Archive for the 'beef' Category
My goal this week: to be in bed by 10 every night. (With a book, if possible.) And to chip away at the contents of my freezer, which is currently being held closed by duct tape. Also: go to the gym.
(Check. Except for the early bedtime part.)
Confession: many of the containers in my freezer contain chili. It’s not that I’m particularly fanatical about chili, but it is the sort of thing I tend to make in large batches, often to use up surplus meat or beans, and rarely do we get through an entire pot. I fancy myself the sort to come home after a long day, slide whole potatoes in the oven and some frozen chili on the stove, and have chili baked potatoes in no time. I hardly ever do this, but I love the idea. It makes me feel very on the ball, like a squirrel with an overflowing nut tree. That must be held closed with tape.
And so because I’m not forthcoming with new dinner creations this week (also? I left the cord that connects my camera and computer in Jasper, and it appears no one has any of same anywhere in Calgary, and so I’m waiting for the cord to be shipped back before I can upload any images I took in the past week) I thought I’d share a chili recipe with you. I’ve had a lot of requests for this one. It was tough to nail down a recipe, since my method is generally to toss stuff into a pot – I’ve been making chili for years – since winning the Calgary Stampede chili cook-off when I was 12 – and I didn’t write the recipe down that time either. Start with lean ground beef or sirloin, or try slow-cooking stewing beef in beef broth or beer, then starting with that. Sausage adds flavour, but you could ditch it and add more beef. And lots of beans.
And in a fortuitous twist of events, I heard today that Canadian Beef is having a contest, in which they send five people to Eat, Write, Retreat, which I’d dearly love to go to. (Shauna will be there!) I’ve been milling around the website now and then, trying to justify the expense of going (all by myself!) for the weekend (in DC! never been!), and if I could win my admission, that would take the edge off.
Hell, I was going to share a beef recipe with you anyway. (It’s a random draw from whomever wants to write a beef post, so don’t worry – you don’t have to do anything.)
By the way, if you’re in Calgary, for every pound of ground beef you buy at Second to None Meats (all naturally raised Alberta beef), they donate a pound to the Calgary Inter-faith Food Bank. How completely cool is that?
Another thing you can do with a freezerful of chili? Make chili cheese fries! Best on sweet potato fries, topped with any cheese that will turn gooey.
Beef & Spolumbo’s Sausage Chili
canola or olive oil, for cooking
1 large onion, peeled and chopped
1 red bell pepper, seeded and chopped (optional)
3-4 garlic cloves, crushed
1 lb. lean ground beef or ground sirloin
2 Spolumbo’s Italian or chorizo sausages (or whatever you have available-the big, fresh ones)
2-4 Tbsp. chili powder
1 Tbsp. cocoa
1 tsp. cumin
1 – 19 oz. (540 mL) can diced tomatoes, undrained
1 – 19 oz. (540 mL) can kidney beans, rinsed and drained
1 – 14 oz. (398 mL) can brown beans, with pork or in tomato sauce (optional)
1 cup beef broth or Guinness
1 cup salsa
salt and pepper to taste
Heat the oil in a large pot set over medium-high heat. Sauté the onions in for a few minutes, until they soften. Add the red pepper and garlic and cook for another minute. Add the beef and sausage, squeezed out of its casing, and cook it, stirring and breaking up any lumps, until it’s no longer pink.
Add the chili powder, cocoa and cumin and cook for another minute. Add the tomatoes, beans, beef broth and salsa and bring the mixture to a simmer. Reduce heat to low and simmer for about an hour. Keep it covered if it’s thick enough for your taste – if it seems thin, leave the lid off so that the excess liquid can evaporate. Season with salt and pepper as you see fit.
Serve hot, topped with sour cream and grated cheese, or cool it down and then refrigerate it for a day or two; reheat over low heat on the stovetop. To make chili cheese fries, serve hot chili over oven-roasted fries, topped with cheese curds or grated cheddar, Gouda or Monterey Jack. Serves 8-10.
March 11 2011 | beef | 9 Comments »
Back in Calgary. Dinner was leftovers from this morning’s BT – a spicy Moroccan stir fry made with ground sirloin, peppers and olives, served over couscous. It was so cold in the back of my car – with the heater blasting up front – that my cilantro froze. For those of you not on the currently frozen Canadian tundra, last night it hit -41 in Edmonton, which is where I was.
It’s been a crazy week, and I’m off to another event tonight (I’ll keep this short so I can get some W time in) and we’re heading to Jasper on Friday (I’m doing cooking demos etc at the Pajama Party), and there’s another something special going on tomorrow night – a food tour for First Thursday my mom and I have been trying to piecemeal together for the past week or so, and I just realized I haven’t announced it yet.
Some of you may be lucky enough to know my mom. She’s done a lot for the arts and culture of the city – she was the general manager of the Cultural District for 10 years and is still on more boards than I can keep track of. Among a myriad of other festivals and events she’s brought/organized/run, she launched First Thursdays, bringing people downtown to the cultural district on the first Thursday of each month for art shows, tours, shows, sneak-a-peeks and great deals on food and drinks. She has put a ton of work into it. I want to be her when I grow up. Except I want to get more sleep. (PS she has a far busier social life than I do.)
My mom is usually downtown leading First Thursday tours, but can’t this week, and so she asked me to. Of course, I’m not quite as art-savvy as my mom, and so the tour wound up being food related. Which is going to be kinda fun, I think. It’s our first go at a sort of progressive dinner. Here’s the plan:
At 5, everyone meets at CharCut with a pocketful of $5 bills. We start by sharing a share burger (or two) at their communal table – and they’re giving us a special deal for beers, too – $5 – then we hop from place to place, tasting and drinking and carrying on. (But not too much, lest we get kicked out.) So if you’re looking for something fun to do tomorrow night, come along! It’s open to anyone who wants to join, and I’d love it if some of you came! (Note: you’ll need to email my mom at cd@culturaldistrict.ca, so that we know how many people are coming – it must be capped at 20.)
Hopefully it will work out, we’ll figure out what works and it can be a new thing every First Thursday.
What: A new First Thursday Food Tour – whet your appetites for The Big Taste (formerly Dine Out Calgary) with a progressive $5 Dinner with Julie!
Where:
5pm: A shareburger (large burger or burgers to be shared by the group) at Charcut, one of Calgary’s most popular restaurants (now a year old), NW corner of 9th Ave and Centre St SW, across from the Tower, $5 for the share burger, $5 for a beer if you want one, at their communal table.
6pm: Wine tasting and appies (by Julie!) at The Cellar Winestore, 137-8 Ave SW, $5
7pm: Dessert tasting at The Home Tasting Room, 110-8 Ave SW, $5
8pm: Thomson’s for Alberta beef carpaccio with regianno, pickled onions and rocket olive oil emulsion $5
Somewhere along the way we’ll stop at Coppeneur, the new chocolate shop, for a free chocolate tasting!
How Much: bring about $35 cash in $5 bills!
RSVP: cd@culturaldistrict.ca – limit 20 people!
And here’s the Moroccan beef!
Spicy Moroccan Stir-fry
adapted from the Canadian Beef Information Centre
1 lb (500 g) ground sirloin
1 onion, chopped
2 carrots, coarsely grated
1 small red pepper, chopped
4 garlic cloves, crushed
1 Tbsp. paprika
1 tsp. each ground ginger, cumin and cinnamon
1/4 tsp. each salt, pepper and hot chilli pepper flakes
Half a 28 oz (796 mL) can diced tomatoes
1/3 cup sliced green olives
Toasted pine nuts and chopped fresh cilantro, for garnish
In a large skillet, cook beef, onion, carrots and red pepper over medium-high heat, breaking up beef with back of spoon, for 8 to 10 minutes or until beef is completely cooked and vegetables are tender-crisp.
Stir in the garlic, paprika, ginger, cumin, cinnamon, salt, pepper and hot pepper flakes; cook, stirring, for 1 minute. Stir in tomatoes; bring to boil. Reduce heat to low; simmer, covered, for 5 to 10 minutes or until vegetables are tender. Stir in olives; heat through. Serve over couscous, topped with pine nuts and cilantro. Serves 6.
March 02 2011 | beef | 16 Comments »
I had the urge tonight to make a proper dinner, rather than serve everyone whatever I had been testing that day. And it occurs to me that there have been a great many non-dinners here. Isn’t that what it was supposed to be all about?
There was a small pot of leftover rice in the fridge, so I thought I’d make fried rice. Which triggered a memory of a recipe for garlic fried rice, which I decided to seek out, most likely at a moment I was struggling with writers’ block or some such. (I’m easily distracted to food sites, and like to tell myself it’s all in the name of research, even when I should really be working on something else and reading up on recipes I want to try isn’t really that pressing.)
The recipe, for Asian-style chili with garlic fried rice, was at Kitchen Play, and – behold and lo! – it was a contest! With a deadline of today! A clear sign if ever I saw one.
I thought at first the combo of ground sirloin and sliced steak was odd, and could probably be streamlined, and then I started second guessing the ingredient list, my brain automatically offering up my usual substitutions, until I decided to get over myself and just do what I was told. (More or less.) I’m glad I did. I love the combination of ground sirloin and strips of steak – together they have a great texture. And it means I can use more Canadian beef! (Alberta, even!)
Mike said: “write this one down”. And so here I go:
Asian-style Chili with Garlic Fried Rice
canola oil, for cooking
1 onion, chopped
4-5 garlic cloves, sliced or chopped
1/2 lb. sirloin steak, cut into thin strips
1/2 cup beef broth
1/2 lb. ground sirloin
1 tsp. salt, or to taste
1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
1/2 tsp. ground chipotle chili pepper or chipotle hot sauce (I used a few glugs)
1/2 tsp. smoked paprika
1 red bell pepper, chopped
1 cup tomato sauce
1/4-1/2 can coconut milk, plus extra for serving
1 tsp. sriracha sauce
2-4 Tbsp. chopped fresh cilantro (optional)
lime wedges, for serving
Garlic Fried Rice:
canola oil, for cooking
6 garlic cloves, finely chopped
4 cups cooked long-grain rice
salt, to taste
In a large, heavy skillet, heat a drizzle of oil over medium-high heat and sauté the onion for 2 minutes, until starting to soften. Add garlic and cook for 5 minutes, then add the beef strips. Sauté until the redness of the meat is almost gone, about 4 minutes. Add the beef broth, cover and boil for 10 minutes, letting the steam out and mixing once halfway through.
Add the ground sirloin and spices, and mix thoroughly. Cover and cook for 5 minutes, or until the meat is cooked through and the sauce thickened.
Stir in the tomato sauce, coconut milk and sriracha, reduce heat and simmer until thickened. Stir in the cilantro and serve over garlic fried rice, topped with a drizzle of coconut milk. Serves 4.
For Garlic Fried Rice: heat a generous glug of oil in a heavy skillet (cast iron works great) set over medium-high heat. Cook garlic for a minute or so until the edges get a faint shade of gold. Add rice and a couple of pinches of salt. Stir for about 5 minutes, until it begins to faintly brown and toast. Best eaten warm.
February 28 2011 | beef and one dish | 11 Comments »
9 out of 10 firemen can’t be wrong.
So Friday morning, you may have heard, I did a cooking segment on BT at the new Le Creuset store in Chinook (yes, I’m working on free stuff here! there are channels to go through!) WITH the firemen from the 2011 Hot Stuff calendar. Yes, my job does not suck at all some days. Although it must be said that Jill had a little more firefigher attention than I did. Possibly a lot.
We cooked with beef – ground sirloin, which comes from a single cut (sirloin) rather than a bunch (which you typically get with ground beef), which I like the idea of, plus you get the taste of a steak in ground form. Bonus: ground sirloin has about the same amount of fat as the extra-lean ground beef you’ll get at the grocery store, but with far better flavour and texture. Our theme was cooking with beef and beefcakes, surrounded by Le Creuset. Forget whiskers on kittens – these are a few of my favourite things. The coffee at Phil & Sebastian right next door completed me.
We made shepherd’s pies, a beefy Moroccan dish with olives and couscous, and these stuffed shells.
(Or rather they made them, under my -loose- direction.) They had it covered. They did a little improv. When the second wave of firemen arrived to eat, the consensus was the stuffed shells were their favourite. They’re like little two-bite lasagnas, filled with beef, spinach and ricotta and topped with melty cheese. How could you not adore them? I must admit I’ve always wondered who buys giant pasta shells to stuff – but despite their slipperiness and the fact that several tore or broke and were nibbled on by W or fed to the dog, I’ll be making them again. It was quick – I cooked up the beef, onion and garlic while boiling the shells, added it to some ricotta and spinach (the second time I added a spoonful of pesto, too), spooned the mixture into the shells (kids love getting in on this part, and it wasn’t at all finicky), poured sauce over, sprinkled with cheese and baked until bubbly. Easy. They freeze well (before baking), so you can make a big batch, divide it between two baking dishes, eat one right away and freeze the other for another night. Bake it straight from frozen.
Here’s the recipe – it’s very adaptable though – we didn’t measure particularly closely.
Florentine Beef & Cheese-Stuffed Shells
The best part about this gussied-up twist on lasagna is that it makes two pans – that means you can stash one away for a no-effort dinner another night. If you have kids around, small hands are particularly adept at stuffing pasta shells. Recipe courtesy of beefinfo.org.
1 box (340 g) jumbo pasta shells (approx. 44 shells)
1 lb (500 g) lean or extra lean ground beef sirloin
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2-3 large garlic cloves, minced
1 tsp. (5 mL) Italian seasoning
1 pkg. (454 g) light ricotta cheese
1 pkg. (300 g) frozen chopped spinach, thawed and squeezed dry
1 1/2 cups (375 mL) shredded part-skim mozzarella cheese
1/2 tsp (2 mL) pepper
4 cups (1 L) pasta sauce
1/4 cup (50 mL) grated Parmesan cheese
Cook pasta shells according to package directions. Drain and set aside. (Don’t worry if some shells tear – you won’t need them all.)
Meanwhile, cook the beef, onion, garlic and Italian seasoning in large, deep skillet set over medium heat until the beef is thoroughly cooked and any liquid has evaporated. Remove from heat. Stir in the ricotta, spinach, 1 cup of the mozzarella and pepper. Spoon about 2 tablespoons of the filling into each of about 32 shells.
Spread about a cup of the pasta sauce into each of 9×13-inch baking dish and a 9-inch glass pie plate (or similar sized baking dishes). Place 20 filled shells in the larger baking dish, and 10 to 12 in the pie plate. Drizzle the remaining pasta sauce over the shells, sprinkle with remaining mozzarella and Parmesan. (At this point the dish can be covered and refrigerated overnight or frozen for up to 4 months). Cover loosely with foil and bake in 350°F oven for 30 minutes. Uncover and bake for 5 minutes, until bubbly around the edges and golden on top.
Makes 10 servings.
February 16 2011 | beef and freezable and pasta | 16 Comments »
I made this! Myself! From scratch! For real!
I’m sad to say it doesn’t look anywhere near as good as the first batch – this one is a bit paler and pouffier (like its creator) due to my excitement-triggered belief I could improve upon it, and make it even crispier. Next time I’ll go back to the version below. I still had to photograph it, as the light died and we had ten minutes to finish eating and get to gymnastics. Mike said it was better than take-out.
In the past I’ve been inclined to leave this sort of thing to the experts, but gave it a shot earlier this week for CBC in anticipation of the Chinese new year. If I can make ginger beef from scratch at 6:30 in the morning, you can do it too. (Preferably at 6:30 pm.)
Ginger Beef
If you can find thinly sliced beef for rouladen or bolgogi beef, it’s an easy start. Adapted from the Best of Bridge.
1 lb. sirloin steak or any other cut you like (I used eye of round)
1 egg, beaten
3/4 cup cornstarch
1/3 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup soy sauce
3 Tbsp. rice vinegar
2 Tbsp. wine (red or white – optional)
1 Tbsp. sesame oil
pinch red chili flakes
1/4 cup grated fresh ginger
4-5 garlic cloves, crushed
canola oil, for cooking
1 small red pepper, sliced
1 large carrot, coarsely grated
2 green onions, chopped
Thinly slice the beef into strips a few inches long and about 1/4-inch wide. Toss with egg in a medium bowl. Stir together the cornstarch and water and add to the beef; toss to blend well.
In a small bowl or measuring cup, stir together the sugar, soy sauce, vinegar, wine, sesame oil and chili flakes. Stir in half the ginger and garlic.
In a wok or heavy pot, heat about an inch of oil over medium-high heat until hot but not smoking. Drop the strips of beef into the oil using a fork, chopsticks or tongs, keeping them from clumping together and cooking in batches so the beef doesn’t crowd the pot. Once golden and crisp, transfer to a paper towel-lined plate or sheet. Pour the oil out into a jar (or start with a fresh pan or wok with a new drizzle of oil) and add the pepper, carrots, green onion and remaining ginger and garlic to the pan. Cook for a minute or two, then pour the sauce overtop and heat through. Put the beef in a shallow bowl, pour the sauce over top and serve immediately. Serves 6.
February 03 2011 | appetizers and beef | 31 Comments »
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