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Easy Everyday Beef Stew

 

Tonight - it's peasant food again! This is my everyday go-to standard beef stew, that I throw in the pot and ignore for a while. It uses some ingredients that I call 'by-product' ingredients: bacon fat, ketchup swish (more on that later), and beef stock. Ok, beef stock may not be a by-product to everyone, but I found a great cookbook at a garage sale, called "Hazel Meyer's Freezer Cookbook". This is an excellent book for learning to extend the table, so to speak, or to cut back on grocery bills. Hazel says in her book that pretty much everything can be frozen; just fried hamburger in the pan? Well, add a cup or so of water to the 'empty' pan, give it a stir, and you've got stock! This works if you're browning or roasting anything - leftover gravy also makes an excellent base for stock. Put it in a container or freezer bag, and thaw it out next time you need a bit of stock. Ketchup swish is the same idea. It's about a 1/4 cup of water swished around in a nearly empty ketchup bottle. Perfect for this recipe, and lots of other things! We're all tight for money these days. Groceries are an easy way to help cut back on living expenses, and using ingredients you don't have to buy makes it even easier. Next year I think I'm going to start scavenging for food, although scavenging food for a beef stew could be a bit challenging. I'll keep you posted anyway :)

Brunswick Stew - Pork Hocks and Chicken

 

Brunswick Stew was inspired by a discussion with my friend on the problem with pork hocks. More precisely, what to do with a freezer full of them (also a freezer full of blueberries, but I was no help there). Since I also seem to have more pork hocks than any one hog should have - I have eight in my freezer, and I'm sure there are only two hind legs - I decided to look for a recipe that would use them up. The pork hocks that I used in this recipe were smoked, but if yours are not, it's not a problem. You can add a teaspoon or so of liquid smoke and get the same effect, or leave it plain and it will be just as good. The meat of the pork hocks is almost sweet, and that adds a great flavour to the stew whether there is smoke in there or not. Traditional Brunswick Stew is a Southern Dish, served with cornbread. My version is a little modified for what I had on hand, but it still turned out good. I may change my mind if I get the chance to eat real Brunswick Stew. The original recipe calls for a 28oz can of diced tomatoes, but kids voted no on that, so I used the tomato paste instead.

Irish Pub Stew

I have no picture for this recipe, which is unfortunate because it was REALLY good. I was intending to get a photo, but by the time I got home from work, the Irish Pub Stew was gone - eaten by the hoarde of boys here at home. This is a very easy, great tasting tomato based beef stew. It is also a crockpot recipe which doubles it's appeal for me. It does require that you brown the beef chunks first, which is not too much work if you are in a rush. And it does actually call for a can of tomato soup, but don't hold that against this irish stew. For the stewing beef in this recipe, I used a small outside round roast (on sale for $1.49lb) and cut it into bite sized chunks. Any tough cut of beef, roast or steak, will work for this recipe. Of course, you can always buy stewing beef already cut up at the grocery store, and that would work just fine for this recipe.

Chili chicken wraps

 

This is something I threw together yesterday before I found out we had supper at my mother's place. It's sort of an original - I read so many cookbooks that I'm sure it's not, but I didn't use a recipe when I made it. I wanted to use up some boneless, skinless chicken breasts I had in the freezer but I also wanted tacos, so I had to come up with something. This chicken is shredded after cooking, mixed with the chili spiced tomatoes, and served on a fajita wrap with cheese, lettuce and sour cream. The Chili chicken can be made in the crockpot and left to simmer all day, or made on your stovetop or in your oven. Whatever is easiest to do. The chili powder can be adjusted to taste, and there is room to use a little more chicken if you have more people to feed. Kick it up a notch with some cayenne or hot chili seasoning if you like things hot. Enjoy!

Ham and Potato Stew (Chowder)

 

I like ham. The problem with this is that I like the old fashioned, bone in, gigantic hams, which only seem to be sold in the 10lb size or larger. Even if we invite the dog in for supper this is still way too much ham for our family. Since David over at Cooking Chat is hosting Leftover Tuesdays, I thought this would be a good time to try out a new leftover recipe. So with my ham problems I am always on the look out for some good recipes that call for leftover ham. I have one posted on here - Hawaiian Ham but I was looking for another leftover ham recipe. This recipe for Ham Chowder is inspired from a cookbook I found in a discount bin many, many years ago. I saw the recipe then, forgot about it, and it was only when my computer fried (again) that I thought to look it up. I heavily modified the original, since I also wanted to use up the leftover scalloped potatoes I had in the fridge. If you don't have leftover scalloped potatoes - don't worry. You can used a store bought package of them, or see my note about working around it. This could also be done in the crockpot, but it may not be a good "all day" recipe. This is for Leftover Tuesdays, but if you don't have leftovers you can still try it out.

Easy Pork Chops

 

So here's an easy recipe for pork chops that I'm sure I haven't blogged yet. There are only 6 ingredients (5 if you leave out the olive oil), browning the chops is optional, and it can be cooked either in the oven or in the crockpot. My kind of recipe. The pork chops that I use are cut from a big piece of sale pork loin (except I see in the pictures I've picked that these are not those chops - another sale package of bone in version). I sometimes butterfly the pork chops, and sometimes just slice them. These chops got cut a little thin, so this seemed to be the easiest way to cook them. I thickened the sauce at the end, and served with plain rice and a salad. A note about the lemon: this recipe, simple as it is, really needs a real lemon. Lemon juice just doesn't seem to work as well. Try it if you want to, but I've found that lemon slices really do work the best here.

Chicken Noodle Soup - $35 a week challenge

So, to start on this challenge, I've picked Chicken Noodle Soup. Since we have to assume that this is a new person starting out with no or very few staples, I've included the prices for each thing. This is a base for some future recipes, so as Mr WhatsCooking points out - in a real kitchen, the noodle is the garnish for the chicken noodle soup. So we'll cook the noodles separately and add them to the bowl before the broth. I'll start with the recipe, and put the shopping list at the end. This is my recipe for the whole family, not just one person, so I've added a little extra chicken for flavour. If you don't have any leftover chicken carcasses lying around, you can just use 3 or 4 chicken leg quarters and brown them first. The challenge is for one person, so there would be plenty of soup leftover. 

Crockpot Shredded Beef

This recipe could almost be called "What to do with Another simmering roast", but I decided to stick with the more descriptive Crockpot Shredded Beef. This is a sweet and tangy shredded barbeque beef recipe that I mostly came up with on my own. While I looked through many, many crockpot barbeque beef recipes I found that I either didn't have all the ingredients or I didn't like some of the ingredients. So I blended a few of the recipes together and came up with this one, and it turned out great. We ate this on warmed Kaiser rolls, leftovers from my father-in-law's 60th birthday party, but this could be served just as is or in a wrap or taco. Crockpot shredded beef reheats really well in the microwave, or you can drain off the juices and give a quick reheating fry in a hot skillet, which changes the texture in a really neat way.  

Glazed Chicken with Tarragon.

I must have cursed myself with the comment about grilling this time of year, because I'm back to baking in the oven. The 60km per hour north wind makes it hard enough to keep the barbeque on the deck let alone lit! So, the oven it is... One of my favourite 'super easy supper' recipes, Glazed Chicken with Tarragon has 4 ingredients and still tastes amazing. Another thing I like about this recipe is that I can use cheap chicken pieces. This time I used chicken drumsticks, a favourite with the kids, but I often use very cheap chicken leg quarters. No pre-browning required, could probably be done in the crockpot (I just haven't tried it yet), goes together in 5 minutes and cooks without supervision. If only the rest of my life were this simple.

Swiss Steak (Or What Do I Do With Another Roundsteak, part 1)

I'm sure I've said it before, but we live on a farm. Mostly my husband and I raise horses, but every couple of years we raise a calf and a couple of pigs. Raising our own beef is great, for the most part. They are grain-fed, no hormone, no antibiotic cattle that we raise. So while we get the best, tender premium cuts of beef, we also usually end up with about 30 full rounds of steak. That's a lot of round steak. Swiss Steak is a quick and easy way to get round steak edible. This is an old recipe that my mom always used to make - she is the one who added the carrots to it. It is very flexible in the simmer time, calls for pre-browning but you can skip that if you have to, and could be done in the crockpot if you wanted.