One roast - 3 meals (continued)

Good news!  I am out of payroll tax return purgatory with a couple days to spare.

This is a continuation of my using 1 roast I bought on sale to make 3 meals with no wasted left overs.

Beef Pilaf Salad
2 cups chopped beef roast
1 can kidney beans, rinsed and drained
1 cup cooked brown rice, (cooked the night before)
1 can garbanzo beans, rinsed and drained
1 small apple chopped
1 small carrot chopped
1/2 c. celery chopped
1/2 small yellow bell pepper from a previous dish chopped
1 small can of sliced black olives
3/4 cup Paul Newman oil and vinegar dressing.

Combine ingredients and chill.

Let's just say that Husband didn't eat a ton of this, so it's my lunch this week, 'cause I like it.  He's not really a dinner salad guy.  He is more a meat and potatoes type of guy.  Thanks for not complaining, dear.  It was an experiment. 

One roast - 3 meals

I'm making a number of changes in our lives.  One is a committment use all of my left overs very efficiently and never waste food.  I've been guilty of this in the past and I was raised better than that.  So this is 3 meals from one beef roast purchased on sale. 

Meal one.  Pot roast.  I have a brand new oven.  I am new to owning a convection oven.  This is the only stove I've ever owned which I cared to read the instructions for, but I love it and am looking forward to learning more.  Vegetables and potatoes.  Husband needed a comfort meal after all of the furniture moving he has been doing.

 

Meal two.  Barbecue beef sandwiches.  For lunch, I dashed home to toast my sandwich buns under the broiler of the new oven.  I wrapped them in foil and grabbed my barbecue beef and headed back to the office.  I transport food quite often, to work and back.  The microwave is the only means of cooking at our business, so I have to be creative.  I recommend owning an assortment of containers that microwave well, transport with a sealed lid, and can go straight into the dishwasher.  I bought this one from Goodwill, so this doesn't need to be a budget problem.

Once at work, I heated the beef and assembled the sandwiches.  This was just pieces of the roast and barbecue sauce poured over.  I used Josh's Sauce, recipe to follow, with my own secret ingredient.  I keep this sauce in a quart canning jar in my frig and use it many ways.  It is easy to make and uniformly handy.  And I know what's in it.  Just read the ingredients in some bottled sauces and you wonder what you are consuming. 

I had baggies of apple and carrots to go with.

The sandwich was savory and hardy.  Step-son said it was delicious.   Husband liked it, too. I had been thinking about it all morning.  Yum.

Josh's sauce
2 cups catchup
1 cup brown sugar
1/4 c. Apple Cider Vinegar
1/4 c. soy sauce
2 t. minced garlic
4 shakes of chipotle tabasco sauce, optional but good

I've reserved enough of the roast for meal 3:  Beef Pilaf Salad.  Recipe for the salad will be coming soon. 

Chicken Caesar Salad

As I've mentioned many times, my husband and I work together.  Every morning, well most, I pack a lunch for us. 

http://dinnerattheosbornes.blogspot.com/2010/03/lunch-at-osbornes.html

I'd like our lunches to be as interesting as our dinners and sometimes I'm successful. Today we are having Chicken Caesar Salad using the leftover grilled chicken from last night.  I've been on a Caesar Salad kick.  I've been experimenting with homemade Caesar dressing, trying many different variations off the internet. 

Here is what I like the best right now.  It is a modification of someone else's recipe, so I can't claim it.

Homemade Caesar Dressing
1 egg yolk
1 t. Dijon mustard
1 garlick clove, minced
1 T. anchovy paste

6 T. olive oil

6 T. canola oil

3 T. fresh lemon juice, not the bottled kind for this.

Whisk the ingredients until smooth.  This is about 3 salads worth of dressing for the two of us, so I keep it in a pint or half pint canning jar in the fridge for the next one.

1/2 head of Romain lettuce, cleaned and torn into bite size pieces.  The Romaine lettuce growing in raised bed 1 is being systematically eaten by a bunny every time any new leaves start to come up, so this Romaine comes from Diane's Produce.

1/2 c. grated parmesan cheese

1 cup. homemade croutons.   So much better than anything you buy and not hard to make.  For sandwiches and toast, I buy a sour dough bread made in loaf pans at a local bakery.  This is three slices. 

1 T of butter in the pan, melted.  Add the bread cubes.

Toss them around with the spoon to coat and continue stiring them as the toast.  Coarse sea salt and fresh ground pepper.  Make sure all turn over and get toasted on both sides until they are as toasty as you want.  They stay much softer on the inside than the kind you buy.  Of course, the shelf life is short.  Put them in a zip lock bag if you aren't using them immediately.

Hopefully they've left me a little room in the fridge at work.  At lunch time, I'll add the dressing and cheese to the lettuce and toss.  Add the croutons and toss again.  Slice the chicken into small pieces and lay it across the salad. 

Packed and ready to go.

Baked Lentils with Cheese

I'm a very frugal person and always have been.  I've always believed that it was because my parents and grandparents had it so hard during the depression and lived so frugally from there on.  So then I marry a man who can't hold onto a dollar for the life of him.  But he is awful cute.

I've been making Baked Lentils with Cheese since my college years.  I'd make it in my big casserole dish and eat it serving by serving throughout the week until it was gone.  I like it, but it is also very frugal. It was in my lunch box the previous post.

It came from my favorite cookbook.  The one that my paternal grandmother gave me that I discussed in the post about Beef and Barley Soup.  This poor book has obviously seen better days.  I've been thinking about taking the binding off and putting it into a three ring binder.  Can anyone think of a better solution? 

The broken out pages are between Arroz Con Pollo, another frugal dish if you leave out the saffron, and Cheese Strata, which reminds me so much of a dish my materal grandparents ate.  Anyway, I recommend this for a vegetarian but delicious meal that feeds a crowd for penny's.

Baked Lentils with Cheese.
12 oz bag lentils, rinsed
2 cups water
1 bay leaf
1 T. salt
1/4 t. pepper
1/8 t. marjoram
1/8 t. crushed sage
1/8 t. crushed thyme
1/2 onion, chopped finely
1 large can of tomatoes
2 large carrots, thinly sliced
1/2 c. celery, thinly sliced
3 c. shredded medium sharp Tillamook cheddar cheese

In a large casserole dish mix all ingredients except the carrots, celery, and cheese.  Cover and bake at 375 for 30 minutes.  Uncover, add the carrots and celery, and bake for 40 minutes more or until the vegetables are tender.  Discard the bay leaf. Add the cheese and cook for 5 additional minutes. 

Interesting that the original recipe calls for 2 onions and 2 tablespoons of salt.  I've never made it that way.  Also, it calls for American cheese, which I have never used.  There are some other small changes I've made over the years to suit myself.  Husband won't go near it so it's all mine.

Remember to be humble.

Lunch at the Osbornes

It is important to me that my husband eats a good lunch.  If left to his own (and I mean this kindly, dear), he would skip it or eat fast food.  Because we work together it isn't that hard.  Here I have quart canning jars.  In one is the left over Beef and Vegetable Stir Fry from the previous post.  Husband is a carnivore and would like to have meat with every meal, but he also needs vegetables and fruit.  I'll bring this for him each lunch time until it's gone.  In the other jar, I have a vegetarian lentil dish that I've made since my college years.  It is frugal and flavorful, seasoned with marjoram and other herbs.  I like it. The recipe came from the cookbook Grandma gave me.  See the the Beef and Barley Soup post for more about the cookbook.  I'll post the recipe for the lentil dish tomorrow.

I put them in canning canning jars because they are reuseable, dishwasher safe, and fit easily into my cooler.  Our work has a small frig but it always seems to be full of other people's stuff, so I use those blue freezer things to keep everything cold. 

The care it takes to do this every day is soothing to me.  Creating order in your outer world helps make order in your inner world.  Or something like that.  Keep it simple, keep it basic. 

And I have a stash of dark chocolate truffles at work, so good.

Remember to eat lunch.

Summer in a Jar

I want to can.  When I was younger and constantly broke, I made pints and 1/2 pints of blackberry jam every year.  Blackberries grow wild here and with a small amount of effort and organization it is fairly easy to pick large quanties when they are ripe.  Throughout the year, when I needed a small hostess gift or thank-you gift I gave away my jam.  I haven't done it in a few years, but I often make strawberry/rhubarb jelly or raspberry.  I like pickles and determine each year that I will make tons, but often life gets in the way.

Canning makes me remember the way summer feels.  It gives me hope.  It makes me smile.  Why don't I do it more?  Thank you mom, once again, for teaching me how.

When I was young, my mother and grandmother canned all summer.  They ended up with dozens and dozens of jars of beans, cherries, peaches, pears, pickles, relish.  They didn't have much money during those years.  Mom, my Grandmother, my sister and I went to U-pick fields.  We picked the product in the morning then went home to can it in the afternoon.  Many an afternoon, I spent belly up to the sink with a pairing knife peeling sinks and sinks of fruit.  To this day, I can peel an apple with a pairing knife faster than anyone I've ever known.  Really.  Try me.

Last summer, I made pickled three-bean salad in pints.  My husband won't even consider eating it, so it's all mine.  Here's what I have left. Not much.

When I make a sandwich, Husband gets potato chips and I get a scoop of this.  Crunchy and tart.  Colorful.  I bought the beans at a farmstand down the road from my house.  Green beans and wax beans.  There was an earthness in the air.  The smell of a working farm.  Fans were placed in the windows to keep air moving through her little building.  I dipped my hands into big bins of beans and dropped handfuls into paper bags.  I picked out leafs and stems and said, "The wusses.  These are machine picked bush beans.  In my day, pole beans were picked by hand."  Sorry, that's just what I said.

I went home and filled one side of my sink with water and poured the beans into it.  Beans float.  Or they don't.  But mostly they do.  Then I transferred handfuls into the other sink.  Let out the water and fill the sink with clean and back into the pool again, boys, for bath number two.  Then, set a colander into the second sink and deposit the now clean beans to drain. 

And I snipped.  Between thumb and first finger, twist off the stem and tip end.  Break them in two or three to get a uniform length.  A satisfying sound when beans snap.  This is what food is people.  Real food, Real life.

Pickled Three-Bean Salad from Kerr Kitchen Cookbook   

3 cups (2 to 3 inch) fresh green bean or yellow beans or a combination
2 (16 oz) cans red kidney beans, rinsed and drained.
2 (16 oz) cans garbanzo beans, rinsed and drained
1 cup sliced onion
1 cup sliced celey
1 cup sliced green bell pepper
2 1/2 c. water
2 cups white vinegar
3/4 c. sugar
1/2 c. bottled lemon juice
1 t. Kerr Pickling Salt.

Wash and snip the beans.  Blanch in boiling water for 3 minutes, the cool in ice water.  Drain well.  In a very large bowl, combine beans and remaining vegetables.  Set aside.  In 4 quart saucepan, combine water, vinegar, sugar, lemon juice and pickling salt. Bring to a boil over medium - high heat.  Pour hot vinegar mixture over vegetables.  Mix well.  Cover and refrigerate overnight.  In saucepan, bring vegetables/vinegar mixture to a boil over medium-high heat.  Immediately fill hot pint jars with vegetables, leaving 1 inch headspace.  Pour hot vinegar mixture into jars leaving 1/2 inch head space.  Wipe the jar tops.  Place lids and bands.  Process in a boiling water canner for 15 minutes.  Remove and cool. 

You know they sealed when you hear that lovely deep popping sound.  I remember lieing in bed at my grandmother's and hearing that sound every so often after a day of canning peaches.  Also, you know a jar has sealed if you press with your thumb on the lids and there is no give.  The lid of an unsealed jar will pop in when pressed on.

Remember to put a dated label on each jar. 

And remember to enjoy the process and feel good.

Chili Heaven

There is something very comforting about a big pot of chili for me.  The source of my love for the stuff must be my mom.  She made awesome chili in a huge kettle. 

In addition to ground beef, she added bacon.  She was a very frugal person, but added bacon to lots of stuff.  Each time, she made a point of saying to everyone that bacon was expensive, but it was worth it for this particular recipe.  We often had cornbread with it.  We were allowed several toppings to both our chili and our cornbread.  To chili, we were allowed shredded cheese, saltine crackers, sour cream and chopped onion.  To cornbread, we had butter and something sweet, sometimes, honey, molassas, jam or dark karo syrup.  I know this wouldn't be for just everyone, but we all looked forward to this.

When we were finished with our meal, Mom spooned the remaining chili into Mason canning jars, put lids on them and put them in the freezer for other meals.  I have many happy memories of coming into the kitchen and seeing a frozen jar in the sink defrosting and being happy knowing that chili was coming. 

I don't have my mom's chili recipe.  Here is one my family likes a lot.  It is very good reheated, not very hot, but has lots of flavor. It still makes me happy to make it and eat it.  I'm just as happy to have left overs. 

Chili Chez Osborne (A modified version of a Taste of Home recipe)
3 lbs ground beef
1/2 large onion chopped.
1 medium green pepper, chopped
2 celery ribs, chopped.
2 cloves garlic, minced 
1 can each (16 oz each) kidney and pinto beans, drained and rinsed
1 can (29) oz tomato sauce
1 jar (16 oz) mild picante salsa
1 can (14 1/2 oz) diced tomatoes, undrained. 
1 can (10 1/2 oz) beef broth and 2 cups water
1 - 2 T. chili powder
2 T. Worcestershire sauce
1 T. dried basil
2 T. ground cumin
2 t. A-1 steak sauce
1 t. salt.

In a large pot, cook meat, onion, pepper, celery, and garlic unil meat is no longer pink.  Drain.  Stir in remaining ingredients.  Make sure to rinse the beans.  Canned beans have a starchy liquid on them which isn't good.  Bring to boil. 

Reduce heat, simmering uncovered for 30 minutes.  Use any left overs for other meals or for lunches.

Turkey Sandwiches

I can't believe we ate the whole thing.   TheThanksgiving holiday makes many people feel warm and comfy-cozy, safe and happy.  The smell of the food, the feeling of it all, the nesting hominess is a happy memory for most of us.  Turkey, sage and thyme, butter and cream.  This is our culture.  Who we are on some fundamental level.

But let's be real.  The traditional Thanksgiving of my past is 2 days of work to prepare and serve and 1 day of clean up for someone.  If you've been that person, it can be overwhelming.  And yet it is easy to feel guilt at not doing this for future generations. 

My usual solution to this problem is a seriously scaled back version.  This year, I roasted a turkey, made mashed potatoes and gravy and a pie.  No greenbean casserole, no yams, no stuffing, no rolls, no salad, and on and on.  I served it on the china.  We enjoyed the smells and toasty warm feelings before, during and after the meal.  I cleaned up as I cooked so it wasn't too bad.  We had left overs for 4 days. More and more, the important thing for me is to be happy, not to be perfect. A hard lesson for me.

My favorite sandwiches are all grilled.  My memories of my mom making grilled cheese are strong and just make me feel good.  To make this sandwich, butter one side of a piece of bread (bakery sour dough here).  The other side is spred with mayonaise.  It goes butter side down in a heavy bottom pan that has been heated to medium.  A layer of cranberry sauce, then turkey, and Brie cheese.  Common left overs after Thanksgiving.  I've done this with swiss and provolone also, if you don't have Brie.

Another piece of bread butter up, mayo down.  The bread gets toasty as the sandwich heats and the cheese melts.  Use a spatula to lift up the corner of the sandwich and peak under. 

When the bread is browned, use the spatula to flip it over.  Be careful to make sure the ingredients stay intact.  Apply a little pressure with the spatula to the top of the sandwich now and then as it cooks and the ingredients incorporates. Just delicious.  One day I may get one of the new fangeled pannini makers, but maybe not.


A piece of pie and a pair.  Shared this all with the husband and we had lunch.

Lunch

Lunch is a simple concept. Stop work in the middle of the day and eat something that will keep you going and in good shape until dinner. It really needn't be more complicated than that.

I grew up in a frugal household. I was never hungry, but I know my parents struggled for many years to keep the household in the black. Things changed for the better for them in my teens and later, but early on we didn't have much. I remember running bare foot across particle board floors because they couldn't afford carpet in the house as a child. I had never seen a full closet of clothes until my early adulthood. The house was always so cold at night and I can remember shivering in the dark. To this day, I have many careful rituals to feel good at night. Fortunately, I have a caring husband who makes sure I am comfortable and warm.

For lunch, we often had canned soup and half a sandwich. Campbell's soup was the main brand then and there were much fewer choices. I liked cream of tomato and chicken noodle. I remember helping to make the soup, opening the can, spooning it into the pan. Back then Campbell's soup was concentrated. It came out in cold, jellied, chunks, not very appetizing, really. You filled the empty can with water or milk and poured into the pan, then heated and mixed the liquid with the soup. As it heated, it combined and started to look more like soup. I can still smell it as I write this.

We never felt deprived by these meager lunches. In fact, I think back fondly to these memories. We grew up feeling safe, cared for, loved. There are better soups available these days, but I still keep a few cans of the old ones for days when I need extra comfort.

Grilled cheese was another favorite for us. I remember my mother buttering the bread on both sides, taking out the cast iron skillet, slicing the cheese. I remember hearing the sizzle, the sound of my mother sliding the spatula under the sandwich and flipping it over, the smell of the toasting gooey mess and knowing warm comfort was coming. She was more than a bit of a perfectionist. She cut it just a certain way, it needed to be browned just so. Absolute heaven.

Lunch is a very simple thing. It needn't be hard. I understand that cream of tomato and grilled cheese is not your comfort food. So do something else! It needn't require standing in a line, ordering, paying. It isn't rocket science, just food.