silicate to prevent the cheese from clumping and sticking together.  Since we don't eat the silicate packets from our vitamin bottles, I would also suggest you shouldn't be eating food-grade silicate that coats pre-shredded cheese.  

The chopped onions in this recipe was an idea I took from the enchiladas served at the Golden Pride restaurant in Albuquerque, NM.  Because the onions don't cook through during the baking process, there is this bright textural crunch that heightens the enchilada experience.  The trick here is to not overuse the onions.  You just want a noticeable sprinkle on each layer, nothing more.

While I grant that some may thing that quinoa flakes are a poor substitute for corn tortillas, I will put forward that they do one thing much better and that is add a richness and flavor to the enchiladas that far surpasses anything a corn tortilla can do.  I'm sure there are loads of quinoa flake brands out there, but this is the brand I have access to and I've been very happy with it.

By omitting the quinoa all together this recipe could qualify as a lacto-paleo recipe, meaning it fits within the paleo paradigm for those paleo eaters who are still consuming portions of dairy.  Whether or not you could still call it an enchilada at that point is a matter of some debate.




During chile season there is no reason at all why you shouldn't be buying your chile pods fresh and roasting them yourself for the purpose of making your own sauce.  However, since we here at Adventure Cooker Cooking respect the noose of time constraints using frozen chile will also work.

I'd discourage buying pre-made sauce for two reasons: corn starch and sodium.  By making the sauce from scratch you are controlling all the secondary and tertiary contributions to its make up that allow this meal to be considered a healthy part of the recipe rotation or just a salt-packed, corn by-product, gut-inflaming indulgence.

Bake these enchiladas in a covered glass or ceramic dish for 30-45 minutes.  After they come out of the oven, let them stand (still covered) for 10 or so minutes before cutting in and eating them.  Pair this with some amazing guacamole and a blisteringly cold pinot grigio.  Enjoy! 

Red Wine Beef Short Ribs

I say, "SHORT RIBS!" You say, "DEAD COW!"  SHORT RIBS! >DEAD COW!< SHORT RIBS! >DEAD COW<! YAAAAY!!!  That is going to be our cheer for this recipe, so break out your pom poms and your glitter eye shadow and get ready for some melt-in-your-mouth beefy goodness.

Allergen Notes: None

Lifestyle: Paleo, Clean Eating

Red Wine Beef Short Ribs

3 lbs boneless short ribs (or 4 lbs bone-in short ribs)

1 large onion sliced thin

4 small turnips peeled and cut into your preferred size of chunks (not too small, though, or they'll dissolve during the cooking process). 

4 stalks of celery cut into thick slices

8 ounces of whole baby brown mushrooms (sometimes called pearls)

6 ounces of small/thin baby carrots (actual baby carrots would be awesome, but the commercial kind work, too)

1 cup dry red wine (not cooking wine, actual drinking wine, please)

1 cup beef broth

1 TBSP coconut oil (or olive oil)

3 tsp fresh thyme (or 1 tsp dry)

1 tsp garlic powder

1/2 tsp mustard powder

salt

pepper

1. Spray the crockpot with some manner of spray oil, largely to help with the cleaning process later. 

2. Prepare the vegetables, keeping the onions separated from the rest. 

3. Heat a large frying or griddle pan with the coconut oil until the oil is almost smoking (smoke point of unrefined coconut oil is around 350F). Generously salt and pepper the ribs and then brown the short ribs on all sides. 

4. Place the first round of ribs in the crockpot and top with sliced onions and some of the veggies. Repeat this layering process until all the beef and veggies are in the crockpot.  

5. Mix together the red wine, beef broth, thyme, garlic, and mustard powder.  Pour over the ribs and vegetables.

6. Cover the crockpot and cook on low for 8 hours, or on high for 6 hours.  

Beef short ribs are a relatively inexpensive cut of meat that come from, y'know, a cow.  Specifically, they are cut from the rib and plate primals of the animal. 

If you happen to have recently acquired an elk or deer recently (I'm looking at you, Jerry and Melissa), I'm guessing that venison or elk would work just as beautifully in this recipe as beef.  I am completely uneducated at cooking with game meat, so I can't make a serious recommendation on which cut of the animal would work best.  My initial guess would be to suggest using a roast chunked up so it would cook up like stew meat.  

For our purposes, we are using boneless short ribs because they were on special at my local grocery store, but bone-in would work just as well, and would likely create a richer, beefier output as the marrow from the bones cook into the broth and vegetables.  You can read everything you'd care to know about short ribs here.  The plan here is to slow cook these in the crockpot, so go dig yours out of storage, or lift it off its gilded pedestal (which is where mine is kept).  

Next, find your griddle pan or frying pan.  To get the best searing effect, I like to use either a heavy cast iron skillet or my ribbed griddle pan.  I got mine from IKEA for $15.   But the bigger question is WHY use a ribbed griddle pan? So we can get hoity-toity grill marks on our meat, that's why.  Heat this pan up with some oil in it until the oil is just about smoking.  It needs to be plenty hot so when the meat hits the surface it immediately sears. We want to sear the outside without cooking the inside.  

Generously salt and pepper the beef.  

  

Line up your vegetables and crockpot, um, crock so the assembly process can go smoothly.  Everything is there: Onions, mushrooms, carrots, and chopped up turnips and celery.  As a note, you could replace the turnips with rutabagas or even parsnips if you wish.  For a very hearty fall-tasting final product use all three root vegetables along with the others listed in the recipe.   

Now, BEGIN! 

 

Lay only a few pieces of beef into the hot pan at a time, searing the meat in batches.  If you overcrowd the meat then it'll steam, not sear.  Keep at least 2 or more inches between each piece of meat to avoid making the steam versus sear mistake.  And, if you have a ribbed griddle pan then lay the meat at a diagonal to make an even hoitier-toitier set of sear lines.   After about 90 seconds on one side, turn over and brown each of the four available sides.  

See?! How awesome is that.  It almost looks like something you'd see on a cooking show! Only, YOU did it! In YOUR kitchen! 

Lay this first set of ribs in the crockpot and top with a generous amount of onions and then its your discretion how many vegetables you want to lay in.  I strongly encourage layering meat and vegetables so both get to take advantage of each other's benefits.  The produce will soak up all that beautiful beef flavor, and the beef will get seasoned beautifully by the vegetables.  If it's all meat on top and veggies on the bottoms (or vice versa) then you'll end up with bored ribs and mushy depressed vegetables. And, a mushy depressed vegetable can really ruin a person's day.  

By the time all the meat has been seared, you should end up with a pretty full crockpot that looks something like this: 

Pretty, don't you think?  I think so, too.  But before we get all chest puffy we need to add our spices and red wine.  Slow cooking beef is a marvelous smell, but slow cooking beef in red wine is especially marvelous.  Pick a drinking wine to cook with instead of cooking wine.  Cooking wine is more vinegar than wine to preserve its shelf life.  Uncork a nice pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon, or burgundy for this recipe and you'll still have enough to drink with dinner.  Alternately, buy a four pack of small bottles and you've got  four one-cup pre-measured servings, which is nice for cooking, but less nice if you're hoping to have something to swill later.  Note: if you don't have any red wine handy, any fortified wine will work like cognac or brandy, just be aware that if you're eating the Paleo lifestyle that the only compatible alcohol materials are wine and tequila.  

Now. Let's talk about broth for a moment.  

 The common thought is that buying organic broth is best, which is true, but there is a lot more to consider, especially when buying beef broth.  For our gluten free friends, most commercial beef broths have MSG and there are even some organic brands that use MSG, too.  Once you find a non-MSG-using beef broth, you'll still want to read the label because Pacific Rim uses evaporated cane juice in theirs, and Swanson Organics uses refined sugar in theirs! If you can't make your own beef broth from scratch then take the time to be super picky to find an organic beef broth that a) does not have MSG; b) does not use sugar or other sweeteners; and, c) does not have any added food dyes.  As you can see, the closest to the beef broth trifecta that I could find still has organic caramel coloring, which won't work for those who are working hard to stay dye free.  But, for my family the lack of MSG and sugar was more important.  

Mix together the broth, wine, and spices and pour over the beef and vegetables.  Cover and cook on the low setting for 8 or so hours, or on high for 6 or so hours.  The final product will be meat that is forkable, falling apart at the slightest touch, soft aromatic vegetables. Yum.