Tag: Ground Beef

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Stroganoff Burgers

To say last week was stressful is an understatement.

My daughter got her second set of stitches because her brother accidentally hit her in the mouth with a baseball bat.  I am  very conscious of how much worse it could’ve been.  She kept all of her teeth and the blood came out of all the clothes. (The first set was on her toe because a knife I had been using to cut organic kale fell on it when she pulled the cutting board down on herself.)

Those events were soon overshadowed by the events of last Wednesday.  I have been debating how much of this to share.  I don’t think a food blog is probably the place to share the entire story.  You see, two months ago, I stopped working at the company that made the news last week because  a former colleague of mine brought a gun to work where he proceeded to shoot the place up.  While this was happening I was in lockdown in another building just a few blocks away.

I probably don’t need to further explain why cooking was not the first thing on my mind this week.  However, my family still needed to eat.  I hate resorting to things like peanut butter sandwiches or cereal.  Not only do I like to make sure they have their vegetables, but I like having leftovers for work the next day. This is where make ahead meals come in handy, but I didn’t have any of those prepared.  Instead, I found this recipe for stroganoff burgers.

Beef stroganoff is one of my favorite dishes.  The tender pieces of beef combined with meaty mushrooms in a sharp, rich, creamy sauce over egg noodles, fills my soul.  It’s comforting.  When someone feeds you beef stroganoff, they really love you.  This easy recipe combines the best elements of stroganoff without the hassle.  It is easy enough  to throw together any night of the week.  Even when the week has left you drained.  It’s like the hug you give someone who needs it when you have nothing left to give, but need to push through.  It says “I love you, but I’m exhausted.”

If you can’t quite picture it, it’s kind of like creamy sloppy joes.  My family prefers this sort of loose meat sandwich to something so heavily tomatoed.  Toasting rolls ensures a bit of crisp and battles against soggy buns.

If you are as exhausted as I am, serve this with a bag of salad or some frozen vegetables.  It’s such an easy meal, you don’t even need to boil water.

 

The Recipe:

If you liked these, why not try Blast Off Burgers, or Freezer Meal: Tuna Burger Casserole, or Ex-Boyfriend Beef and Macaroni Skillet

To see what else I’ve been doing in the kitchen, follow 10 Cents Worth of Dates on Facebook.  

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Easy Beef and Noodle Skillet

Every once in a while I like to try to make things easy on myself.  I can’t let it become a regular habit because someone needs to freak out, worry, and then do things the hard way. If I don’t stress, who is going to?

Speaking of stress, maybe it’s just cost of living down here, but hamburger is not as cheap as it used to be.  I remember it being used a lot more when I was younger because it was the cheap alternative to other meats, same with chicken.  You can still get leg quarters inexpensively, but…I need to stop.  If I continue down this rant the next thing I’m going to be doing is yelling at some kid to get off my lawn.  (Remind me to tell you the story of my friend B and Night Ranger at some point.)

Ok, enough of the beef I have about the price of beef and onto the good stuff.  I am sure that most of you have had Hamburger Helper at some point.  Maybe it’s because of an exhausted mom or maybe because you were bachelor who didn’t really cook.  It doesn’t really matter.  It’s a thing that exists and I’m not judging (much), I mean we’ve all done it.  (Except maybe me, I’m not sure I actually have ever purchased a box of Hamburger Helper or any of its offshoots.  I have made it before, though.)  It’s easy, convenient, and pretty versatile. 

If you think about what that magic box contains, though, it’s pretty basic.  There is some carbohydrate (noodles or rice) and a seasoning packet.  You have to provide your own browned hamburger and whatever veg you may want in there.

How would you feel if I told you that you could basically make your own seasoning “packet”?  There are a bunch of recipes online that you could use, but why would you use those when you could use this one?  (Hint: Because in order to make this one really delicious, it requires a lot more herbs, spices, and salt than this recipe says.)  This is a good jumping off point.  

Once you have the seasoning made, you can use that to make one of three delightful dishes.  (There is enough seasoning to make all three.) I chose to make the Beef and Noodle Skillet to start.  It’s a lot like hamburger stroganoff, but as bland as you imagine food coming from a place where ketchup was considered spicy.  Honestly, when I made this exactly as written in the recipe, I realized that there was no way I was going to be able to serve it to my family and get them to eat it.  It’s too bland.  Since it was already sort of like stroganoff, I added lots of garlic, some paprika, some Worcestershire sauce, and a bit of sour cream.  

All in all, this is a great idea if you can get the seasoning right.  It’s nice to have something like this on hand for quick meals when you don’t have time to make something like Chicken Tetrazzini, Frazzalene, or Sausage Bean Casserole.  The advantage of making it yourself is that you know everything that is in it and can easily adapt it to your family’s preferences.  I have enough of the Hamburger Dinner Mix to make the rest of the recipes suggested, but the next time I make a seasoning “packet”, it will have a lot more flavor.  

If you are still reading at this point, let me tell you about B and Night Ranger.  When we lived in our old town, every summer there was Riverfest.  It was a classic carnival, activities, food, and music-type affair where most the bands could no longer get work anywhere except these sorts of small town festivals.  Bands on the way down, not usually on the way up.  One year, Night Ranger was going to appear.  You know their song “Sister Christian” and that’s about it. For years, I had told my friend B about which acts were performing at Riverfest since music was one of things we bonded over.  

The year Night Ranger came to town, I IM’d him to let him know.  He responded with disgust.  “I wouldn’t go see Night Ranger if they were playing on my lawn.” He typed back to me.  I hesitated wondering how to respond while the icon that showed he was writing something else came up.  “Except to tell them to get off my lawn.”  The image in my head of him going out and shaking his fist at Night Ranger cracked me up, but also made me realize that I kind of want to have a lawn concert.  That’d be so cool.  

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Frazzalene for A Frazzled Mom

Going from being a WAHM (Work at Home Mom) to being a WOHM (Work Outside the Home Mom) has been a rough transition for all of us.  Gone are the days where I could close my computer at exactly 4 PM and start making supper immediately.  I created elaborate dinners with careful adherence to the food pyramid guidelines.  I’d always create more than one vegetable for the table.  I turned up my nose at most casseroles and one dish meals.  I judged other mothers for not being as well set up and prepared as I was. These days, I call to report in that I may be home around 5 or 5:30, depending on traffic.  There are nights where it is later.  I need to menu plan and have all my grocery shopping done by Sunday night or my entire week is shot.  We’ve relied on more quick meals than I’ve wanted to and at times even casseroles take too long to get on the table before it’s nearly bedtime.I have a book about making freezer meals.  It’s a great book.  I don’t have time to prep the meals in it, although I do have the freezer space.  (When I say I don’t have the time, I mean that I don’t prioritize the time.  I have as much time as anyone else.) How do other people do this?  I have so many things I want to do and no time to do them.  In short, I am frazzled.

Frazzalene to the rescue!  Frazzalene sounds like the name of super hero, right?

As far as casseroles go, this one is pretty typical.  It uses ingredients that most of us already have around our house.  While I am fairly certain the noodles the recipe suggests are probably egg noodles, we didn’t have any in the house and used pasta instead.  The big differences between this dish and the “goulash” or “hot dish” that most of us grew up with is that it uses tomato soup instead of tomato sauce and the addition of a can of corn.  

Have I told you that I have a child that hates corn?  We finally got him to admit that he doesn’t really hate it, he just doesn’t like that it gets caught in his teeth when he eats it off the cob and has just extended that dislike onto the entire corn genre (except corn bread).

Even with the baking time of Frazzalene being only 30 minutes, this dish still takes nearly an hour to prepare because of boiling the noodles.  Unlike Pineapple Teriyaki Meatloaf, this recipe does not suffer from being prepped ahead of time.  This is another of those dishes that can be fancied up as much as it needs to be.  It’s a basic, no-nonsense casserole (or is that hot dish?)

For other make ahead hot dish recipes, check out Sausage and Bean Casserole and Chuck Wagon Casserole.

 

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Chuck Wagon Casserole

Chuckwagon Casserole

 

With these old recipes, however, there are occasions where the recipe is just non-specific enough that it allows for me to interpret something in a slightly different way.  Sometimes this is as easy as in the Apple Marmalade where I chose to use blood oranges instead of a regular seeded orange.  Sometimes it requires switching out types of mustard.

A lot of recipes call for the addition of prepared mustard.  I am sure that the original intention was to use basic yellow mustard.  That’s boring.

Not only do we have a friend that has a mustard fridge and has done mustard judging, but when we went to the Mustard Festival at the Mustard Museum the kids won 8 bottles of mustard from Koop’s and French’s.  Not one of those mustard’s was plain yellow.  However, in this recipe, because of the title, we had no mustard more appropriate to use than Giddy Up mustard.  I mean, right?  It fits the theme.DSCN2678As long as we are going there, let’s get a good picture of this recipe.  Imagine you are a cowboy.  You have been driving cows down the range.  You are hot, you are tired and dusty.  The sun is now setting, the cows are lowing as they eat sweet meadow grass.  You may hear the trickle of a stream.  If you weren’t bow-legged, your chaps would swish softly as you walked.  Instead, you hear a small jangle of your spurs and the wail of a harmonica as you walk to the chuck wagon.  Your tin plate is in your hand and old Cooky glops something onto it.  More than likely it’s a lot like this dish.  (Ok, probably not, I think I heard stories about the amount of beans that were eaten, but just go with it for the sake of the story.)

This rice-based casserole sort of reminds me of something like chili.  The molasses provides a deep richness.  I chopped the olives up super fine because at least one of the kids still claims to hate them and they’ve never been my husband’s favorite, but the girl and I like them.  I added some water to cook the rice all the way through.  If the lid to my Dutch oven wasn’t missing, I might’ve had slightly better luck.  I may just have to break down and buy a new one some day, however, I’m not quite ready for that kind of upgrade yet.  DSCN2680The best thing about casseroles is that they are infinitely adaptable.  We might’ve added some chipotle powder to ours.  We might’ve added some ancho pepper to it.  There is a possibility that we put some cheese in it. Maybe we added some french fried onions on top and served it with optional sour cream…For all of the additions that we made, the best choice was the addition of something more than plain yellow mustard.

The Recipe:

Chuck Wagon CasseroleIf you like this recipe, check out Sausage Bean Casserole, Easy Beef and Noodle Skillet, and Stroganoff Burgers.

Pinnable Chuck Wagon Casserole Image

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Supper In a Bread Loaf

Supper in a Bread Loaf

There are days where making supper is just hard.  I am crap at following recipes (before this).  I am a reforming bad meal planner and never seemed to have the right combination of ingredients in the house to make the meal that I really wanted.  I’d have to scour cookbooks and the internet in order to find something that I was in the mood for using the ingredients I had on hand.

If you don’t already realize it, this is a very bad, time consuming way to go about meal prepping and planning.

It can result in creative and tasty dishes, but ends up being very frustrating.  Take out seems much easier than going through that stress every night.  It also doesn’t help when you ask the family what they want to eat and either no one has an idea or everyone has different ideas.  Making these decisions after a long day of making other far more important decisions is hard.  It’s a lot of pressure.  Making the decision to go through these recipes and make them all has taken a lot of pressure off.  I still don’t always have the right ingredients, but meal planning is significantly easier.  DSCN2433Enter Supper in a Bread Loaf.

This recipe is the poor man’s version of Beef Wellington.  It is because of this recipe that I had frozen bread dough in the house for the French Apple Coffee Cake.

Had my house already been clean, my children all in school, etc, I might have taken extra bread dough  to make beautiful decorations on the roll.  I might’ve egg washed it, made gorgeous cuts to make this into a work of art.  Instead, I just did the most basic version of this dish.

Well, sort of.

The directions say “season to taste”. For those of you that know me well, you know that my brain automatically shot in infinite directions.  “Oh, this could be good seasoned with taco seasoning.”  “Ooooohh, what about using my Krakow Nights seasoning?”  “I have some fresh herbs in the garden, but I think those might be the wrong choice.”  I settled on adding a bunch of Fox Point Seasoning.  I thought it would add flavor, but keep it true to the original intention of the dish.  It worked! The kids inhaled the meal.

My husband took leftovers to work.  His co-workers asked about it.  He said it was good reheated.  DSCN2439In order for busy people to make this dish in time for supper, there is some pre-planning that needs to happen.

Put the bread dough from the freezer into the fridge the night before you want to make this dish.  It will start the thawing process.  In the morning, move the bread dough into a container on the counter.  Cover it with plastic wrap. (Speaking of plastic wrap, my husband told me that environmental concerns means plastic wrap no longer has the coating on it that allows it to stick to anything. It now only sticks to itself.) Leave this on your counter until it’s time to actually make supper.

For this purpose, a lengthy rising time is not going to affect your end product.  It may even allow some of the bread dough flavors to develop a little more.

If you cook extra ground beef, throw it in your freezer for something else.  It’s much easier to do dinner in a hurry when at least part of it is already cooked. DSCN2443Substitute chicken, turkey, pork, or whatever for the meat.  For a vegetarian version, use mushrooms, cooked lentils, or eggplant as your filling, add some sauteed greens.

This is one of those unapologetic dishes that is basic and filling.  It’s open to all sorts of interpretation.  Open up your fridge, your pantry, and your spice cabinet, get creative.  If you have a great version of this dish, please feel free to let me know about it.

The Recipe:Supper In a Bread Loaf

If you like this recipe, check out 7 Make Ahead Dinners For Busy Moms and Other Important People and Freezer Meal: Tuna Burger Casserole

Pinnable Image Supper in a Bread Loaf