beef – no counterspace

January 18, 2011

Beef Black Bean Soup as a Work In Progress

There’s a good chance I’ll be moving into a house! A real house! (with hardly more counterspace than my current apartment, which wouldn’t be nearly as charming without owning this URL – but there’s lots of room to add furniture, shelving, and counters)

As part of looking forward to moving all of my belongings, I have a goal of not buying any groceries all month. I’ve already caved with a packet of soba noodles, but they’re small and light and I was in Chinatown.

So I’m going through my mind and reviewing what’s in my pantry, refrigerator, and freezer and pondering how they’d match together.

Okay, so I’ve been overeating because as soon as I come up with another plan for food, I have to do it right away, but still.

I’ve finished off three lingering containers of loose tea. Yay!

And I’ve started a plan for soup –

I have a bunch of leeks
I’ve pulled a random/unidentified cut of beef from the freezer to thaw
I have several large cans of black beans
I have an open jar of pipian sauce

Simple, right?

Only I was pondering this potential soup in my mouth, and I think it will not be pleasing to have chunks of meat in this soup.

My first thought, of course, was, “Oooo… if only I had bought a meat grinder for my recently acquired Kitchenaid.” (thanks, @geeksdo1tbetter) And, yeah, that would be lovely… but let’s be honest that it probably isn’t really something I want until I also own a dishwasher. And, either way, I don’t have one.

So the only other way I know to get a pleasing texture will be shredding the beef with slow braising. And, ~whine~ … I don’t want the soup to take that long.

But, on the plus side, it will help heat the house.

So here’s the rough draft of the soup plan:

Beef Black Bean Soup
In medium saucepan

beef

can of tomatoes

red wine

1 tsp pipian (to get the flavor started in the meat, but I’m not sure about its pH and texture and all, so not too much)

-> braising

in large saucepan

whites of leeks

carrots

big can of black beans

quart of stock

-> cooked until beans are soft

-> add beef

-> add more pipian to taste

in large skillet

greens of leeks

2 tsp oil

-> fried hard over high heat for greasy, salty, delicious garnish of joy

April 6, 2010

Beef tongue

Friends of mine recently went in for a half share of beef. And then a few months later the couple brought a third into their household – only the new person was vegetarian and had trouble with meat just being cooked in the same room.

It helps that I like the person, but I’d be excited anyway because this is bringing a lot of free beef into my life.

It’s also bringing the weird beef into my life. For some reason half of a cow (or steer, I suppose) yielded 2 tongues. I don’t know.

I knew exactly what I wanted to do with this tongue – I wanted to cure it and slice it thinly onto sandwiches. Only I don’t own pink salt, and I didn’t have any other plans for the huge amount I’d have left over. And basically, it was going to end up procrastinated for months taking up space in my freezer.

So I started looking for more options, and happened upon Tacos de Lingas. Woot! Just slow braising the tongue until it reaches joy.

I followed the recipe pretty closely to start, and I put into my soup pot

1 frozen tongue
1 onion, diced
5 cloves of garlic, minced
2 bay leaves
plenty of water to cover
and I just added a little sprinkle of salt

And here’s why I skimped on the salt. You see, I’ve just recently written up my recipe for carnitas, and I figured that if I cooked all the liquid out and ended up with something shredded, that would be delicious and would have flavors so concentrated that I’d want to wait on correcting the salt until later.

So I cooked it down until the meat was cooked through, and I took it out to slice into 1″ this rounds, to break up the grain. I also peeled the tongue… to discover that even right underneath the thick skin/membrane there was the same rough tongue texture. So I ended up cutting off the skin, instead of peeling, so that I’d get below the texture.

All back in the pot, and I cooked until there was very little liquid left. Then I poked the meat with a wooden fork – and it didn’t shred. So I added half a pot of water and started cooking it down again, poking occasionally as I went.

Still not shredding.

I tasted the meat, and it was okay, but it could use a little more flavor. So I added some wine. And some ground oregano and black pepper.

Cooked down until there was very little liquid, and it still wasn’t shredding.

So I added a pot full of water again, and about quarter of a cup of balsamic vinegar and another quarter of a cup of red wine vinegar.

By the time this cooked down again (let’s say the total is about 14 hours over a few days), the meat still wasn’t shredding, but it had the lose give of good pot roast. So I declared it done.

Pulled out the meat, and I had about a cup of liquid left behind. I corrected the seasonings (mostly with salt and a bit of pepper), and I starting sifting whole wheat flout into it gradually. About 2 teaspoons later, I had a good dark broth. I remembered that I had some water hanging out in my fridge from reconstituting some dried mushrooms, so I added that, too – it added a nice flavor, but was totally optional.

And then I forgot about the tacos, and I had it over leftover cooked brown rice with gravy.

June 12, 2009

Miscellaneous root vegetable cottage pie

This isn’t so much a recipe as a narration. I accumulated food, and then I ate it.

So there was someone at the farmers’ market selling an assortment of intriguing root vegetables in early summer – woo! So I ended up with a parsnip, 2 rutabagas, and 1 celeriac. I also had some carrots hanging around. And then one of my co-workers came in with a bag of turnips from her CSA farm share that she didn’t want, and I yoinked it because they looked arrow-shaped and somehow much more appealing than your standard turnip at the store.

And then the root vegetable sat for almost a week because it was summer, and not really root vegetable time. I saw a post on roasted root vegetable pizza over at Straight From the Farm, but I do not posses pizza-making mojo, so instead of making it I forwarded the link to a friend who does bake well (and owns a pizza stone) to see if we wanted to make a project of that some time. That was not, however, scheduled in the near enough future to provide the fate of these tubers.

So I did the easiest thing possible – I cut them into chunks, piled them into foil packets (with some garlic cloves), and roasted them. One packet was seasoned with Penzey’s Turkish seasoning and the other one was Penzey’s fajita seasoning with some extra crappy paprika that I got from my supermarket when I ran out and think has red dye in it (and yes, I’ve bought better since, but I’m having trouble convincing myself to throw anything away unused). And I baked it on 350, but I didn’t really pay attention to how long – I think roughly the length of time it took to clean my kitchen and play a round or two or three of bubble spinner.

End result – the packet with the Turkish seasoning was delicious, and the packet with the fajita seasoning was just okay and kind of unimpressive. But I am really loving the Turkish seasoning – it was a freebie in with another order, but when I run out I’d buy more. But I had a lot of food in the house, so the tubers did not end up a meal on their own.

~*~

I also had leftover rice hanging out in my refrigerator. Rice is the one thing I have found, where your results are much better if you are cooking on an electric range.

So for this one – have one burner on high and one burner almost as low as it will go.

Add to your pot with a lid: 1 part rice (in this case, 1/2 cup), 2 parts liquid (in this case, the tail end of jar of salsa and enough water to fill up the rest of the 1 cup measurement), 1 teaspoon lipid (forgotten in this case), a pinch of salt, and anything extra (in this case, the pinched and powdered head of 1 clove, 1 teaspoon turmeric, and 3 dried tomatoes sliced into thin strips).

Put pot onto high burner, and bring to a boil. Once boiling, stir once, cover, and transfer to the low burner. Wait 20 minutes – and then you have perfect rice.

~*~

And then I had a cheap roast of beef. I cut it into thirds and only prepped part of it to be a real roast (embedded garlic cloves and rosemary and then froze it), but this part was sliced into thin strips against the grain (because otherwise this cheap meat will be tough and stringy).

I tossed the meat with a third of a taco seasoning packet my mother had bought in bulk from Amazon. And then I cooked it down quickly with some sliced onions and minced garlic and jalapeno (flesh only).

~*~

Cottage Pie

So then I pulled out my pie plate (the right size for how much food I had, if there had been more, I would have used a casserole dish – your call).

On the bottom, I lay out some thin slices of a very ripe tomato.

Over that, I layered a mixture of the beef and onions I’d cooked and the leftover rice with sundried tomatoes. I sprinkled over that the rest of the tomato, diced.

Then I heated up the roasted root vegetables and mashed them with some cream cheese and salt – and then spread that over top of the meat.

Baked at 350F until the top was getting nice and crusty.

And the end result was deliciousness and many leftovers turned into actual food and lunches.

June 8, 2009

food list – it’s summer again!

I may have gone a bit overboard at my produce truck and the farmers’ market and berry picking.

Oh, yes, I went berry picking. Food in Jars had a post about local Pick Your Own berry farms, and I was totally sold on the idea. So a friend and I went out to Rowand Farms (no website?) in Glassboro, NJ to acquire cherries and strawberries. I’ve only picked apples before, and cherries are definitely harder – but then moving on to strawberries was like leveling up once more because you really had to look hard to find the pretty ones… plus stooping, but we knew that going in.

Now I have to make plans for all of this food:

Produce
1 nectarine
4 tomatoes
2 bunches of small asparagus
handful of shelling peas
radishes
slightly less than 1lb lettuce
2lbs cherries
3lbs strawberries
3 lemons
5 limes
2 grapefruits
4 rhubarb stalks
turnips galore
1 yellow squash
1 red pepper
1 carrot
1 parsnip
3 rutabagas
1 celeriac root
7 oz kale
1lb spicy mustard greens

ready to be harvested from my garden
radicchio
swiss chard
nasturtium flowers

processed produce
tail end of a jar of salsa
vodka pasta sauce
1/4 cup rice with turmeric, clove, and sundried tomatoes
Thai sweet spicy garlic sauce
chipotle in adobo sauce
jarred crab apples
pineapple juice
orange juice
fermenting peaches

dairy
sour cream
cheddar cheese
1% milk

protein
beef fajita leftovers (about enough for 3-4 quesadillas)
3lb beef roast
4 eggs

So now I need a plan
Monday, June 8
breakfast: 2 quesadillas with leftover fajitas

~*~

roast: foil packets of root vegetables with various spice mixes and garlic; asparagus

dinner: salad w/ half the lettuce, shelling peas (try one to see if they are good popped out, or if they need to be blanched), roasted asparagus, radishes, and nasturtium flowers – dressing: something mild and sweet – white balsamic and apricot jelly?

prep beef: 1/3 slice into thin strips and marinate with pineapple juice, jalapeno, black bean sauce (for stir fry); 1/3 slice into thin strip and marinate with salsa, chipotle, and lime juice (for something involving tortillas); prep the thickest third for roasting (studded with garlic cloves and tuck in some rosemary) and wrap for freezing

Rhubarb – make candied rhubarb and rhubarb syrup for camping

dessert – strawberries and milk

Tuesday, June 9
breakfast – try Kenyan collard green recipe with kale (uses a tomato); eat some strawberries

9am – meet real estate agent to go see a house I can’t afford

~*~

dinner: stir fry marinated beef with asparagus, red pepper, jalapeno, ginger, radishes; also saute some of the spicy mustard greens with garlic to have one the side. Make rice.

strawberries – try making small batch strawberry jam w/ shredded fresh ginger and 1 ground black cardamom jam

salsa – try making salsas from strawberries and cherries

Wednesday, June 10
meet friend for coffee; take radishes and sexy butter.

do I still want breakfast? – rest of the spicy mustard greens made like roman kale

take any remaining berries in to work

~*~

dinner: (psst: you still haven’t eaten your theoretical packets of roasted root vegetables, the yellow squash, maybe a tomato or two, nor the Mexican-ish beef) That could be an interesting start to a cottage pie…

cream cheese – cut some of my fresh herbs to make a cream cheese spread

pack to go camping – take

candied rhubard
rhubarb syrup
limoncello
rum
scotch?
camping cups and dishware
herbed cream cheese
hot sauce (but not my salsas)
if I feel really ambitious I’ll make a batch of raita, but looking at this schedule – I doubt it
again if I’m feeling ambitious, perhaps some of this ginger syrup
fig newtons

December 21, 2008

Green Tomato Salsa, Beef Rib Roast, Quesadillas

I’m leaving on a trip in a few days, so I am trying to make sure I eat everything perishable in the house.

First thing up – getting rid of the last of the green tomatoes that I picked when the garden season was ended by frost.

I split them in half, lay them on a baking sheet cut side down, and roasted them while I was also roasting a butternut squash. I wasn’t too sure what to do with them (because I knew I didn’t want to fry them), but I figured I could probably do anything to them I would do with tomatillos.

Green Tomato Salsa

Remove the peels from the roasted green tomato halves, and dice the tomatoes. Put the tomatoes and all of their juices into a container (but go ahead and compost the skins). I was using 1 very large one, 2 medium, and two very small. But juggle that around in your head and fix up the proportions to whatever you have – I certainly wasn’t being scientific.

To the diced tomatoes, I added roasted garlic pods. I just finished off a head, but I’ll say it was 1/3 of a head of garlic. Take the time to break up the garlic with a fork so that it will incorporate smoothly.

I added half a serrano pepper, seeded and minced.

1 tspn white balsamic vinegar, and then the juice of half a lime (squeeze a little, stir, taste, and then repeat until it tastes right).

Season with salt, pepper, nutmeg, a tiny bit of cinnamon and a decent amount (maybe 2/3 tsp) of oregano.

And it wasn’t quite perfect, so I looked in my spices and pulled out my newly acquired (but not on purpose) Penzey’s Turkish Seasoning – which includes salt, cumin, garlic, half-sharp paprika, black pepper, Turkish oregano, sumac, and cilantro.

It was tasting pretty good, but then I let it sit for a couple hours, and now it tastes amazing. This is the first preparation where I have liked green tomatoes.

~*~

A couple weeks ago, the grocery store had a sale on rib roast. Now usually I am cheap with meat and I’ll only buy meats that are under $2/pound without bones. But for some reason, rib roasts catch my eye when they occasionally go on sale at under $5/pound.

So there I was with my $25 piece of meat, and I was busy that weekend and I became rather worried that I was going to have t go bad before I had a chance to cook it.

Then I had a half day of work the Monday after the weekend to go shopping with my mother (because there was no way I was willing to brave a mall between Thanksgiving and Christmas any time other than 9am on a Monday morning). I came home and brilliantly thought to pop in the roast before I left for work at 5pm so that it’d be ready when I came home. (and that way, I wouldn’t have to start cooking the thing at 9:30pm).

Beef Rib Roast

Slice a few garlic cloves in half lengthwise. Plunge the knife into a meaty area, and then stuff garlic into the slit.

Now use the knife to lift a section of the fatty layer on top apart from the meat, and then feed a sprig of rosemary into the resulting tunnel (so the fat will rend, get flavored by the rosemary, and then season the meat).

I dusted the top of the layer of fat with garlic powder and some salt.

Then I put the roast into a very slow oven (250F) for about 45 minutes/pound.

(And don’t forget to save the ribs as you eat the meat away for stock-making later)

~*~

Quesadillas

I use quesadillas as a way to go through small quantities of leftovers. So an ounce and a half of cheddar cheese, 2 ounces of the beef rib roast meat, the green tomato salsa, half a seeded serrano pepper, and some lettuce, made a pretty delicious couple of quesadillas.