Beef Barley soup: This, like many/most soups, is more a method than a recipe. Almost all the ingredients are optional, so you can make it to your taste, but this is what I generally use: Minced onion & celery (Mirepoix without carrot, but you can use carrot if you can't find a bag of frozen veg with carrot) Minced garlic or shallot (half a large shallot, 2-3 garlic cloves) (this is optional) 1-2 lbs stew beef or ground beef 1-2 potatoes, cut in bite-sized pieces 1 bag frozen chopped veg--peas, corn, carrots 1-2 C pearl barley 1 can tomato paste or 1 small can diced tomatoes, or both good mustard, like a dijon mustard--you'll use a big spoonful of this (optional if you hate mustard or don't have any, but you really don't taste mustard in the soup) white wine (optional) Beef stock or Beef Better than Bouiilon--about 3-4 C Worcestershire Sauce Bay leaf Seasonings: thyme, dash of nutmeg, rosemary...optional seasonings include Herbs de Provence (just a little if you want), celery salt (but be careful with salt, the stock usually has enough), marjoram, sage Sweat the onion and celery along with the garlic &/or shallot if using, as with the mirepoix in chicken & dumplings. Scoop the veg out and brown the meat. If you're using stew meat, I've found I can brown only half the meat and still get the same flavor results from the fond, so that saves time. If you're using ground beef, of course, you need to brown it all. Also, when I make this with stew meat I cut the chunks from the store at least in half; you want smaller chunks than they give you. Deglaze the pan with the wine (if using) or the stock (if not using wine). Scrape up all that yummy fond, and put the meat and mirepoix back. Add a big spoonful of the tomato paste or half the can of diced tomatoes (with juice), the bay leaf, and the seasonings you've chosen. If using stew meat, let that simmer about two - two and a half hours, covered. If using ground beef, you can go ahead and add the potato and frozen veg now and simmer about 15 minutes just to meld the flavors a bit. Add the pearl barley. Cover and simmer 45 min - 1 hour, until the barley is cooked. The barley will thicken the soup, so you might need to add a little more liquid about 2/3 of the way through. Taste the soup, adjust seasonings. Add the dollop of mustard if using--a Tbsp or two--and stir it well. Cover and simmer a few minutes, taste again. I sometimes make dumplings for this (my family and I love dumplings). Or I serve it with good buttered bread (or just good bread) or cornbread. Leftovers for this are very versatile; I once stretched a big pot of this an entire week, pouring it over baked potatoes, using it as filling for Yorkshire puddings, as a filling for little pies made of puff pastry...there are lots of possibilities. It only gets better with every day it sits in the fridge because the flavors meld even more.  (Yorkshire puddings: Equal amounts flour, eggs, and milk. Measure the eggs first--four is usually a good amount and comes to around a cup of egg. Pour the eggs into a large bowl, then measure out the same amount of milk and whisk it into the egg. Add a good pinch of salt. Now measure the same amount of flour and whisk it in. Some Yorkshire pud recipes have you make a well in the flour, but it rises higher if you add the flour to the liquid. Let that mixture sit for at least twenty minutes; you can heat & prep the oven while it does if you're only resting it for 20 min. Preheat oven to 450F. Get out a muffin tin, and into each muffin cup drop a little dollop--maybe a tsp/tsp and a half--of bacon fat/beef drippings/lard/shortening. You MUST use some kind of fat, sorry. Place the muffin tin into the hot oven and let it heat for ten minutes. At the end of the ten minutes, give the pudding batter another quick whisk. Remove the tin from the oven, and into each cup pour some of the batter--should fill about 1/2 - 3/4, somewhere in between there. (If you're making this with the soup variant--or ou can use seasoned ground beef, or seasoned sausage meat, whatever you like--quickly drop a spoonful of the meat into each cup as well, and put it back into the oven. Let cook about twenty minutes - half an hour, until the puddings have risen very high and are a lovely golden brown and the meat filling is nice and hot. Plain puddings are a lovely side, especially with gravy; when making this with meat filling I serve it with mashed potatoes and gravy. The basic ingredients of this soup, btw--meat, veg, stock, bay leaf--can be the basis of a number of soups depending on what you like. If you use red wine instead of white, omit the mustard--you can use rice instead of barley, too, if you like, in which case I skip the potato and like to add some soy sauce to it. Or you can add more tomato sauce and add little soup pastas, like orchiette (?) or small macaroni or orzo (which brings me to pasta e fagioli, next). Really, that's all soup is: meat and/or veg simmered in a flavorful liquid. Try the same basic seasonings as this, but with diced pork shoulder and parsnips, with white wine--delicious over rice. You can make my "lazy bourguignonne" by browning a few strips of bacon cut into smaller pieces, removing the bacon (put in fridge to finish soup with), and then browning stew meat with minced onion and garlic in the bacon fat. Make a roux by adding about 1/4 C flour to the pan (might need to melt some butter in there or add a little olive oil) and stirring the flour and fat for a minute or two until well combined. Deglaze the pan with 2 C red wine, add a cup or two of beef stock, and simmer with rosemary, thyme, a couple of bay leaves, and a little parsley. If you have/have access to mushroom ketchup, pour in a glug of that, along with Worcestershire sauce. Simmer for 2 1/2 - 3 hours until meat is tender, then add the bacon back in and cook 15 minutes more. Serve over rice--I make this allll the time (I do a much more elaborate version with cocktail onions and mushrooms for our Christmas dinner ever year, that marinates overnight on Christmas Eve and simmers half the day on Christmas day), it's one of my favorite meals and is so easy. You can also serve with mashed or baked potatoes and some nice crusty bread if you like.