Recipes: Meat

For almost a year, I've been looking for a way to cook tip roast that doesn't end up overly chewy- for some reason, it seems even a long bath in the crock-pot is too much for one's round tip roast. Tonight, I was determined to come up with a solution, and I am disturbingly pleased by the result.

It started with a small round tip roast, which I tried to murder horribly with a fork before dredging in flour, onion powder, and garlic powder. Then, I heated a 10-inch calphalon pan with a small amount of canola and added a pinch of cumin seed and three cloves of garlic. I browned the tip roast quickly, then just as quickly burned off a shot of cognac.

After this, I added one can of chicken broth, a pound of celery hearts (halved), and a can of tomato sauce; one dash of hot sauce and a pinch of freshly ground chiles and it was ready to go in the oven at 350 degrees.

An hour later, I pulled out the roast and celery and covered them with foil; added a little more flour to thicken as well as a shot of soy sauce and a dash of worcestershire. I whisked this down, mounted the sauce with half a stick of butter (for shine), and then served it over the sliced roast and the celery.

It turned out pretty fantastic. I used a very small roast, so there was an overabundance of sauce this time around; I think I'll make a little more next time.

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Here we go! For this EU night, I decided on making Cheesesteaks. Alas, they weren't traditional, in the fact that they weren't made with Cheez Whiz (Seriously. Apparently, a hot dog vendor in Philidelphia invented cheesesteaks when he got bored with his regular faire). This is the recipe. alas. it is not exact. Why? Well because its up to you the amount of ingredients you want on the thing. Not me.

Also, note that the cut of beef required (suggested) for these is a mysterious cut known to few as "Eye of Round" Roast. In my earlier, uncertain years, I worked at a Smiths Food and Drug in the Meat department. I know quite a bit of beef from my Father and Grandfather as well, but I had never heard of this cut. I dont know why. Ask your butcher, or use a Rib-Eye steak or comparable marbled cut of beef. You can't tell the difference. Except in price, maybe, the Eye of Round is very cheap, $11 for 2.5 lbs or so. (Note: 2.5 lbs is enough to make 10 sandwiches, and thats just meat and cheese.)

2lb.      Eye of Round roast, 
          or comparable portion of 
          meat to stick in sandwiches.

8-10      Dutch style sandwich rolls (very flaky crust).

16-20     Slices of provolone cheese

?         Frenched onions, chopped bell peppers, mushrooms
          sweet cherry peppers, anything you want on there.

1         Spray bottle or mustard bottle filled with        
          clean water.

1         Bottle of Steak/Grill seasoning (optional)

Start by putting the roast, or other meat in the freezer for an hour or two. You want it frozen, but still pliable. Rock hard would be bad, and hard to cut. While its freezing, cut the vegetables, watch TV, do something.

Frozen enough? ok, get a serrated blade, yes, the type you cut bread with. What you're looking for here is to shave very thin slices of beef off of the roast. Since the beef is frozen, it should be easier to cut without tearing. After you've sliced all of the beef very thin, set it aside in a bowl. I would suggest you get a two burner cast iron griddle for this, they're good for pancakes, eggs, pretty much anything, but great for this. Lay it across one front burner and one back burner, and turn the heat on the front burner to high, and the back burner to low.

Throw a cup or so of your veggies on the front part of the griddle, and saute until desired done-ness. While this is cooking, preheat the oven to 175 degrees. If the vegetables begin to stick to the griddle, hit them with a squirt of water from the mustard bottle, it will prevent them from sticking. Once they're cooked to your liking, move them to the back of the griddle. Throw a cup of the sliced beef on there, and cook to desired doneness and again, hit with a squirt of water if it starts to stick. Once this is cooked to your liking, combine the cooked vegetables and the beef together and cook for a minute or two, blasting with water when you need to. With the spatula, form the mixture into an oval shape, and then put two slices of provolone on the oval, almost covering the meat but try to keep it off of the grill. Hit the top of the cheese with two or three squirts of water, and the steam from this will melt the cheese very very quickly.

Get one of your sandwich rolls, and cut lengthwise along one side, in the typical hot dog bun fashion. Lay the bun open side down onto the meat, and then slide the spatula underneath the entire mass. In one motion, flip the whole mess over, and you should have a Philly Cheesesteak! Yay!

I know it seems like quite a bit of work, but they are mighty tasty.

I was seriously in need of some sour cream yesterday, so I browsed the internet for a couple beef stroganoff recipes and generated something that turned out to be pretty darn fantastic.

After slicing a half-pound sirloin steak into small strips, I dredged them in flour, garlic salt, and pepper, then sauteed them in butter along with a quarter onion (diced). I added a couple dashes of Worcestershire and soy sauce (that combo is my secret weapon for meat dishes). After the onion was transparent, I added some sliced mushrooms, a shot of apple cognac (any brandy would be fine), and half a can of chicken broth. Once the whole mixture thickened, I added half a cup of sour cream, reduced the heat to medium, and let the sauce thicken.

Over buttered egg noodles, this one was pretty fantastic. There was just a hint of the apple flavor from the cognac. If I do this again, I will wait to add the steak until after the onions are done; it certainly wasn't overcooked, but I would have liked it to be a little less cooked anyways.

There was a recipe in the Kraft Food & Family magazine for pulled pork sandwiches. That gave us the idea for making our own, except by doing it without going to the store at all.

Barbecue sauce was the first part of the equation, and it's so easy to make that I make it every other weekend or so. I do cheat a little by using ketchup, but only because the tomato paste and vinegar and seasonings I'd be using would essentially be making ketchup in the first place.

Steps to make barbecue sauce:

1. Pour some ketchup into a saucepan. The ketchup will be about a third the mass of the entire finished result.
2. Pour half that volume of brown sugar in.
3. Add a few shots of worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, and if you have it, liquid smoke.
4. Pour in enough apple cider vinegar to make the whole thing liquid.

By cooking this over medium and tasting it frequently, you can adjust the taste with those ingredients until you get your base sauce at the perfect level between savory and acidic. (I usually do my red pepper at this point too, so I can also adjust for heat).

There are tons of things you can add to this to make your own special barbecue sauce. For our pulled pork, I used Newcastle Brown Ale, cayenne, and onion powder. Because that's how I roll.

The barbecue sauce in this instance went with some pork ribs into a slow cooker for 4 hours, got pulled, and got stirred back in. Tart-head made the hamburger buns, and excellent they were- but you'll have to wait for her update, because I have no idea how she made them.

This weekend, I once again proffered my fantastic cookery in two dishes- one sublime, one subpar. Not to say the subpar one didn't come out alright...

The night before grocery day is always a bit of a scrounge for miscible ingredients, since there's not much to plan a main course around. While the Tart was telling me the same three ingredients she'd been mentioning every night for a week - eggs, bacon, and potatoes - I used my fantastic powers of looking at things and discovered a bag of thin egg noodles.

Since we stock about twenty billion cans of broth just in case we need one, I salvaged two cans of chicken stock and set both of these out. Now, I needed something interesting, something that would keep this from turning into a generic chicken noodle soup.

After poking around in the fridge, I found a third of a ham steak in a tupperware container. Now, I remembered this ham steak. Sort of. Kind of. You see, we'd had it for quite a while. I might have named it had I remembered it existed.

I lifted the lid and sniffed. Okay, this smells bad. Or does it? I remembered something I heard a teacher say in high school- if you accidentally switch sodas with someone else, the first sip always tastes like the soda you were expecting. Human suggestibility is prominent in our sensory awareness, being the point. So I sniffed again and convinced myself that what I felt was the florid odor of decay was, in fact, just the inscrutable hamminess of... well, ham.

I mean, back during the Great Depression they threw rashers of bacon out in the streets, right? Bacon lasts forever by dint of its high salt and low moisture content. Isn't ham cured pretty much the same way? Waste not, want not. With all those things I convinced myself to cook.

So, I diced the ham steak and fried it with some butter in a large skillet, then added the broth and noodles. Nice and simple. Nobody would suspect that this was Hindenberg ham. Would they?

Figuring that if we were all going to die from some ungodly taint, I'd rather be hung as a sheep than as a lamb, I made sure to add extra chunks to my serving. I couldn't get the thought that I was serving this to small children out of my head.

You know what? It turned out pretty good. I didn't get sick. The ham was kind of tangy though. Nah. It's all in my head.

Here's some pics of the lamb and tzatziki I did, anyways:

I obviously don't want to take up much kitchen space at EU Zero, so I prepared the lamb smear (which the lamb will be dipped in before the panko roll) here at home.

So far, the ingredients look something like this:

• 3 Tbl Olive Oil (oregano flavored)
• 3 Tbl Tahini
• 1/2 container spreadable goat cheese
• 1 tsp fresh thyme
• 1 stripped twig rosemary
• Onion powder (to replace 1/4 onion)
• Garlic powder
• Black pepper
• Paprika (just a dash)
• Soy sauce (just a dash)
• 1 tsp fresh dill
• Lemon juice

So far, it tastes rather strongly of tahini... but a lot of the flavors that come after come in notes. The goal, of course, is to augment lamb and maybe obscure the slight mutton taste, not to become the flavor of the dish. So the lamb won't be very thickly covered.

The thin coating is the reason I decided to experiment so much with this dish. I haven't seen any recipes online that suggest coating lamb with either tahini or goat cheese, so I may be well on my way to a tremendous flop.

Stay tuned.

Hopefully, you've seen my lamb and tzatziki article. That recipe was made in preparation for tomorrow night, Edible Unknown Greek night. My mission today: to consider what I could have done differently, to make each dish both authentic and still unique. Think Greek fusion.

I'm pretty notorious around here for my habitual overuse of black pepper, a trait which comes from my German ancestry. I'm thinking a lot of pepper could do a lot for a tzatziki; I sort of wish I could harvest some of the medieval European herbs that were used in place of pepper before true piper nigrum came into common use.

The lamb? I'm not quite sure- everyone I'm serving it for hates lamb, so I have to magically transform it into something else- but I think, even through the hate, that I'll let the lamb flavor shine through. It's too delicate to waste.

Tonight, I'm doing lamb chops and tzatziki sauce. In fact, it's broiling while I type.

I started the tzatziki last night, draining some plain yogurt, grating a cucumber into it, and mixing in some dill, grated garlic, red wine vinegar, and pepper. It has been sitting in the fridge for a full day, but not without several inquisitive spoonfuls being borrowed...

Tonight, I mixed a stick of melted butter, some fresh thyme and mint, a couple squirts of dijon mustard, a quarter of an onion (chopped), some cayenne, and some black pepper and dill into a mess, then dipped the lamb chops in it and rolled them into breadcrumbs (pouring the rest of the mess in between them).

After broiling on both sides for five minutes apiece, I put a baguette from a local bakery on the bottom rack and turned the oven onto three-fifty. Give me a second to check on it...

Alright. The lamb is going to come out pretty soon; pictures (hopefully) at eleven.

...

Update: Rare is definitely the way to do lamb; it got barely any oven time after its broiling and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

The tzatziki had a little too much red wine vinegar; I'd suggest tasting it regularly and adding the vinegar (especially) at a slower pace. Remember that the tzatziki is going to be a bunch of separate flavors before it goes to the fridge, and taste accordingly.

Lamb is an interesting ingredient. It plays better with those obscure herbs in your spice rack than the standard American meats do; lamb with a little tzatziki is certainly a complex and wonderful experience.

Just a note: before tonight, I've had lamb three times and hated it each time.