Delicious Japanese-Style Beef Stew

In searching for a delicious Japanese-style main dish to serve my brother who was visiting from out of town, I found a terrific New York Times recipe by Mark Bittman. I figured it had to be good because it had over 1,000 five-star reviews. I've made it several times now and have been very happy with the results. I serve it with Japanese, short-grain, sticky rice. (My brother really liked this stew and asked for the recipe.)

This recipe serves four and takes me about an hour and fifteen minutes to prepare. I've also scaled it up to serve six people. I've added my comments to the original recipe, which can be found at 

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1017398-japanese-style-beef-stew.

Ingredients

- 1 & 1/2 to 2 pounds of boneless chuck cut into 1-inch to 1 1/2 inch chunks. (I use precut chunks of stew beef from Publix.)

- 2 cups of dashi or chicken stock, or water. I use dashi, which is a Japanese cooking stock. It is easy to make with Hondashi, a powder produced by Ajinomoto. For each cup of dashi, mix 1 tsp of Hondashi into 1 cup of boiling water. I bought the hondashi at Kim's Oriental Food, a local oriental store, but it is available on Amazon.

- 1/4 cup soy sauce

- 1/4 cup mirin, honey, or sugar. I used Kikkoman mirin purchased at Kim's Oriental Food. It is available at Publix and Whole Foods.

- 10 nickel-sized slices of ginger

- black pepper to taste

- 1 lemon

- 1 & 1/2 pounds of peeled butternut, pumpkin, or other winter squash or sweet potatoes. I used butternut squash. It was great.

- salt to taste

Preparation

1. In a large, nonstick skillet over medium heat, sear meat until nicely browned on one side - about 5 minutes. Transfer chunks into a medium-size casserole pan.

2. Add stock to the skillet, and cook over high heat, stirring and scraping until all the solids are integrated into the liquid. (This took me less than a minute.) Pour this liquid into the casserole and add the soy sauce, mirin, ginger, and a couple of grindings of pepper.

3. Peel the lemon and add the peel to the casserole. (I had never used lemon peel in a recipe, but I quickly found lots of videos on different ways to easily and properly peel lemons.) Now juice the lemon, but don't add the juice to the mixture yet.

4. Cover, and cook on top of stove (or in an oven at 350 degrees), maintaining a steady simmer. Stir after 30 minutes. Then check meat for tenderness every fifteen minutes after that. I only simmered the meat 45 minutes the first time. That was not long enough. The second time, an hour of simmering worked perfectly.

5. When the meat is nearly tender, stir in the squash and continue to cook until the squash is tender, but not mushy. Add salt if necessary. Then stir in the lemon juice. Serve.