Sloppy Bobs

Now that we've been eating on our half a cow for six months, some of the usual meals are becoming a bit tiresome, particularly in the ground beef department. While perusing the internet for recipe ideas I was reminded of the classic Sloppy Joe. Except there's no can of Manwich involved, and most importantly it's not over a bun. To avoid confusion, we've affectionately renamed this dish Sloppy Bob.

It's common for us to adapt recipes, but rarely do they come out perfect on the first try. Usually it takes a few tweaks to get it just right. This time we got it dead on. It has the perfect amount of spice, sweetness and tanginess. 

If you want you can serve it over a bed of spinach or other greens, or perhaps a paleo coconut bun. But frankly, there's no need. It's just that good.

Sloppy Bobs

Adapted from Paleo Perfect

Serves 4

Ingredients
1 pound ground beef (or other ground meat of your choice)

1 T bacon grease (ghee or coconut oil would also work)

1 medium shredded carrot

1/2 large onion, minced

1 jalepeno, diced

8 oz can tomato sauce

3 T tomato paste

2 T cider vinegar

1/2 T garlic, minced

1/2 t onion powder

Pinch of ground cloves

1/8 t ground all spice

1 T honey

1/2 t salt

1/2 t paprika

1/4 t black pepper

1/4 t dry mustard

1/4 t chili powder

1 t balsamic vinegar

1 t tamari

2 T ketchup

Directions

In a large skillet over medium heat, heat bacon grease until melted. Add in ground beef, and cook until halfway done. Add the vegetables and cook until they are about 80% done. Next, add in the dry spices and wet ingredients. Simmer for about 10 minutes. Serve and enjoy!

Nutritional Information

400 Calories; 26g Fat; 19g Carbohydrates; 3g Fiber; 22g Protein.

Mexican Casserole

Thanks to the 100-plus pounds of ground beef from "Bessie" we're always looking for new recipes. While this Mexican Casserole isn't drastically different than just eating a taco, it's just different enough that it has earned a spot in our meal plan on a couple of occasions now. It may not look particularly appetizing, but it's definitely tasty.

Mexican Casserole
An All Meat and No Potatoes Original
Serves 6

Ingredients:
1 pound ground beef
1 medium onion, diced
1 large jalapeno, diced
2 gloves garlic, minced
Taco seasoning of your choice
1 pint crushed tomatoes
1 (7.75 ounce) can of El Pato Jalapeno Salsa
3/4 cup sour cream
3 taco sized sprouted corn tortillas (or whichever corn-based tortilla you prefer)
8 oz mexican-blend cheese
Queso Fresco (optional)
Cilantro (optional)

Directions:
In a large skillet, cook ground beef. When it's approximately halfway done, add the onion, jalapeno, garlic and taco seasoning. When the veggies and beef are fully cooked, pour into a large mixing bowl. Add in tomatoes, jalapeno salsa and sour cream. Mix thoroughly.
In a deep casserole dish, place 1/3 of ground beef mixture as the bottom layer. Next add 1/3 of the cheese followed by 1/2 of the tortillas. We find it works best if these are ripped into smaller pieces. Repeat the layers once more. For the third and final layer, place the remaining ground beef and cheese. If you prefer, you can replace the mexican-blend cheese with queso fresco for the top layer.
Bake, covered, at 350 degrees for 20 minutes. Remove cover and bake for another 5 minutes. If desired, you can broil for an additional 3 minutes to get the cheese nice and golden.
Serve with freshly chopped cilantro if desired.

Nutritional information, per serving:
459 Calories; 33g Fat; 16g Carbohydrates; 2g Fiber; 24g Protein

Spaghetti Sauce

I should probably come clean about something. Despite the fact that I have this food blog, I don't actually do much cooking. I help out, and take care of the dishes, but the real chef in the family is my husband. He's really the one making all of these delicious meals I keep talking about. There are about two exceptions to this: Spaghetti Sauce and Sour Cream Chicken Enchiladas (which I'll post about next week). These were really the only two good recipes I brought into this marriage, so I'm more likely to be in charge of these over anything else we eat.

The spaghetti sauce recipe comes from my mom. She's been making it for as long as I can remember. We've slowly adapted it to our own recipe, since the original involves a couple packets of Lawry's spaghetti sauce packets (full of crap like modified food starch and hydrolyzed soy protein). It's easily just as good, and far better for you. It's also extremely cheap to make and makes about 12 servings of sauce. Be sure to clean out some freezer space before making this dish. We find it freezes best in the glass quart canning jars.

We've been serving this over zucchini noodles, making it full of nothing but healthy vegetables and some protein from the meat.

Spaghetti Sauce
An All Meat and No Potatoes Original

Ingredients
1 pound ground beef
1 pound italian sausage
1 large onion
1/2 head garlic
10 mushrooms, sliced (or more based on personal preference)
80-90 ounces of crushed tomatoes (Check Costco for a big ol' jar for under $3!)
1 teaspoons kosher salt
Cracked pepper - a few twists
1.5 teaspoons thyme
3 teaspoons basil
2 teaspoons oregano
4 teaspoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon onion powder
1/2 teaspoon garlic power

Directions
In a large dutch oven or deep pot, fry the ground beef and italian sausage. When it's almost down, add onion and garlic. Saute until onion is soft.
Add tomato sauce and spices. Mix everything together, then add the mushrooms.
Simmer for one hour, stirring regularly.

Bunless burgers

There's a lot of burger lovers out there, and a large number feel that the bun should be carefully considered. Plain white? Wheat? Potato? Well, I feel pretty strongly about my bun choice as well...except by preference is non at all.

While I resisted the idea of a bunless burger at first, it didn't take me long to realize that was the way to go. Turns out the bun is just a limitation! It keeps you from being able to put on large quantities of toppings, or a variety of sauces that just get soaked up into the bread. 

Without the bun, you are only limited by your imagination. This particular burger had lettuce, spinach, onion, pickles, avocado, ketchup, mustard, worcestershire sauce, and two kinds of cheese (and an egg, but it didn't look as pretty). 

Short Ribs with Wine and Cream

A few months ago I was looking for a special recipe for Travis and I to make together. I don’t remember what the occasion was, but whatever it was, Pioneer Woman’s Short Ribs with Wine and Cream fit the bill. Ironically I dislike fatty cuts of meat and I’m still in denial about my newfound love of mushrooms, so what possessed me to choose this recipe I’m not quite sure. It was indeed a bit too fatty for my tastes, but Travis was in love with this meal. In fact, as soon as we brought home our 1/2 cow, he requested we remake the meal.

We were hungry, and didn't cook these as long as we should have.
If we'd gone the full three hours, more of the fat would have melted off. 

I’m still not a huge fan of the fat content, but I can’t deny it’s a tasty recipe. It’s rich, tender, and has excellent flavor. I even like the mushrooms. Honestly, I don’t think you can even improve on the recipe. I do highly recommend finding an assortment of mushrooms as the recipe suggests. Our local Safeway strangely only had cremini and portabellas in stock, and the lack of variety was definitely noticed.

It is important to note that we specified our short ribs be cut English style. It seems the more popular cut is Flanken style.

While this was a great meal for the two of us, I could definitely see serving this to guests in the future. It’s largely hands-off due to the three hour simmer time, but comes across as one something much more elaborate. It’s sure to impress at a dinner party.

Short Ribs with Wine and Cream

Slightly adapted from The Pioneer Woman

Ingredients

12 whole Shortribs

Salt and pepper, to taste

1 1/2 tablespoons bacon grease

1 cup red wine

32 ounces, fluid beef broth

1/2 teaspoon dried rosemary

2 tablespoons grainy mustard

1 cup heavy cream

2 tablespoons capers

16 ounces by weight of assorted Mushrooms: Cremini, Oyster, Baby Bellas, Etc.

Olive oil, for drizzling

Directions

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

Heat bacon grease in a dutch oven over high heat. Sprinkle salt and pepper on three sides of the ribs. Quickly sear the meaty sides of the ribs, about 1 1/2 minutes per side. Remove the short ribs to a plate.

Pour wine and beef into the dutch oven. Add rosemary. Stir to combine, scraping the bottom of the pot to deglaze. Return short ribs to the pot, cover, and place in the oven for 3 hours.

After they have cooked, remove the pot from the oven and increase the temperature to 400 degrees. Arrange the mushrooms in a single layer on a baking sheet with parchment paper. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper, then roast the mushrooms until they're golden brown, about 15 to 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, place the dutch oven a stove burner and carefully remove the short ribs from the pot again. Stir in mustard, cream, and capers, then raise the heat and allow it thickened a bit. Return the short ribs to the sauce, put on the lid, and turn off the heat.

Serve the short ribs on top of the mushrooms, then drizzle with extra cream sauce.

Bringing Home Bessie

Both my husband and I are in agreement that there is more to healthy eating than just
eating healthy fats and vegetables and omitting grains and sugar; eating local food is also
part of the equation as well.

In general we do a pretty good job of this on our own. We have our own garden during
the summer months and regularly have a freezer full of freshly caught steelhead, bass and
trout. We also hunt deer and elk, but after a disappointing and unsuccessful season we
were interested in purchasing half a cow (who we've since named Bessie).

On one of his recent hunting trips to eastern Oregon, my husband was listening to a radio
station when an advertisement came on for a ranch that fertilizes the grass the cows eat
with leftover “waste” water from local brewers. They cows are also fed beer mash of
wheat, hops and barley as they become older. We could have opted for a cow that was
100% grass fed, but as beer lovers we thought this would be the perfect starting point.
The entire process was incredibly easy. We simply filled out a form on the rancher’s
website and waited for a cow to be ready. The butcher called once it was ready and we
were able to specify exactly what cuts of meat we wanted along with their preferred
package size.

Our half cow weighed 450 pounds hanging weight, and at $3 per pound hanging weight our total came to $1,350. In exchange we received:

109 packages of ground beef (approximately 1 pound per packages)

7 packages of New York steaks

5 packages liver

4 packages Tenderloin steak

12 chuck roast, approximately 3 pounds each

3 Bottom Round Roasts

6 Top Round Roasts

1 Rump Roast

1 Heart

1 package of Stew meat

5 packages Top Sirloin Steak

5 packages Sirloin Tip Steak

6 packages of Ribeyes

4 packages of Short Ribs, cut English Style

1 Brisket

4 package of Soup Bones

2 packages of suet, approximately  five pounds each

All of the meat was (barely) able to fit into a 15 cubic foot freezer we bought especially for the occasion. So far we've tried the ground beef, New York steaks, Ribeyes, Chuck Roast and Sirloin Tip. It's not the most tender steak I've ever had, but that was to be expected. I'd trade that extra bit of tenderness for a local, grass-fed cow any day. 

Brasato al Barolo

After a whirlwind Christmas weekend, my husband and I were looking forward to a quiet New Year’s Eve at home. Making a special meal together sounded like the perfect way to celebrate. We took a trip down to the local butcher and found a nice looking bone-in chuck roast. With the help of the internet, it didn’t take long to figure out what to do with it.

The recipe I found was almost a year old but had just shown up in my Google Reader as one of The Beantown Baker’s top recipes of 2011, and it’s clear why it made the list. One sentence of the description stood out: “Cooking some beef in red wine for four hours couldn't possibly have bad results.” She was right.

In place of the Barolo wine called for in the recipe, I chose a large bottle of Yellowtail Cabernet, with the added bonus that there was extra for drinking while the roast cooked. We were also missing a few ingredients and had to improvise a bit.

After spending a few hours cooking in the wine, the roast had taken on an impressive purple color but the meat was somewhat bland by itself. The deep, rich flavor of the finished dish all comes from the sauce. It’s quite sweet but not overpowering. Despite the name of this blog, we served it with a side of mashed potatoes, an occasional treat for us in an otherwise mostly Paleo diet.

Brasato al Barolo (Beef Braised in Wine)

adapted from The Beantown Baker, originally from Emeril

Serves 4-6 

1 (3-pound) beef chuck roast
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
3 slices bacon, diced
1 yellow onion, chopped into fingernail size pieces
15 mini carrots, halved
4 celery stalks, chopped same as onion
5 cloves garlic, minced
4 1/2 cups (1 1/2 bottles) Cabernet Sauvignon, or other dry red wine
2 cups chicken stock
1/2 teaspoon dried rosemary
1/4 teaspoon dried crushed bay leaves
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons rice flour

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

In a large Dutch oven (oven safe), cook the bacon until done. Remove with a slotted spoon leaving the grease in the pot. Sprinkle the roast with salt and pepper, and place it in the pot and cook, turning every couple minutes to brown on all sides. Remove roast from the pot. Put the onions, carrots, celery and a pinch of salt into the pot, adding more bacon grease or other cooking fat if needed. Cook the vegetables until softened a bit and starting to brown, about 15 minutes. Add the garlic and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Return the bacon and beef to the pot and add the wine, stock, rosemary, bay leaves and cinnamon. Bring the liquid to a simmer over medium-high heat, then cover and transfer the pot to the oven.

Cook in the oven, turning the roast once midway through, until fully tender and meat is starting to fall apart, this took about 3 hours for ours. Remove the meat from the pot and tent with foil to keep warm.

Place the pot over medium-high heat and bring to a boil. Cook about 10 minutes. Ladle some of the hot sauce into a small bowl. Whisk in the rice flour then stir the slurry back into the pot. Cook another 10 minutes or until the sauce has thickened. Adjust the seasoning to taste and turn the heat off.

Place meat onto a platter and thinly slice or shred. Serve the beef ladled with the sauce.