Beef and Corn Casserole

I made this beef and corn and black bean casserole, because I had some cooked black beans to use, and because it looked kind of plain with just beef and corn underneath. Even so, my husband sprinkled it liberally with spices, and even my son ate some seasoning salt on it. I don't think I'd make it again, but it was fine once. Quite edible, just not very exciting.

Ingredients:

•  2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 green pepper, chopped
• 1 onion, chopped
• 2 c. corn kernels (I used canned, bc I don't have fresh corn)
• 1 lb. ground beef
• 2 ripe tomatoes, sliced
• 1 c. bread crumbs
• salt 
• Optional: I added 2 c. cooked black beans and a lot of ground pepper, and, after it was cooked, some Tony Chachery's for seasoning.

 Directions:

Heat oil in large cast iron skillet. Add peppers and onions and cook until onion is translucent.

Add ground beef and cook until pink is gone.

Preheat oven to 350. Add black beans and corn, salt to taste, and heat through.

Pour into a casserole pan. Lay tomato slices over, sprinkle with bread crumbs.

Bake 25 minutes or until crumbs begin to brown.

Meat Balls (for spaghetti)

I usually make really simple meatballs that are gluten free, so when I saw that these used bread crumbs, I was reminded of the ones my mom used to make. I have to admit, they held together MUCH better than my usual "recipe" (which is just a bunch of stuff mixed with ground beef and squeezed into balls).

 For this, I used:
1 lb. ground beef
1/2 c. dried bread crumbs
1 clove garlic, minced
2 tbsp parsley
1 tbsp basil
1 egg
1/2 tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper
2 tbsp olive oil

1 batch spaghetti sauce (or one jar of sauce)
1/2-1 lb spaghetti noodles
parmesan cheese for topping

mix all ingredients (except oil, sauce and noodles) in a large bowl until well combined.

Shape into round balls about 1.5 inches in diameter and place in hot skillet with oil.

Cook in a single layer, turning as until browned on all sides.

Add sauce and cook about 20-30 minutes.

Meanwhile, cook the noodles. Then top each bowl of noodles with sauce, meatballs and parmesan.

Shepherd's Pie

I've only had this once, though my husband says he's eaten it at lots of restaurants. Maybe I just don't like the sound of it, so I've never noticed it on a menu. Anyway, my brother in law made this last year and I liked it. It's kind of like pot pie with mashed potatoes for a crust, which is perfect for anyone who doesn't want to or can't eat gluten.

For this I used:
1 lb. ground lamb
3 c. mashed potatoes (about 4 large, but depends a lot on size of potatoes...doesn't have to be exact, so just guessing is fine)
1 onion, chopped fine
1-2 cloves garlic, minced
1 lb ground lamb (beef works fine, too)
1 tsp. rosemary
4 tbsp butter
2 tbsp. flour
3/4 c beef broth
salt & pepper

Add-ins: 1 red pepper, 1 green pepper, 1 small zucchini, all chopped fine in food processor.

Steam or Boil potatoes. I used purple potatoes, so my pie was a bit purple. Mash them (about 3 c.) and set aside.

Cook lamb in skillet until pink is gone. Add onions, garlic and rosemary.

Melt butter in skillet or sauce pan. Add flour and cook a few mins. Add beef broth and cook 5 more mins.

Fannie doesn't call for any veggies in this, but I can't in good conscience make a veggie-less dish this time of year. So I added the peppers and zucchini at this point.

Add meat mixture and level it in a baking dish.

Top with mashed potatoes, make checkered pattern on top with fork. Cook in 375 oven for 30-40 minutes.

 This turned out really well. You could easily use ground beef in the absence of lamb. I love this dish, since I don't like pie crust so I usually only eat the inside of pot pie anyway. I would have liked the gravy on this to be a little creamier, so I may use milk next time. But it is still a great dinner, very filling and hearty, and, if you use pastured meat and veggies, very healthy as well. Will definitely be making this one again and again.

Mulligatawny Soup

I've heard of mulligatawny soup before, but it was one of those words I'd heard while never really knowing what it was (like vissisous). Apparently it's an Indian dish that made it's way over here a long, long time ago. I looked it up on Pinterest and all the recipes used lentils, but Fannie's uses meat, listed as an optional ingredient. With or without meat, she doesn't mention lentils. Since I was trying to make a FF recipe, I followed hers rather closely, with the exception of using a red pepper in place of celery, since I don't have celery and it would be criminal to buy a vegetable at this point, with my counters overflowing with homegrown organic veggies of all sorts (except the celery variety).

Here's my adaptation for this:

Ingredients:

4 tbsp butter
1 diced onion
1 diced carrot
1 diced green pepper
1 diced red pepper (or a couple stalks of celery, which I didn't have, so I used peppers)
1 diced apple
1 jalepeno, minced (or 1/8 tsp. cayenne)

1 lb raw beef
1/3 c. flour
1 tbsp. curry powder
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
6 c. water (or use beef broth if you have it)
2 crushed cloves
1 large tomato, chopped
salt & pepper to taste

3 c. cooked brown rice

optional garnishes: slivered almonds, cashews, or chilled banana slices. I didn't use any of these. I used some plain yogurt for garnish, because it's what I usually eat with Indian food.

Directions:
Melt 2 tbsp. butter in large pot

  Add vegetables and meat (everything down to the flour) and cook 15 minutes on low heat, stirring often.

 Add other 2 tbsp. butter, flour, nutmeg & curry powder and cook 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add water, cloves, tomato, salt & pepper and simmer 30 minutes.

Serve in bowls atop rice, with preferred garnish.

I'm not a huge fan of Indian curry, so I wasn't crazy about this, but it was okay. My husband liked it well enough, and my son ate it one day as well. Since it makes a big pot of soup, we ended up having it for dinner a couple times, though my son requested a cheese sandwich the second night we had this. It's a good soup if you like curry. Otherwise, I'd skip this one.

Hamburgers

I know what you're probably thinking--there's no way you made that delicious hamburger in the picture. And you're right. But I DID make hamburgers for dinner last night, and I did forget to take pictures of them, so I'm just posting a mouth-watering picture of a burger I got at this little diner across from the local gas station. They are as delicious as Fannie's for sure.

Fannie Farmer doesn't have much of a recipe for burgers. She doesn't have those fancy stuffed burgers that are all the rage lately. She doesn't even fancy them up like I do with bread crumbs and eggs and onions and all that fun stuff.

Fannie's recipe goes like this:
1 lb ground beef
butter for frying
salt & pepper

Just barely mix the salt and pepper. Do not handle the meat more than necessary or it gets tough and dry.

Shape the meat into patties and fry in butter 3-4 minutes per side.

I like my burgers a bit rare (my husband was scared to eat them without further cooking), so I probably cooked them less than that. I'd never fried hamburgers in butter before, so that was new. And I've never made them so plain. But, with tomatoes I had picked literally 20 minutes ago, how could they go wrong?

Sorry for the lack of pictures, but some days, I'm lucky I managed to make anything at all. Days like this, when I work all day, take my son to Tae Kwon Do, drive an hour to get home, work in the garden, unload the clean dishes, wash the dirty dishes, and THEN start dinner, well, remembering my camera just isn't going to happen. Lucky for me, everyone in my house likes burgers, so they didn't mind that they weren't fancied up. So, this 'recipe' is for a busy week night dinner. Can't get much more simple than this.

Little Joe's, Sauteed Zucchini, and Tomato Slices, oh my!

According to Fannie, this recipe is popular in San Francisco. I've never heard of it, but it sounded alright, and I had most of what I needed to make it, which is reason enough for me to choose a recipe.

Chop kale & onion while oil heats.

 For this, I used:

3 tbsp coconut oil for cooking
1 onion
1 bunch kale leaves (FF says 1 lb. spinach, but I have neither spinach nor a cooking scale, so I just used the handful of kale I had from the garden. I adjusted cooking times accordingly.
1 lb ground beef
3 eggs (or 4, depending on how many people are eating)
1/4 c. parmesan cheese
salt
tobasco

Cook for about 10 minutes, or until onions are translucent, stirring often.

Add ground beef and cook until pink is gone. Beat the eggs, add a splash of Tobasco, and pour over mixture. Cook til eggs are solid, stirring occasionally.

Top with parmesan, salt & pepper, and lots of splashes of Tobasco (if you like that kind of thing).

This wasn't the best recipe I've made, but it was alright. I paired it with sauteed zucchini (yesterday's post) and added some sliced tomatoes from the garden for a complete paleo meal. It was tasty enough, just not very exciting (until I started splashing Tobasco all over it). My son even ate a huge helping without complaining. I gave him a huge scoop, since he won't eat zucchini, and figured he'd give me a lot of trouble. But all he said was that it didn't taste like sausage and eggs, and then, to my surprise, he ate his entire helping, kale included. Apparently, he really likes kale now. Also, he thought the Tobasco bottle looked so cool that he wanted to try it, and shockingly, he splashed drops all over his and ate it all up. This is a kid who thinks the gingersnap 'oreos' I bought him were hot. So go figure. But hey, if he's not complaining, I'm not complaining!

For my son's sake, I'd call this a roaring success, even though personally, I found it a little plain without a heavy dose of Tobasco to liven it up.

Revoltillos

I was looking through Fannie Farmer for a stove-top recipe that uses ground beef when I ran across this one. It looked really weird, but I thought I'd try it.  I made it for a dinner with my sisters, and when I told people what I was making (I pronounced it in what I imagined was the Spanish way, ray-VOL-tee-ose), my sister said, "You're making something called 'revolting o's'?" I couldn't defend it too staunchly, since frankly, the recipe did sound a little gross (Olives and raisins? Who came up with that combo?). So I let it slide when everyone called it Revoltio's all week, pronounced like Spaghetti-O's.

Since it had raisins, and sounded vaguely curryish, I used ground lamb instead of ground beef for it. I'm guessing this is a Spanish food, seeing as it has olives and bay leaves in it, but I really have no idea. I do know that it was surprisingly delicious.

Unfortunately, the pictures aren't too lovely, as I forgot my HTC phone, and my iPhone camera is worthless. So if it looks especially ugly, don't let that deter you. It's actually quite good.

Here's what I used:
1 c. brown rice
2.5 c. water
1/4 c. olive oil
3 medium onions
3 green bell peppers
3 cloves garlic
1 lb. ground lamb (Fannie calls for 2, and if I had it, or made it again, I'd use 2)
5 bay leaves
3/4 c. ripe olives
3/4 c. raisins

Directions:

• rinse rice, then add it to a sauce pan with the water, simmer on very low heat for about 40 minutes or until the water is absorbed and the rice is tender. If the water is all absorbed and the rice is still chewier than you like, add more water and cook longer.
• while rice is cooking, heat oil in large cast iron skillet with lid
• chop onions and add to skillet
• chop peppers and add to skillet
• cook about 5 minutes, or until onions are translucent, stirring often
• mince garlic, add to pan and cook about 1 minute, stirring constantly to keep it from sticking
• add ground meat and cook until browned 
• add bay leaves, olives and raisins
• cover pan and cook on low heat 15-20 minutes, stirring once or twice. If it begins to stick reduce heat or remove from heat if it's been at least 15 minutes.

I served this with creole tomatoes, which don't really go with it so well, but I have sooo many tomatoes that I wanted to make a side dish with them. Shockingly, despite the weird name and ingredients, everyone enjoyed the revoltillos. My sisters (even the picky one) said it was good, my mom, husband and brother in law all ate it, and even my son finished his plate, though he thought the meat tasted funny since he's used to ground beef. I served these with creole tomatoes, which everyone also ate without complaint, though I don't think it was a very good match for this dish.

Overall, I'd definitely call it a success.

Goulash Stew

We are renovating a house this summer, and so far, it's a disaster zone. We have loose boards on the back porch, and some red wasps took up residence there. The other day, my husband got stung by a wasp, so I brought him a frozen steak for the swelling around the sting. So, we had a partially thawed round steak that needed to be used.

I looked in Fannie Farmer for a recipe that used round steak, and I found this one that I wanted to make. There was a very similar one called Hungarian Goulash, and only after I started making this and realized it barely has any vegetables did I look at the other recipe and see that it had more veggies! But, I stuck with this one and made a veggie side dish. I paired it with squash and cabbage saute (recipe tomorrow).

Here's the ingredients I used:
2 tbsp. organic butter
2 onion
1 clove garlic
2 tbsp. paprika
1 lb. beef round (Fannie uses 2, but I had a package with about a lb, so that's what I used)
3 c. chopped fresh tomatoes (or a 16 oz can)
1/4 c. sour cream *AT ROOM TEMPERATURE*
salt to taste (FF suggests 1/2 tsp)

Two of these, any size. FF says large, I used medium.

Slice thin.

Saute 10 mins. in butter in casserole or dutch oven (cast iron of course)

Meanwhile, cut round steak into chunks (I tried for 1 1/2 inch).

After 10 mins, add paprika, garlic, & salt. Cook 2 mins more.

Remove onions from pan, add meat.

Turn to brown on both sides.

Put onions back in with meat.

Add tomatoes, stir pot, cover and simmer for 2 1/2 hrs.

Here it is when done.

*Now add the 1/4 c. sour cream. Unfortunately, I did not heed Fannie's advice to add it at ROOM TEMPERATURE, and instead of melting nicely and making a creamy soup, it kind of congealed and refused to melt no matter how I stirred it. So it looks kind of weird, but it tasted good!

With weird sour cream speckles.

I was a bit afraid that the steak would be tough, since I'd had the same cut recently (made into chicken fried steak) and it was a workout for the jaw. But this time, it had plenty of time to cook slowly and get nice and tender. Fannie suggests eating it over noodles, but I just ate it as stew. I could see it being very good with rice, too.

And a side of sauteed squash and cabbage.

I may make the Hungarian Goulash next time, since it's very similar but I won't have to make a vegetable to go on the side. Plus, aside from the sour cream fiasco, this was really good and worth making again. I even made it on a day when I was doing a major canning operation, and it worked out great. I just put it all together and let it simmer on the back burner for 2.5 hours while I did the canning. Since I was canning tomatoes, I ended up with about 2 c. of extra juice, so I threw that in the goulash to make it more soup-like so I wouldn't have to make noodles or rice. I also added about 6 oz. of pepper juice I had from my preserving endeavors. But none of this is necessary. The pepper juice did give it a bit more veggie flavor, though.