Peposo is very simple. The only ingredients are beef, tomato sauce, garlic, chianti, salt, and black pepper. Lots of black pepper. Lots and lots of black pepper.
Since we don't have a slow cooker, and the stove pretty much sucks for dishes that have to simmer forever, we cooked the peposo in the oven. It sat in there for four whole hours, bubbling and making the entire apartment smell like pepper.
We had steamed rice (that's the Philippine part - as if I had to tell you) and garlic bread with it. The rice and garlic bread helped to cut the spiciness a little bit. Still, I'm pretty sure I'm gonna have to take some antacids a little bit later from now. We had some frozen ice cream pie for dessert, and that helped to cut the spice a little bit more.
It was very good. The meat was falling apart after having spent all that time in the oven. You don't really taste the chianti in it at all, although I'm sure that it added a lot of flavor to the stew. The main flavor, of course, was black pepper. The recipe actually said that whole peppercorns can be used instead of ground. Bill decided to use ground pepper because he didn't want to bite into whole peppercorns. Next time, I think, we will not grind the pepper to see if it makes any difference in the flavor.
I took a picture of the table just before we sat down to eat. I guess I'm also supposed to email it to Cathey to make her mouth water. LOL.