Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Black Bean Chile

This is a standard of mine. The kids love it, I love it, Carol is sick of it. I make it when I have leftover beef.

Saute a chopped medium oven and a few cloves of garlic in olive oil until soft. Add two regular cans of black beans, a can of Rotel tomatoes with chiles, a couple of T of ketchup. and half a cup of coffee. Season with 1/2 t of cumin, a tiny pinch of cinnamon, a bay leaf, and good chile powder to taste. Add the diced leftover roast beef or steak, maybe 1 1/2 cups. I use a variety of Penzey's brand chile powsers: Northwood Fire, Chipotle, and Cajun. Obviously, it is supposed to be hot.

Bring to a simmer, set fire to low, and let cook until it thickens. If it starts to get too thick, thin it with a little beer. Some beer at the start is a good idea if you have the time to cook it down.

Serve over steamed rice.

Scalloped Potatoes

A problem with a slow oven roast beef recipe is that it makes it hard to get anything else in the oven. If you don't have a double oven, how can you cook anything else? I tried the following.

Eight medium potatoes, sliced thin in a mandoline. Butter a 9 x 12 baking pan, and lay down a layer of potatoes. Salt and pepper, and sprinkle in a thin layer of shredded swiss or gruyere cheese, then another layer of potatoes, etc, going on to three layers of potatoes, ending with cheese on top. Heat two cups of cream and half a stick of butter for four minutes in the nuke, and pour over the potatoes.

Next, it ought to say, place in a 350 oven and bake for an hour, but when can we do that? I put it in the oven with the beef for the 45 minute last cooking period, but it wasn't close when the beef came out, so I cranked the oven to 425 and waited.... truth it it wasn't really done when it was dinner time. Good, but not quite done. Next time, maybe I'll try precooking them with the beef, and then finishing them in the 300 oven later, though that's a lot of cream to be sitting around warm all aftenoon. Maybe I'll just get that double oven.

Roast Beef II

Well, after the debacle at Christmas, I have been eager to try one of the slow oven roast beef recipes. I bought a small, 2 rib, 4 pound prime roast at Sam's Club, which for some reason has pretty good beef. Their hamburgers (the premade patties in the meat section, the frozen ones in the case are awful) are the some of the best hamburgers I have ever bought.

Borrowing from a couple of recipes, I did the following. Brought the meat up to room temperature all morning, seasoned it with some spice rub, put in a rack in a roaster in a preheated 350 oven for one hour, and turned the oven off. Left it there most of the afternoon. Before dinner, I turned the oven up to 300 and let it cook for 45 minutes, took it out and let it rest for another 30, while I tried to get the potatoes to cook, which turned out to be a problem (see next post).

And.... It worked, pretty much. The meat was rare, perhaps a little better done than we would have liked, but that just makes me realize a lot of us like our beef VERY rare rather than just rare. If I did it again I might cut that last phase down to 40 minutes... even 35. I wonder if it really works for ANY size piece of beef? Potatoes next post.

Thursday, January 05, 2006

Honeyed Apples and Mustard Greens

Peel core and slice eight apples. I decided to do this because the apples weren't very good, actually. They were a little too mushy to eat fresh (I'm fussy about apples), but it seemed fine to use them for cooking. I sauteed them in butter until they started to soften, then added 2 cups of finely chopped fresh mustard greens. I added a little water and covered until the greens wilted, then stirred them in and added a quarter cup of honey and 2T of soy sauce. It gave off a little water aqt this point, and so I simmered it slowly for 20 minutes or so to cook it down. Right before serving I thickened it with a T of cornstarch in half a cup of water.

Roast Pork Dinner

The grocery had a good sale on pork loin rib roasts, I got a five rib roast, which wasn't very large. Rubbed it with a commercial meat rub, let it sit for an hour, then roasted it on a rack at 375 until it reached about 160 internally, about 1 and a half hours. Carved it between the ribs...

Served it with baked dish, and

Honeyed Apples and Mustard Greens

Pot Roast Sauce for Pasta

A little different from the usual. I got a 4 pound rolled pot roast, not the blade kind, I forget the exact cut. I cooked it for seven hours in a crock pot in a cup of red wine, a large can of crushed tomatoes (they were very thick, which helped), a quatered yellow onion, a couple of garlic cloves, a little red pepper flake, dried basil and oregano. At the end of the cooking time the meat was falling apart, I shredded it with two forks and returned it to the sauce, which had stayed thick. If it thinned out you'd want to cook it down a little first. The final consistency was a thick meat sauce, perfect over pasta, much hartier that the typical ground beef kind. Good grated Parmesan, of course.