Warning: Undefined variable $show_stats in /home/jdqespth/public_html/wp-content/plugins/stats/stats.php on line 1384

Tag: beef

Refrigerator Clean Out Salad

So I’ve been self soothing by stocking up on groceries, but then I ended up with too many types of vegetables that require intensive prep in order to turn into food and not enough easy meals.

There’s still three quarters of a kabocha squash, two ears of corn, and some tomatillos to reckon with. But those are for another day.

Today I was gardening and it was very hot and I didn’t really want to cook much. Then I remembered I had lettuce! So this salad is based on one head of romaine lettuce, cleaned and cut up.

Ginormous bowl of the complete salad with even an egg on top

Then I had bought new carrots, but I still had three old carrots. So I pulled those out and sliced them up for pickling (quick pickle with a dried chili and seasoned rice wine vinegar) and the slices that weren’t pretty for cut a little more finely and added to the salad.

Then I pulled out the package of small Persian cucumbers. I really do like them more than other cucumbers and they’ve been pretty cheap recently, but they barely last a week in the refrigerator. So I washed all the ones I haven’t eaten (4) and sliced them. I also got out a red onion and thinly sliced half of one. Most of the slices I pickled separately with red wine vinegar, but I added some to the cucumbers for extra flavor. And then all the parts of the cucumber that were a little soft but still good went into the salad.

I cleaned and finely sliced one scallion and added it to the salad.

I grabbed the third ear of corn and cleaned it. The husks compost better if you slice them across the grain a few times. Then I sliced off about half of the kernels and put them into the salad raw. But that was enough raw corn, and I wasn’t sure how to save half an ear of corn like that. So I took a pat of butter and thinly sliced some of the remaining purple onion and put that to cook while I sliced off the rest of the kernels. My mother would have also taken the back of her knife and scraped it all of the corn milk, too, but I just gnawed on the corn cob while I was working.  Anyway, the remaining corn kernels then went into the butter and onion and was cooked until just soft and hot before being added to the salad.

But wait, there’s more!

I’d bought a little of the good mozzarella (good within the category of grocery store mass produced cheese), so I cubed that and added it on top.

And I had some soft boiled eggs, so I peeled one and put it in hot water to both wash off any tiny shell crumbs and to take the chill off.

But then I also decided to cook some leftover thinly sliced (hot pot style) fatty beef that I’d gotten from the Asian market. Instead of thawing and unrolling them, I just put them in the hot skillet as chunks – they still cooked through just fine.

And that was everything… except I had no plan for salad dressing. But I did have a pan with a couple Tablespoons of beef fat that had rendered off, so I thought about the Pennsylvania Dutch bacon fat dressing, and figured I might as well improvise. So I whacked a Tablespoon of Dijon mustard into the hot fat and stirred it around until it started to break down (not my plan, but that was what happened), and then I added some pickle sauce and stirred until it emulsified, and then poured it over the salad. And that worked really well! It had enough salt and brought everything together without feeling fatty.

Another view of the complete salad

Oh, and then I sliced the soft boiled eggs on top, which was really gilding the lily, but eggs don’t last forever.

Comforting Cabbage and Ground Beef … Casserole?

I mean, it has all the makings of a good casserole. It just needs some egg noodles and a casserole dish. But I guess making it for just me it’s more in the “skillet” category.

Plated final dish with a saucy mix of cabbage and minced beef

So I had roughly diced and boiled a head of cabbage, and I still had about a pint of leftovers from that.

I also had half a can of diced tomatoes left from making shakshuka. Ground beef was what I’d thawed. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned before, but when I the a pound of ground beef, I usually split it into quarters and use one loose for that day’s meal, and I make the other three quarters into hamburger patties and refreeze them.

So this was my starting point, and then I went to see what other people online were doing with these ingredients – and the results were almost universally soup. I was not feeling like soup. So this is winging it.

I started off browning the meat with some onions and diced serrano peppers, and then I minced and added three cloves of garlic.

There’s some “tagine spice” in my cabinet that a friend brought me back from France. It smells more like a sweet curry powder than a ras el hanout, so it feels weird using it in either context. But this seemed like a great reason to use up a tablespoon or so. And then I added about a tablespoon of flour and stirred everything well until all of the flour was sticking to the meat and had cooked a bit.

And then I added liquids – the leftover canned tomatoes, some nut milk, and I decided to count the cabbage as kinda liquid, too. After stirring everything thoroughly, I made sure everything came to a boil to cook the starches. And then I stirred it again and let it simmer until most of the water had evaporated and the sauce was very thick. I did have a moment of my ancestors (well, my mother) telling me that this dish needed a dash of Worcestershire sauce, but I don’t have any, so ancestral advice was ignored. But if you’re inspired by this, it probably wouldn’t hurt to add some.

Re: nut milk – I had impulse bought some pistachio milk (unsweetened!) because I’d never seen it before, and Even though it’s delicious and fancy, it’s always a struggle getting through that much of any kind of milk before it goes bad. So I was delighted I found an excuse to use it, too!

It was delicious! I was so full!

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

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.

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.