Roast Beef Roundup

A collection of roast beef recipes...these recipes let you cook once for two meals by making enough for dinner with leftovers to use in other recipes.

Looed Crockpot Beef

Baltimore Pit Beef

Russian Dressing Beef Pin It

Beef Roast & Beef Manhattan

Beef Manhattan is one of those looked-down-upon dishes because you typically see it in cafeterias and hospitals.  Really, it shouldn't be overlooked.  It's a great way to repurpose leftover roasted beef.  The first day after we have roasted beef, there's an excited flurry of roast beef sandwiches for lunch, then...it sits.  Beef Manhattan revives and reinterests the dinner-time audience ;)

If you don't want to use Russian dressing (because, really, it is a bizarre form of salad dressing that's far better suited to marinades than dressing salad IMHO), use an equal amount of ketchup with liberal dashes of salt, pepper and garlic powder with a splash of red wine vinegar.  If you do use Russian dressing but wonder what else to do with it, I recommend this freeze-ahead chicken dish.

To make the gravy for Beef Manhattan, I used a red wine reduction to happy up the stock.  If you'd prefer to skip the wine, use 1 tbsp tomato paste and brown it very well (5-ish minutes over medium heat without oil) in the saucepan instead.

If you're planning well in advance, you can make the gravy without the cooking juices from the beef and freeze it.  When you're ready to serve the second-round Beef Manhattan, thaw the gravy, warm it to bubbling, add the reserved juices and chopped beef and simmer until it's a good consistency.

You can serve Beef Manhattan over bread (white or whole wheat) or over mashed potatoes.  If you're looking for a lower-carb version, serve over pureed cauliflower.

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Faux-grilled Alabama Chicken

I love how food tastes when it's been grilled over charcoal.  I hate how much time and cleanup a charcoal grill takes though (not to mention what a PITA it is to control temperature for longer than 15 minutes' worth of cooking), and lately even thinking about it makes me want to order a pizza.

So I've been fiddling around with using a cast iron grill pan in the oven to get the same kind of char you get from grilling without the grill.  I've had some dud attempts and some successes, and I think I've found a method that makes me happy.

Please note I'm using small whole chickens, 3 to 4 lbs each.  If you've got a bigger bird, or chicken pieces, the cooking times will of course be different.

The trick seems to be preheating the cast iron pan in the oven to a screaming high heat, leaving the heat up for a part of the cooking time, turning it down to a regular roasting temperature for the bulk of the cooking, flipping the chicken halfway through and bumping the temperature back up (to make up for the heat lost by opening the oven door while you flip the bird) and finishing with a quick broil if desired.

It sounds fussy, but it's a kind of fussy that I prefer over the fussy of the grill.

This particular recipe is adapted from Cook's Illustrated.  I'm less and less a fan of sugary, dark barbecue sauces.  This subtly sweet-and-spicy mayonnaise-based sauce is a new one for me and I quite liked it.


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Armadillo Eggs

Another "as seen as Pinterest, sort of" recipes.  Another Pin Win too.

This is one of those make-it-with-whatever-you've-got recipes...hot peppers or sweet peppers, ground meat of nearly any persuasion or combination, whatever cheese appeals to you and whatever sauce/glaze you can rustle up out of the fridge.

I had pork sausage, sharp cheddar, mini sweet peppers and garlic jelly in my fridge so here's what I did (though meatloaf mix, provolone and beer jelly or jalapeno jelly glaze sounds good too).  The original Pin also suggested grilling them...trying to keep 3 kids under the age of 5 supervised and clear of the grill is not my idea of a good time, so I baked mine on a rack placed over a lipped sheet tray.  But I bet grilled is good too.

I really, really, really wish I had made more of these and popped them in the freezer.

Last thought...this reminds me of a recipe from the 1973 Betty Crocker International Cookbook for "Scotch Eggs"...those are peeled hard-boiled eggs wrapped in breakfast sausage, then breaded and deep-fried.  I think the next time I make Scotch Eggs (which are outstanding post-Easter leftovers), I'll glaze them and bake them instead of breading and deep-frying.

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Baltimore Pit Beef

Some more lerve for Cooks Illustrated/America's Test Kitchen/Chris Kimball.  If ever I could be persuaded to move full-time to the snow-barren Northeast, it would be to work for these folks. 

If I am ever going to make a beef roast for sandwiches, this will be my recipe.  

Now, it does call for (authentically) charring on the grill, but since my personal comfort range for cooking outdoors ranges from about 60F to 75F ambient temperature, this will only fly for about 3 weeks out of the year.  

On the recent Superbow...er, Big Game... weekend (during which the Baltimore Rave...er, East Coast Team...prevailed), I used a combination of oven-roasting and stovetop cast iron grilling to make this to very good reviews.

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Roast Redux Salad

Leftovers can sometimes be a hard sell.  Not many people like eating exactly the same thing for dinner then lunch, then dinner again.  Which can be a problem if you've made, say, a large roast and a LOT is left in the fridge.  For some reason, leftover roast (be it beef, pork or lamb) lingers at our house.  Maybe because no one wants to deal with slicing it once it's cold, maybe because reheated roast tends to get dry, or maybe because it can be just plain boring to eat the same meat-plus-two-veggies for back-to-back meals.

Interestingly, I couldn't persuade anyone to eat the leftovers of the roast I used to make this dish, but my husband took the leftovers of the repurposed leftovers twice for lunch.  This leftover salad is just that good.

This grain-based salad is inspired by a recipe from Julia Child's The Way to Cook for managing leftover lamb roast.  I did make this with thinly sliced leftover leg of lamb, but I think it would be good with beef or pork roast too.  I made it with bulgur as the grain base (per Julia's directions), but rice, quinoa or couscous would be good too...just be sure to cook the grain according to package directions.

Now the tomato and onion roasting is NOT a fast process and you don't really have to do it (Julia didn't, she just put these ingredients in her salad raw).  But it made the winter hothouse tomatoes de-lish-us and roasting takes that sharp, bitey heat out of the onion that you'll get if you leave it raw.

You can do all of this a day in advance, which is precisely what I did (if you roast the veggies, I'd fridge them for 2 or 3 days even, for as long as you fridge your leftover roast).  I got to walk in the door after work to a fully prepared meal.  And THAT, in addition to how good it tasted, is the real beauty of this meal.

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Fez-Style Baked Fish

It's summer, which means on any given day, we're likely to be out playing right up until dinnertime.  So I try to get everything ready for dinner in the morning or the night before so that the most I have to do at dinnertime is stick a prepared casserole in the oven, dump a bunch of stuff into a skillet or even less if possible. 

This is a new twist (for me) on flavors for fish...I love the combination of tomatoes and olives, potatoes and saffron, garlic and cumin but I've never applied it to fish.  The original recipe calls for cilantro along with parsley, but I'm one of those people to whom cilantro tastes weird so I substituted garden mint (read: I can't remember what variety of mint it is anymore) for the cilantro.  I also didn't have cherry tomatoes on hand, so I used a 15 oz. can of cut-up, drained whole tomatoes instead. 

Here's what I did this morning...I mixed up the marinade for the fish (which is still thawing a leetle), parboiled the potatoes and put them in my baking dish, and sliced/assembled the rest of the veggies.  I put the fish in the marinade (even if it's not totally thawed) later in the afternoon before we went out.  When we got home, I put the 3 components together in the baking dish while the oven preheated and baked 30 minutes while wrestling the kiddos into a dinner-appropriate state of cleanliness.  If I had been prepping the night before because I'd be gone all day, I'd go ahead and marinate the fish starting in the morning but not overnight due to the acid content of the marinade.


Another make-ahead thought...if you have leftover boiled potatoes from another meal, use those in this dish!  A single layer of pre-cooked taters in a square baking dish will do you.

One more note...my husband liked this very well as a fish dish, but also thought it would rock as a chicken dish.  Just bake 30-40 minutes for chicken breasts, until they're cooked through.
Adapted from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/dining/baked-fish-fez-style-recipe.html



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Sauerbraten

A beef roast that's been marinated in spiced red wine, then braised in the crockpot with gravy thickened with gingersnaps...that so says "holiday season" to me!  My recipe is a mash-up of a recipe from a 1975 cookbook called The Crockery Pot Cookbook by Lou Seibert Pappas and the Frugal Gourmet's Immigrant Ancestors recipe.

Sauerbraten can be made with a variety of beef roast cuts...I used a rump roast, but eye round, chuck pot roast, bone-in, bone-out, it all works.  It does need to marinate for at least 3 days, if not longer, so making this up and freezing it works well.  The marinade recipe I use is about 2 parts wine to 1 part vinegar, and I'd be comfortable freezing it for up to 3 weeks before I'd start to worry about the acid level of the marinade making mush out of my roast.  You can also leave the beef and marinade in the fridge until you cook it, if you have the space.

A word on browning meat before putting it in the crockpot.  It's a pain.  It completely detracts from the no-fuss appeal of using the crockpot.  It's usually not *really* necessary.  In this recipe though, I think you need to brown at least the top side of the roast.  Reason being that when you take the roast out of its 3-day booze bath, it will be purple.  Purple.  Not purple-y.  Purple.  Like Violet in Willa Wonka.  Purple.  Browning, well, makes it brown instead of purple.  Now if you don't brown the roast, it's not like you'll end up with a roast that looks like a grape popsicle at the end of the day, but it won't be quite as roast-colored as usual either.

To slice a roast well, let it rest several minutes before touching it.  Look for the direction of the grain of the meat...if you see long ridges in the meat, that's the "grain".  Don't cut directly across the grain, or you'll wind up with shredded beef.  Don't cut with the grain or you'll have tough slices of beef.  Make slices at about a 45 degree angle to the grain for the right balance of tenderness and cohesion.

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Chinese BBQ Pork

Oh.My.Goodness.Delicious.

My kids are sick and therefore on a hunger strike against snot, but they demolished this pork (while leaving everything else on their plates untouched).  You can make this in advance to serve cold or reheat or just plan to use it in something else (recipe for THAT to come!)

This is adapted from the Frugal Gourmet (who else?) and his recommended cooking set-up is to put the marinated meat directly on your oven racks with a water-filled drip tray underneath.  My oven racks aren't clean enough for that ::blush:: and really, who wants to scrub honey-marinated pork bits off your whole flapping oven rack?  I devised a good work-around in using a cooling rack positioned over a 13x9 pan filled with water placed on a baking tray for transportability.

If you don't have red miso or black bean sauce on hand, you can sub in Marmite or just leave this out.

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Tomato Soup

I am not a Campbell's tomato soup fan, but I do like homemade tomato soup, especially with summer-ripe garden tomatoes.  If you can or freeze, a pint of homemade soup boiled to half its volume will replace a can of store-bought concentrated soup for recipes that call for it.  Just leave out the milk for all make-ahead preparations, and add 1 tbsp per cup of soup when you reheat it.

I have a couple of favorite recipes, but here's the most versatile of the bunch.  You can peel and seed the tomatoes before proceeding with the recipe which saves a good bit of straining at the end, or skip this step (especially if you're only doing a small batch of soup) and sieve out seeds and skin at the end.  You can also choose to roast or not to, depends on your time frame and preference.  For putting up, you can freeze or can...if you can a soup made with a stock (be it beef, chicken or vegetable), you really should pressure-can...although before I knew what I know now, I canned tomato soup containing chicken broth in a boiling water bath and have lived to tell the tale.  So do as you will.

Cored and "X"d tomatoes

Peeling tomatoes is not hard (especially compared to sieving 3 gallons of soup a ladleful at a time).  To peel tomatoes, take a small paring knife and cut the stem out in a cone-shaped cut.  Cut a shallow "X" on the bottom of the tomato and slice lightly across any cracked bits of skin (important if you're using heirloom or homegrown tomatoes which tend to be tastier but also less "perfect" than store-bought). 

Parboiled, in the cold water bath

Bring a gigantic pot of water to the boil (or a smaller one, but give yourself time to let the water reheat between batches), and drop the prepped tomatoes in.  Have another large pot filled with ice and water at the ready.  Boil the tomatoes 1-2 minutes.  Keep an eye on them, and pull the ones whose skins peel back first.  Different varieties, different stages of ripeness affect how long the tomatoes need to boil before they start peeling.  Pull tomatoes as they begin to peel, and leave the tougher ones a minute or two more.  Drop them right into the cold water, partly to keep from cooking the bejeepers out of them and partly to make them easy to handle quickly. 

Peeled "zombie" tomatoes

Once all your tomatoes are chilly, start pulling the skins off.  It's kinda like peeling a sunburn ::blark::  Don't worry if you don't get every bit of skin.  To seed them, just squish the tomatoes like they're stress balls.  Cut big ones in half before squashing them silly.  Don't worry if you don't get every last seed out.  Now you'll have a pile of really horrifying-looking but delicious seeded, skinned tomatoes.  Proceed with your recipe.


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Easiest-Easier-Easy: Acorn Squash

Acorn squash is not really my favorite of all squashes because of its scalloped, hard-to-peel skin.  I do like its flavor and versatility, however.  I cut the skin away with a knife rather than a vegetable peeler, and will be satisfied with getting most of the peel off.  The bits of green peel that are left bother me, but aren't inedible LOL

It is a mildly flavored squash and lends itself to slicing into cute rings.  All of these recipes can be made with sliced rings or chunks of squash. 

This is a perfect time of year for grilling...the worst of the summer heat has passed (in most areas of the country) but it's still warm enough to dine al fresco.  Throwing your veg on the grill with your main dish is one of favorite menu plans, and acorn squash can be grilled just as nicely as summer squash.  The roasted recipe is a pretty classic way to handle acorn squash, and the batter-fried recipe is tweaked from my aunt's suggestion...let me say that I may never eat acorn squash any other way from now on.  Yum!

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Chicken Francese for a crowd

I love chicken francese, but it's a fairly last-minute intensive dish to prepare...frying those cutlets can really eat up time, especially if you're cooking for a crowd. 

I tried a new twist for a "dinner party" (can you really call it a dinner party when you're eating off paper plates?) wherein I baked many chicken breasts that were seasoned with lemon pepper and served the lemon-caper sauce as a relish on the side.  Captures the same flavors with far less work.

If you prep this in advance and put your chicken in a baking dish in the fridge, plan for extra cooking time (I screw up so you don't have to).  The cold dish slows down the chicken's progression to an appropriate final temperature, and it took an extra 20-25 minutes of cooking to get my chicken up to temp.  Better yet, prep the chicken, store it in a ziptop bag and put it in the baking dish at the last minute. 

I don't have pictures because it was a dinner party and I had better things to do than take pictures of food LOL

Edited to note...this is evidently my 100th "freezer" recipe!  I guess I do more of this sort of thing than I realized!
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Broccoli packets for roasting or grilling

Blackberries, lemon-thyme salmon
and broccoli packet

This doesn't have to be done with broccoli or Boursin.  It's just a framework for an easy make-ahead/freezable side dish.  You could do carrot slices, cauliflower, asparagus, squash or zucchini and any kind of soft, flavored cheese.  To make it freezer-friendly, use pre-frozen vegetables and omit the extra liquid. 

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Roasted red peppers: Roasting (or grilling or broiling)

If you're playing "Mystery Dish" with me at home and you've bought some on-sale red bell peppers, it's time to roast them! 

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Lewd Crockpot Beef

I went shopping today without a real meal plan...not unprecedented, but definitely not common.  I picked up a few cuts of meat that were on manager's special (sounds better than "bargain bin beef", doesn't it? LOL) and figured I'd figure out what to do with them when I got home. 

So Surprise Dinner #1: Crockpot Chinese Looed Beef.  Looed is pronounced "lewd", much to my husband's giggly delight.  Looing is, according to the Frugal Gourmet, a Chinese method of cooking wherein meat is slowly simmered in a flavorful cooking liquid which can be reused for subsequent looing sessions.  Sounds like a perfect recipe for the crockpot to me. 

Star anise is a vital ingredient in this sauce. It is really an unmatched flavoring agent in Chinese cooking. It isn't quite the same as aniseed or fennel seed, though they are similar in flavor. If you can't find whole star anise, use 1 tsp of ground anise or 1 tsp of five spice powder.

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Asian Chicken and Veg Packets

I'm back from a delightful family wedding in a beautiful part of the country I'd probably not otherwise have visited.  Gorgeous!  Splendid time!  Hiatus explained, now back to work.

I'm still posting recipes from the "carb-conscious" freezer meal kit assembly-fest I did before my trip.  Probably the suckiest part of "anything-conscious" eating is portion control.  You can eat low-carb, low-sodium, low-fat, low-whatever and find delicious and healthy things to have, but in the end, if you're eating it by the bucketful, it's not healthy any more.  Enter South Beach Chicken and Veggie Packets.  Each serving of this recipe is HUGE, and it's tasty, low-carb, low-fat and relatively low-sodium (use lightly steamed fresh veg to help reduce sodium content and swap no-salt broth for soy sauce).

A lot of my notes on this recipe involve how to pack it for freezing.  Because foil is the most leak-proof wrapper you could do (and can be grilled as well as roasted), I recommend using it.  BUT if you plan to freeze these guys, I'd use heavy-duty foil and put a layer of parchment paper (not waxed paper) on the inside to protect against tears from frozen cooking liquid.  Store them seam-side up in the freezer and be sure to defrost them that way, too.
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Chinese Maple Chicken & Grilled Marinated Bok Choy

No fake maple syrup please.  Did you know that artificial maple flavor is derived from fenugreek seeds which are a dietary supplement commonly used by nursing mothers to boost milk supply?  Makes you wonder why Mrs. Butterworth is so curvy.  I'd personally substitute molasses for maple syrup here if no real maple syrup is to be had.

This marinade lends itself well to chicken in a variety of formats.  I had planned to spatchcock mine and freeze it in the marinade, but life throws curveballs and I wound up roasting the whole bird with only a brief marinating period.  I think it would be especially scrummy on grilled chicken parts, too. 

And the maple syrup concoction did double duty as a browning agent/dressing for grilled bok choy.  Love grilled lettuces! 

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Spatchcocked Chicken with Saffron Cornbread Stuffing

Quit giggling, it's a real word.  It basically means butterflying, but isn't "spatchcocking" so much more fun?   Chickens prepared this way cook faster and take up less freezer space so it's really a useful technique, whatever you call it.

You can do plain ol' cornbread stuffing if you want, especially if you're working with a boxed mix or store-bought cornbread to save time, but this is a superb cornbread recipe, if I do say so myself.  If you use a mix, do two boxes of a Jiffy-type mix or use 1 8"-9" pan of store-bought cornbread.
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Ancho Chicken, Coffee-Cocoa Beef Roast

A shout-out to Albuquerque's Fruit Basket whose chile-not-chili powder appears in a great many of my dishes.



Coffee-Cocoa Beef Tenderloin with
roasted asparagus and carrots

 Both the Ancho and Coffee-Cocoa dry rubs work well on a variety of meats.  Whatever you choose to do, try to get the spices on the meat and at least refrigerate it overnight.  The longer the dry rub sits on the roast, the better it gets IMHO.  Of course, if you're planning way ahead, go ahead and vacuseal and freeze the dry rubbed roast for a no-prep meal later.

The Ancho Chicken in particular is a rock-star leftover when sliced and added to a green salad.  Leftover Coffee-Cocoa pork or beef roast makes a tasty sandwich the next day, too.
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Eat It the Way You Found It: Lemon

I am not a professional nutrionist, so what I propose is merely my own crackpot theory.  Disclaimer over. 

In general, I think food is better for you when you eat it the way it comes in nature...leave the peels on fruits and vegetables, leave the bran on grains, eat meat in the proportions it grows on the animals (fyi...there is shockingly little actual bacon on a pig despite the disproportionate number of appearances bacon makes in this blog), and so on. 

And so...lemons.  My grandmother ate citrus fruits peel and all.  I mean, she chomped into an orange and ate it like an apple.  It turns out that my 2.75 year old is the same way.  I'm not going to go that far, personally, but I do freeze the zest from citrus that I've peeled for eating or juicing.  I mix all types of citrus zest together, but you can keep them in separate zip-top bags as well.  Here are a few other ideas for ways to use the whole lemon.
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