Stone Soup

My lower school was very big on musicals. We had two every year- one for the kindergarteners, and one for grades 1 thru 6. Stone Soup was the very first musical I was in as a kindergartener, so I have very fond memories of it. The traveller makes a soup for a whole village, using just a stone, but managing to get all the villagers to contribute whatever they happen to have lying around. Which is what I did, albeit without the stone: stone are dirty, y'all. Although I probably put in some things worse than a stone. Anyway, the recipe is cobbled between a recipe for beef stew in How to Cook and the recipe for Beef and Vegetable Soup in the Oct/Nov 2007 Cook's Illustrated.

Stone Soup sans Stone

2 lbs stew meat, cut into 1/2" cubes
2 onions
3 potatoes
some white wine
4 cups chicken broth
some spaghetti sauce
bay leaf
oregano
soy sauce
salt
pepper
water
some peas
arrowroot
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Dice up the onions and cook in large pot over medium heat with melted butter. Let cook a long time until becomes brown and caramelized. Remove from pot.

While onions cooking, chop up stew meat into bite size pieces. Toss with some soy sauce and salt and pepper. After onions removed, cook in same pot until browned. Throw in some white wine leftover from Thanksgiving. (This is probably not all that good, but not the worse.) Throw in cooked onions. Throw in 4 cups of chicken broth, 2 cups of which are leftover from Thanksgiving and were sitting in the original metal can, which you are not supposed to do. (Bad thing #2) Add another 1-2 cups of water, make sure everything's covered. Throw in bay leaf and oregano, a little more soy sauce, and more salt and pepper. Boil, then turn to simmer and cover. Then decide to throw in a few spoonfuls of spaghetti sauce (Cook's Illustrated recommended you caramelize some tomato paste early on.) and only after you do, realize there's some mold. But it's TOTALLY LOCALIZED to the lid, and it looks like maybe it was on the lid touching the outside face of the jar, not inside of the jar with the main spaghetti sauce, which was not moldy AT ALL. Decide that 2 hours of cooking will probably kill mold. Not that there was any mold to begin with. Nope, nope, nope.
Ahem. Let cook for 2 hours until meat tender or near tender. Chop up 3 potatoes (russet) and throw into soup for 30 more minutes. After 30 minutes, take a little broth out, mix in some arrowroot and return to pot and stir. After 5 minutes or so, throw in peas for a few minutes and serve. Hope no one gets food poisoning.
Also, I just came across this link. I'm not sure if it makes me feel better or worse about what I put in the soup.