Archive for the 'beef' Category
My good pal Pierre just launched his brand-new very first cookbook, named Kitchen Scraps for his blog, and I don’t think I ever did properly congratulate him. I mean, I went to his book launch and ate a lot, something I’m willing to do for only the closest of friends, and even swallowed my very first escargot (sorry Pierre, a slug’s a slug), but I never did publicly pat him on the back. His new book is brilliant – funny, entertaining, well written. Perfect bedtime reading. I love the illustration of the guy with the hairy chest about to be jolted back to life by one of those things they used to use on every episode of Emergency! (with Randolph Mantooth – I can’t honestly believe I remember his name – funny what your brain holds onto and what it jettisons) because he ate a heart attack sandwich. Sorry I can’t tell you what’s on it, you’ll have to get the book. Or check out his blog.
So this is Pierre’s recipe, from his new book. I made it for an article I was working on on the subject of offal. I adapted it a little, baking the pastry right on the pie instead of cutting rounds to bake separately. To be honest, I picked at it a little before leaving to teach a hands-on hors d’oeuvres class at the Cookbook Company tonight, and then left Mike to have his way with it. I came home to about half in the fridge. I imagine W picked out a few chunks of meat and asked for eggs on toast.
Steak & Kidney Cowpie
The Offal Truth: The biological function of a kidney is to filter urine. The unfortunate result is that kidneys can smell like pee. If you can get over this inevitable truth there are a couple tricks to diminish this smell, like soaking them in vinegar and salt, but the smell will probably linger like your six-year-old cousin’s mattress. If there is absolutely no way you will eat kidney, you can substitute mushrooms.
1 calf’s kidney, or substitute 30 button mushrooms, quartered
2 Tbsp. white vinegar (any kind)
2 Tbsp. kosher or sea salt
2 lb stewing beef or chuck steak, cut into 1-inch cubes
vegetable oil for the pan, up to 2 Tbsp for onions
3 Tbsp. flour
1 onion, chopped
2 cups beef broth
1 cup Guinness
1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
pinch of nutmeg
salt and pepper
1 package frozen puff pastry, thawed
Soak the kidney overnight in water with the vinegar and salt in the fridge. Replace the soaking solution as often as you like.
Remove and discard the white membranous material from the kidney, and dice the glumpy lumps into small 1/2-inch cubes and get them into a bowl.
In a big pot over medium-high heat, heat some oil and start to brown the cubed beef in small batches, removing the beef when it is browned onto a large plate or casserole dish. The meat doesn’t need to be cooked through, just browned on the outside for flavour. After you have browned all the beef, brown little batches of the kidney (or mushrooms), and then transfer to the same dish as the beef.
Reduce the heat to medium, pour in some oil if the drippings don’t amount to about 2 Tbsp, and cook the onion until it is translucent, about 5 minutes. Sprinkle in the flour evenly and mix it up a bit with a wooden spoon. Crank the heat to full blast and throw in the beef broth and the Guinness. Scrape the sticky bits off the bottom of the pan. Now add all the previously browned beef along with their juices, and the kidneys (or mushrooms), Worcestershire sauce, nutmeg, and salt and pepper. Drop the heat to low, cover and simmer for at least 2 hours.
Spoon the mixture into a baking dish that will accommodate it, and top with the pastry – no need to cut it to shape, just drape it over the top and let the edges hang over. Press them against the sides of the dish. Bake at 400F for about 15 minutes, until the pastry is golden and it’s all heated through. Serves 6 close friends.
November 30 2009 | beef | 16 Comments »
Check this out. Sometimes this all-encompassing obsession with food has its benefits. (Excuse me, please, while I pat myself on the back for this one. Although I’m quite certain someone somewhere has already thought of it – they can get equal kudos for their obvious culinary brilliance.)
So I was driving recently, or rather I was daydreaming in the passenger seat, imagining myself eating a meatloaf sandwich. Some fantasize about George Clooney; my mind wanders to meatloaf. Can you blame me, really? Meatloaf sandwiches are the best, aren’t they? I mean, they are more often than not my motivation for making meatloaf in the first place. That, and ketchup.
So it occurred to me that one could morph meatloaf and burgers on the barbecue. Although I am a longtime fan of the grilled burger, I don’t make them often at home. (This could be partly due to my underlying prejudice against homemade burgers, instilled at an early age when my Dad would broil patties made with extra-lean ground beef and oat bran in approximately a 50-50 ratio. He’s a gastroenterologist; I suppose this excuses him for being a particularly vocal advocate of fiber. Needless to say, my first fast-food burger was a mind-blowing revelation.)
But – meatloaf. You could bake a meatloaf, and then chill it, and then grill thick slabs to heat it through, brushing with barbecue sauce or the sticky glaze normally reserved for the top of a meatloaf. Couldn’t you? Oh yes. You sure could. Especially if you had leftovers.
Bonus: this relieves any pressure of whomever is in charge of the barbecue to ensure they cook the burgers through without overcooking them, as well as the need to break one or two open to see just how pink they are inside. Because hey, the meatloaf is cooked already.
If you need a meatloaf recipe, there are plenty to be found online. Cook it, chill it, slice it thick. If there is a glaze, save it to brush on while you grill. Then all you need to do is add a slab of aged white cheddar (or, you know, whatever) after the first flip, and close the lid so that it melts.
And so it has come to be that W will not carry a homemade burger prejudice on his shoulders into adulthood.
One Year Ago: Black Currant Sorbet & Ginger Ale Floats
August 15 2009 | beef and on the grill | 22 Comments »
I pulled a pound of ground (Galloway beef from Second to None meats) out of the freezer last night with no real plans for it. Tonight, after painting a bowl as part of the Empty Bowls Benefit for the Calgary Inter-faith Food Bank and coming home with no dinner plan, I noticed half bag of Italian buns in the breadbox and got a sudden urge for sloppy Joes. It seems to me the penultimate working weeknight family meal. (With peas.)
When I was a kid, sloppy Joes were about as close as to a burgers as we got. Closer even than the made-from-scratch burgers my dad made out of extra-lean ground beef and oat bran (in approximately equal quantities) which I called sawdust burgers and which discouraged my friends from staying for dinner. Now it is becoming evident that I am in fact turning into my Dad, as I do things like bring bagels and cheese to the zoo (instead of buying food there) and am excited to tell you how easy it is to sneak ground flaxseed into things like sloppy Joes – anything with chunky texture, like chili or spaghetti sauce, makes a good candidate. It seems I have developed a taste for frugality as well as grainy breads.
I’m sure their sweetness was a big part of the reason I loved SJs so much – between the ketchup and brown sugar, it’s sweet, saucy meat on a bun. Although a soft bun is considered the classic vehicle, sloppy Joes are phenomenal on split cheese biscuits or a thick wedge of cheddar beer bread.
Sloppy Joes
a drizzle of canola or olive oil
1 onion, chopped
1 red bell pepper, seeded and chopped (optional)
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 lb. lean ground beef or bison
1 14 oz. (398 mL) can diced, whole or stewed tomatoes
1/2 cup ketchup or barbecue sauce, or some of each
1 Tbsp. brown sugar
1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
Salt and pepper
soft buns, cheese buns, plain or cheese biscuits
Heat the oil in a large saucepan set over medium-high heat and sauté the onion, celery, red pepper and garlic for about 10 minutes, until the onions are starting to turn golden. Add the meat and cook for about 5 minutes, breaking it up as you cook, until the meat is no longer pink.
Add the tomatoes, ketchup, vinegar, brown sugar, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, and salt and pepper to taste and simmer for 20-30 minutes, until the sauce has thickened. Split the buns or biscuits in half and ladle the sloppy Joe mixture on top. Serves 4-6.
One Year Ago: Peanut Noodles (weird!)
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April 15 2009 | beef and freezable and sandwiches | 12 Comments »
When I think back to the dinners of my childhood, I’m sorry to say (Mom, especially if you’re reading this), that mostly the bad ones stand out. As a kid I was just as food obsessed as I am now, but with little control over what I had access to, and virtually none when it came to dinnertime. It was a bad day when I came home to fish for dinner. Served, in my memory at least, with warmed stewed tomatoes with little green bits in small glass cups that were probably very stylish in the 70s. Beef stew ran a close second – I still have it in my head that I’m not a fan, and am always surprised when I enjoy it – typically made with lean flank steak that had the texture of rope and got wedged in my teeth. I called it beef gum, because it gave such a good, long chew. Beef chaw, if you will.
But there is one exception: hash. Strangely enough I have no recollection of my mom making roast beef dinners, but she must have in order to use up the leftover meat and potatoes to make hash. It was finely chopped – in a meat grinder, even? – with some onion, I think, and then flattened like a pancake in our electric frying pan until it got good and crispy around the edges. I don’t think it was structurally sound enough to be cut into wedges, so it was served up as a sort of meat scramble, with lots of crispy bits interspersed throughout, and doused with ketchup. I loved it.
So I (may have mentioned the dogsitting?) found a note on A’s kitchen counter, left before heading to Mexico, that there was leftover steak and potatoes in the fridge. {Flashback to teenagehood and babysitting – finding a note to help yourself to the chips and pop – jackpot!} A couple chunks of steak and a container of roasted potatoes, with remnants of onion clinging to them. Hmm. My first instinct was to rush home and try my hand at hash.
I have eaten relatively well this week. But I think that this dish of hash beat them all – lobster gnocchi included. It brought me right back to the dinner table of my youth – long and wooden with benches, not chairs – like that scene in Ratatouille where Anton Ego gets sucked through the wormhole into his French country kitchen with a scraped knee.
The thing about hash is you can’t start with raw ingredients – it must be fashioned out of leftovers. Chop the meat and potatoes up fine – a food processor works well, just don’t turn it into paste – and cook it in a hot skillet with a bit of oil. When the bottom is looking dark attempt to flip it – it will crumble apart and then you can just move it around in the pan until it’s heated through, and serve hot, with ketchup. (Eat the ketchupy bits off the top, add more, repeat.)
I think I will go ahead and commit to going back to the daily posts for the month of April. I miss that pressure of having to report every day. (And I’m getting off the hook too easily on those oatmeal-yogurt-reheated Tim’s nights.)
One Year Ago: Banana Bread with Peanut Butter (and just look how adorable W was!)
April 01 2009 | beef | 19 Comments »
OK, here we go. Fiona (who is vowing this year to read 100 books and tell us about them – so maybe that can be our other stay-home-in-your-jammies book club? We can then make intelligent literary conversation at the gym/water cooler about the book “we” just read, and no one will be the wiser?) suggested I ditch the (Apple) Safari web browser that came with my iMac and download Firefox. So lets see if this works. Sadly my index is still nowhere to be found (on my computer anyway – so odd that a few people are getting it. You’d think as admin I’d have access to it if it was on the server. Maybe if you’re seeing it it’s in your cache?).
I spent the afternoon hiding/decompressing (if you can call it that with 4 toddlers underfoot) at K’s house over far too cheesy artichoke dip and a chunky chorizo-bean-tomato-pineapple dip J made that I may have to bug her for the recipe for, scooped up with baked whole wheat pitas (how virtuous are we?) and dragged my feet home at around 5. Having started to cull the contents of my freezer for anything appetizing/usable/bulky I had already committed to making something out of one of the first frosty packages to go: thinly sliced beef that I bought to make Bulgogi (Korean Barbecued) Beef. Fortuitously I had picked up some Shanghai noodles (the thinnish ones) at the market last week and so morphed the two. (The next month I swear is going to be re-runs from last year. I found some roasted squash and ricotta ravioli in there too.)
So I poured equal amounts of soy sauce and rice vinegar and about half that of brown sugar over the beef and let it sit while I made some sesame noodles, and threw a few stalks of asparagus and frozen broccoli trees into the water during the last few minutes of cooking. Drained the lot while sauteing up some sliced peppers and the beef in its marinade, then tossed the lot together in a big bowl and sprinkled it with chopped peanuts. It was OK. The beef was sublime, but the noodles got overcooked as I went to retrieve a naked W from the gritty snow in the back yard, and I don’t think I’ll ever get used to frozen broccoli.
My addiction these days is coffee. I never drank coffee until about 5 years ago, and I still don’t have more than one or two cups a day. Typically Americanos or the odd lattè – because they are espresso-based drinks, lower in caffeine than coffee – which might be why I don’t have any problem drinking them in the late afternoon/evening. It’s comforting to have something to sip on for an hour or so, it’s a way to be sociable that involves food, and I let myself go to Starbucks more often than I used to (partially due to my Christmas gift cards) because I need that something. Here’s a tip: a tall Americano in a grande cup, topped up with whole milk, is like a frugal lattè ($2.36 vs. almost $5, although it’s not as hot and has no foam, but you can drink it faster and rewarm it if you need to) for about 100 calories, or a grande Caffè Misto – equal parts coffee and steamed milk – is only 110 calories; both will provide some protein, too. I don’t add sugar, but one packet of sugar is only 11 calories.
Speaking of book club – I have about 15-20 takers. Yahoo! (If anyone still wants in, email me anytime.) I’m trying to figure out a venue and best time of day, so will email you all directly. It’s hard for me to imagine us all sitting around not drinking coffee and eating cupcakes.
I would do just about anything for a cupcake right now. Anything? Yes, anything.
January 21 2009 | beef | 22 Comments »
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