Beef Stir Fry with Two Kinds of Mushrooms

I've written before about how much I enjoy portobella mushrooms, big or small, but I have to admit that besides the little white mushrooms, I've not eaten a lot of different types. So this weekend I ventured to an Asian market near my work, and found a package of oyster mushrooms for only 2$, I figured I should try them. I was able to find all of the ingredients, including the Chu Hou paste at the market, as well as lots of other veggies that I'll use in other dishes. As my goal is to learn to cook different dishes and different flavors, I wanted to follow the recipe exactly, but I ended up adjusting the seasoning at the end to enhance the taste.

Ingredients:
3/4 lbs beef flank steak
1 green bell pepper chopped
1 red bell pepper chopped
1/2 cup bamboo shoots sliced thin
8 oz baby bellas
8 oz oyster mushrooms
1 lbs asparagus chopped
3 cloves roasted garlic grated
1/2 c chicken stock
2 tbs chu hou paste
soy sauce
rice wine vinegar
red pepper flakes
ginger
white pepper and salt

So I guess I lied when I said I followed the recipe exactly--or really I just kept the seasonings the same at first, and then added more at the end to get it where I wanted. A couple of hours before I cooked the steak, I put it in a plastic bag with a tablespoon of the chu hou paste, a dash of rice wine vinegar, soy sauce, and some crushed roasted garlic. I left that to marinate in the fridge for several hours.

This is a really quick stir fry--first the veggies are chopped. It said to pull the stems off of the mushrooms and just chop the cap, but I wasn't sure what part was which with the oyster mushrooms so I used the whole thing.The bamboo shoots were also new to me--I bought slender shoots, and then chopped them into quarters and then in half.

First the pan is heated up on high, then the steak is quickly seared, then taken out of the pan. Then the mushrooms, asparagus, and broth are added to the pot (if I did this again, I'd add some seasonings at this point). I used four of the homemade frozen stock cubes for the broth--makes it easy to have just a little without wasting the whole can. The lid is put on, covering the veggies and letting them steam until tender. Then the peppers and bamboo shoots are added and cooked very briefly.

After all the veggies are in the pan, the steak and cho hou paste are added to the pan and cooked until the steak is cooked through. At this point, I tasted again and found that it was generally underwhelming in seasoning. So I added a dash of soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, red pepper flakes, ginger, white pepper, and salt. I also served it with a good amount of siracha. Turns out I like it pretty spicy.



The Verdict: The meat was the most flavorful part of the whole dish due to the marinating, so if you make this, I'd add the chu hou, soy, and rice wine vinegar and garlic to the veggies during the initial cooking. It was also pretty soupy, so I may omit or reduce the broth, since you don't want to cook it off and over cook the veggies. The bamboo shoots added a nice texture, though they don't seem to have any particularly strong flavor. Both of the mushrooms were good--the oyster mushrooms were a little texturally different from the portobella mushrooms, but both were good.

Baked Kibbeh and Carmelized Onions

I went to graduate school in Ohio, and at that time did a lot more eating out than I do now. Mediterranean food was one of my favorites--pita, felafel, hummus, and kibbeh. So when I saw a recipe for a baked kibbeh that was pretty easy, I wanted to give it a try. The kibbeh I used to eat was a fried beef fritter, cinnamon scented and flavorful. This recipe is baked and uses lamb--though I added some beef as the ground lamb was over 8 dollars a pound. I also changed the recipe by making the caramelized onions in the slow cooker--which actually worked and only ended up with one night overwhelming onion scented apartment.

Ingredients:

2/3 c cracked bulgar wheat
1/2 lbs lamb
1/4 lbs beef
1 large onion
 tsp cinnamon
alspice
salt and pepper

Topping:
Lots of onions
1/4 c pinenuts
1/2 tsp cinnamon
allspice
salt and pepper

So this recipe has two parts, and I made them on two different days, bringing them together on a third day. Though it really isn't a complicated recipe, I just spread it out. One the first day I made the kibbeh base, the second I caramelized the onions, and the third I brought it all together.

First the bulgur needs to be rinsed and drained, and set aside to dry. The onion is peeled and then pureed, and added to the meat, salt, pepper, cinnamon, and a bit of allspice. I used my immersion blender to blend it all to a paste. Even though I used ground beef and ground lamb, this took some doing to break down the gristle. Once that was a paste, the bulgur is added and blended again.

This mixture is pressed into a baking dish--a large tart pan would work, or a 9x13 inch dish, which is what I used. Then it is scored. At this point I covered the pan and froze it until I was ready to cook.


So as I was contemplating making this dish, I was researching caramelized onions for tips and tricks, since I've never done it before. Somewhere on line I read that you could do it in a crock pot, and that it would be hands off and produce lovely caramelized onions with much less work. Well, of course I had to give it a try and since my crock pot is enormous I had to get a bunch of onions!

Monday night, around 10 pm when I was off of work, I chopped 5 lbs or so of onions and filled my crock pot to the brim. I pre-sprayed the pot with cooking spray before hand, but didn't add anything else. I cooked them on low all night long--and my apartment smelled SO strongly of onions I had to shut the bedroom door. In the morning I drained a bunch of the liquid and then I turned them down to warm when I went to work for another 9 hours. When I got home I cranked it to hot with the lid off to get any remaining liquid.

I didn't use all of the onions in this topping, though there is no shortage of things one can do with a lovely pot of caramelized onions! For the topping I toasted the pinenuts in a hot pan and then added a bunch of the onions, the cinnamon, salt and pepper, and a bit of allspice.


The kibbeh base goes in a 375 degree oven until it turns brown on top and is cooked through--depending on how thick it is in the pan will change how long it needs to cook. I overcooked mine, because I didn't check it quickly enough, so be careful. The kibbeh base is topped with the onion pinenut mixture. I served it with zucchini fritters and leftover spinach salad.

The Verdict: Fragrant and delicious--it isn't the same as what I had in Columbus, but it was still the same flavors. The cinnamon in the meat really worked, especially with the onions. If I did it again,I'd use more of the onions for the topping and increase the amount of topping.

A Morrocan Beef and Vegetable Tagine

So I'm once again venturing outside of my cookbooks and my comfort zone to try something new and different. Inspired by my bright and sunny jar of lemons slowly being salted on the counter top, I ventured to North Africa to make a rich and savory Tagine--though I should say a stew since I made it in my crock pot not one of these gorgeous dishes. I don't have any cookbooks with Morrocan recipes in it, but with two key ingredients in mind and a little google-fu I found a bunch of ideas and made this dish up as I went along. This is largely inspired by Jamie Oliver's recipe as interpreted by this blog post. I made a number of changes and additions--but it is essentially a stew, so it is pretty flexible!

Ingredients:

12 oz beef sirloin steak
1 1/2 lbs butternut squash pealed and chopped
2 cans diced tomatos
3 cups vegetable broth
1 yellow onion
1 medium head cauliflower
1 large egg plant
4 cloves garlic
1 small bunch cilantro
Sea Salt and freshly ground Black Pepper
2 tsp  Ras El Hanout Spice mix
2 tsp ground Cumin
2 tsp ground Cinnamon
2 tsp ground Ginger
2 tsp Sweet Paprika
Harissa to taste

 The first step is to prepare the dry rub. I was surprised to find the ras el hanout at Winco--and it was 2$ for the whole jar--that is not a lot! I had the rest of the spices--though this cleans me out of cumin and ginger, both of which I use a lot of in my cooking. I cut the steak up into cubes and tossed it in the spice rub. Ideally, I would have left it in the fridge for the seasoning to really infuse the meat. But I didn't get going until too late--and it was only in the fridge for about an hour.

The meat is lightly browned on all sides and then diced onion is added along with the chopped stems of the cilantro. These are sauteed until they slightly softened and then I slowly added the broth to de-glaze the pan. There was so much of the spices that sort of stuck to the pan that this was an important step--it toasted the spices and got them into the broth, which thickened it.

At this point I poured it all into the slow-cooker, along with two cans of diced tomatoes. The original recipe called for garbanzo beans, but I felt like I had enough protein with the beef and enough fiber from all the veggies. That got stirred up pretty well, and cooked for two hours on high. While that cooked I pealed and chopped the butternut squash and cut and salted the eggplant.

I added half of the butternut squash after 2 hours of cooking, and the rest after 3.5 hours. This allowed some to really break down and become part of the sauce, while some still had some texture left at the end. I also added some of the harissa to the pot to increase the spice.

While that continued to cook, I chopped the cauliflower and tossed it with some harrisa and lemon juice to marinate before being added to the pot. That went into the pot at the same time as the rest of the butternut squash. The eggplant, which doesn't need as much time to cook was added at about 4.5 hours.

At this point it was almost 9 p.m. and I was pretty hungry--though I'd been nibbling on the butternut squash and tasting the beef all along. I stirred in more harrisa, and served it with some chopped fresh cilantro on top. Total cooking time was 6 hrs on high, though it should have gone a bit more. to get the beef equally tender.

The Verdict: This is a rich and hearty stew--with very complex and developed flavors from all of the time cooking. The veggies provide a variety of textures, from some very soft butternut squash, to the cauliflower that still has some bite. Some of the beef was really tender and some was still pretty chewy--I think this is more the type of beef I used, I should have gotten more of a fatty cut and cooked longer and lower. It was still very good and I'm excited to play around with these flavors!

Recipe from the Web--Swedish Meatballs

We were talking about foods to nibble on for our Polaris Party and meatballs came up as a great option, which I offered to bring. I was going to buy them, but figured it was a good opportunity to try making them! I've never made meatballs before in my life--my Dad buys bags of them frozen and put them in a mix of grape jelly and chili sauce. I looked in my cookbooks for a recipe that would work, and couldn't settle on one that I wanted to try. It wasn't until I was looking through the archives of one of my favorite blogs, Skinnytaste, that I found a recipe that sounded good.

Swedish Meatballs

• 1 tsp olive oil
• 1 small onion, minced
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 celery stalk, minced
• 1/4 cup minced parsley
• 1 lb 93% lean beef
• 1 egg
• 1/4 cup breadcrumbs
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1/2 tsp allspice
• 2 cups reduced sodium beef stock
• 2 oz light cream cheese

 I decided to cook a double batch of the meatballs, so I would have enough for the party and for me to try some. Plus they freeze well and can be used in lots of things. I chopped two onions as finely as I could, then used my microplane to grate about 3 cloves of garlic.Chopping things is a skill I'm still developing, and sometimes they are not equally sized. My older sister told me that practice would help me perfect my technique. Onions are not too challenging, but garlic cloves are so small that I prefer if it needs to be fine to use the microplane. The two were sauteed until tender, and then two stalks of celery and a half a cup of parsley chopped fine were added and cooked a few more minutes.

 

 The sauteed vegetables cooled for a few minutes while I pulled together the other ingredients. Two pounds of 94% lean beef, 1/2 cup bread crumbs, 1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons egg substitute and one egg yolk I had after using the whites for another recipe. I also added 2 tsps allspice, and a lot of salt and pepper. The directions said salt and pepper to taste, but I'm not sure how one can test the seasoning of an uncooked meatball. So I added a bunch and hoped for the best!

Next came the fun part--the veggies were added and I mixed it all together with my hands. I have to admit, as gross as it was, it was also kind of fun--like playing with play doh! I used a 1/4 cup and divided it into two meatballs. I wasn't sure how compressed they should be--so I didn't try too hard, just rolled them in my hands. I placed them on a cookie sheet and froze all but 4 of them.

I cooked those 4 on my George Foreman grill and ate them on toast, yummy! The rest were defrosted and cooked in beef broth--which was drained and mixed with cream cheese and some roasted garlic and loads of salt and pepper to make a sauce. I topped it with some chopped parsley and served them to an appreciative work crowd! Sadly, I didn't snap any pictures, but they looked a lot like Ikea meatballs.

The Verdict: Great flavor and texture, they are a definite make again. If I had to change one thing, I would make the meatballs smaller, particularly for an appetizer type setting. They froze well and were just as great defrosted. We actually ate all of them at the party, so I will have to make them again. I think they'd be good with spinach cooked in the sauce, or with spaghetti squash.