We prepared one pound of top notch and happy angus beef chunks with a good bit of salt and pepper and revved up the oven to a toasty 350F.
We also rummaged for and cleaned up four carrots, three sticks of celery, a few branches of rosemary, a couple of garlic cloves, one big red onion, half a butternut squash (just because it sounds so good; "butternut squash"), one big can of tomatoes, and two small cans of chick peas.
Then all of it got chopped, sliced, diced, minced, cubed, and otherwise minimized to our liking and then chucked into a big oven ready dish with a lid. We also added about two cups of water and a couple of heaped tablespoons of cumin, ground coriander seeds, and cinnamon, as well as more salt and pepper and some olive oil.
We stuck it in the oven for five hours.
Twenty minutes before dinnertime we got a pot of water going based on the cooking instructions of a quarter pound of couscous. When the water was boiling we took it off the stove, added the couscous for five minutes and then the juice of one lemon, and some chopped parsley. When we got the stew out of the oven we also added the zest of the same lemon and more parsley.
It was just simply dig-in-wipe-the-juice-of-your-chin-drop-dead-delicious. We can only recommend. We found the basis for this recipe, by the by, in a dog-eared and stained Jamie Oliver cooking magazine, translated to German.