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I hope you sorted the beans for rocks. I always have to :/

And yes, beans go a long way, and they're dirt cheap. ;3

So they're a staple of mine as both a vegetarian and Mexican American. I use the same ingredients as you do, too actually, though in different proportions, and sans the meat and peppers (I make my own salsa separately, however, and always have beans with salsa when I can).

Oh holy crap look at them.


I can only dream of doing these things.

o:

That dish looks delicious.

But dang, your dorm kitchen is WAY bigger than the kitchen in my dorm. LOL XD My dorm kitchen is like the same size of the bathroom.

I'll try, but I do NOT have any kind of camera. This is my phone, and when I get close to anything it fails at taking any kind of resolution photos.

But I'll try and cater to you next time.

Get it.

Cater.

ahahah I kill myself.

That was all a joke.

But in all seriousness, I'll try harder to take less disgusting prep pictures. Though it is a sad fact that raw meat is scaaary looking to some people, it is what it is. If I wasn't able to deal with the sight of raw meat, I would be opposed to eating cooked meat at all. That may not be your creed, but it's in mine!

But me feeling to post copious procedure about raw meat and how to prepare it into delicious food should not mean you have eye burning by the end of this thread. Tonight I am making a big dinner for tiki and me, so I'll try and take better photography.

It may help that instead of squishy chicken dissecting, I have a slab of chuck roast to deal with.

Or you can tell those to buy the boneless thigh chicken or other prep-made meat at the store if people are gross out about preparing with raw meat.

I agree with you that it is sad that people get grossed out by raw meat, but at the same time these people need to get over it too. After all, how else can they make a delicious homemade meal if they don't prep the meat? In fact, even the pre-made meat with seasonings or sauce are raw meat too. I admit I sometimes get grossed out whenever I have to touch them (feel their sliminess and ooze). Seeing them doesn't really disgust me. However, I have to get over it because this is how meat are prepared before being cooked.

Besides, not all specific dishes you like to eat are available in stores and restaurants such as the Chinese dish "Lo Mai Guy" (Chicken Wing stuffed with Seasonal Rice) or Skrimir's bean dish. If people want these type of dishes, then they have to get over it, remember that this is how meals are made, and starting cooking it... That or become a vegetarian and/or vegan. No offense to those who are vegetarian or vegan. I'm just stating that people should get over their disgust and/or fear when it comes to cooking. In fact, I will admit that I sometimes get scared whenever I try to cook. sweatdrop

I know that. Your tallented if you can work with that stuff. DX

Queen Melethia - How do you not freak out?!

I don't see why people are bothered by it. I mean, we ourselves are 'raw meat' too. Once you get under all that skin, you have muscle and fat and blood and stuff: the very essence of the raw meat that we use to cook. I know it ain't pretty to look at, but deal with it. You only have to deal with it for a little while until it gets cooked.

...I dunno what I'm saying anymore. ._.

What is this? Two cooking posts within a few days? I remind you all that sunday dinner is nasty and it costs way less to eat leftovers for lunch/dinner when we can't make the cafeteria... instead of buying overpriced cafe food.

I crave steak. So steak we shall have. But some knucklehead broke the oven! Not to worry! I can get a cheap cut of meat and make Pot Roast Steak! And while I am at it, why not pull a x2 Leftovers Combo and make a noodle side dish with my leftover rice noodles? And why not get some cheap fresh whole Broccoli stalks that are on sale, too?


INGREDIENTS USED:

Meat:
1 2-pound Chuck Steak. (At 2.99 a pound. Beef is expennnssiiive, so I get cheap and on sale.)
1/2 Onion
Misc Vegetables that You Like
Seasonings
Beef/Chicken stock (I did not use, but you can.)
Vegetable Oil

Kugel:
Leftover Eggs
Leftover noodles
The other 1/2 of the onion
Seasonings

Vegetable: Broccoli.

So we are making stovetop simmered pot steak. This is a way to make the cheapest, toughest cut of meat delicious. Basically it means that you are going to be simmering the beef in it's own juices, along with vegetables and stuff. This also means that it has to simmer for... an hour and a half to two hours. So we begin quite ahead of time with the initial prep.

I remind you that you can make any permutation of this meal: just the meat, just the Kugel, etc. This is just what TIKI AND I happened to do.

So you get your stuff. This is not all of my stuff, but just the stuff I need to prep first.

Tada. Some stuff.

Before we can worry about cooking the beef itself, we have to do some prep work. Tiki and I both like mushrooms, so Tiki goes off at this time to wash them. If you don't like mushrooms, you can put any vegetable you want in: carrots, celery, whatever you want. As for me, no filthy carrots will shame my precious beef dish! D< (Actually, they weren't on sale and the ones that were at the market were icky looking and old.)

While Tiki does that I do the thing I probably will do for every food I ever make: I chop an onion.

Actually, I chopped half an onion for this, because the other half of the onion is being used for something else, later. Yo, Tiki-- how are those mushrooms doing?


Tiki's delicate hands are still well-suited for gently caressing mushrooms.

So about 1/4th of those mushrooms gets cut up pretty fine (as fine as the chopped onions.) and the rest gets set aside for later.

'yons and 'shrooms are best friends. Look at them together. Now they will get to sit and watch happily as I handle the raw beef.


... No.... Tiki says that is not how you do it....


This is how you do it. Take a little bit of vegetable oil in the pot you are going to use, and on high heat cook/brown the outside of the meat.

Why do we do this? To seal in the juices and deliciousness of the beef! Otherwise it will all cook out into the liquid you add later and you will get tasty beef soup... but tasteless beef left behind.

See? There we go. All cooked on the outside. Now take it out and put it someplace where it won't burn anything and is clean, like a plate or something.

Now, the chopped onions and mushrooms have been sitting on the cutting board, but it is now time to put them in. For some reason, I INSIST THAT YOU MUST take no pictures at all of this part-- but it's pretty much the same as every other time I have told you to sautee onions and stuff.

When the onions are translucent-bordering-caramel-color, and the mushrooms are dark brown and delicious bits, put the steak back in and barely cover it with stock, or water.

Either is fine, though stock is tastier. I used water, but I also put in a big ol' dollup of miso paste to make my beef simmered in miso soup! At this time, turn the heat up so the fluid boils briefly, and then turn it down and let it simmer. You now do not have to touch this at all until 40 minutes before serving time.

Now Tiki and I team up, because we still have three things to do: Prep the finishing ingredients for the beef, make the Kugel, and sautee some broccoli. I ask Tiki very nicely to please take the few potatoes we have not mentioned so far...

and cut them up however she likes them.

Tiki likes them small potato cubes rather than big ol' potato hunks. I'm cool with that.

Meanwhile, I make the kugel. What the hell is that, Skrimir, I hear you ask? Well, unless you have a polish/german/jewish grandma/mom/aunt/dad/uncle/guardian/whoever-does-your-cooking, you may not know it's a kind of casserole with eggs and commonly egg noodles. It's really easy to make, and I don't think my great-grandmother would mind if I tweaked her recipe to use the leftovers I already have. Not wasting food is kind of a staple in that tradition of cooking, too.

So I take the other half of an onion I have, chop it up, and sautee it. Sigh. I think my hands will smell like onion ALL my life.

These onions get the heck cooked out of them. We want them sweet and caramelish.

Meanwhile, Tiki is cool and cracks some eggs in the big bowl you may recognize as the AMERICAN bowl from last post.

Then she pulverizes them.

I approve of pulverizing things.

Then I take the rice noodles you should recognize as from the previous post, and I dump them in with the egg. Use cold noodles for this, it is better. But it does mean you have to kind of carefully pull the noodles apart because they are all stuck and glued together.

Use just enough egg to drench the noodles and make them all slimy, and then a little more. We used three eggs. Then, add salt, pepper, etc.

Asdfg the light is terrible in this kitchen.

Then, once your onions are all delicious and caramelish, on the border of being TOO done, dump them in the noodle egg seasoning mixture and smush it all up to get the sweet onion in there evenly.

The light in the kitchen is still terrible in the past. Please don't time travel just to go see, because you all got in the way of the light and made it really bad. Stupid circular time travel loops.

Now you can just chill until t - 45 minutes to serving time. While Tiki and I did this, I also peeled and chopped up some broccoli while taking no pictures whatsoever of the process. Pretty simple stuff though-- cut off florets, cut big ones in half, and peel the tough rind off of the stem. Then chop up the stem. Easy.

OK, it is 45 minutes to serving time. Dump those potato chunks and the large mushroom halves/quarters into the beef pot. Mmmm.

Mmmmm. Delicious. Take this time to taste the broth and add your salt, pepper, whatever it needs.

Now go back to your egg and noodle abomination. This was an experiment on my part, because you would normally bake this in an oven. But some DINGBAT broke our hall oven. That is set into a wall. I do not even know how that is remotely possible, but they did it. So instead, we will be using a skillet and a stove to make a kind of hideous kugel-esque monstrosity. So we flip our noodle blasphemy into the skillet and I ask Tiki to please watch it reaaaally carefully which she does very well because she is cool.

Argh argh argh squiggly little rice noodles are messy.

Meanwhile, I take the broccoli and sautee it. If I was smart, I would have gotten fresh garlic, but naw, I was not... or I would have used butter, but I was doubly not smart and my butter is frozen in the freezer right now because I do not trust it in my little dorm fridge to keep, and rancid butter is foul. Be as fancy or not fancy as you want with vegetables.

The kugel is there, too.

When we prodded the kugel and it stayed together rather than sloshing apart like slimy noodles, we decided to flip it. It was a silly fiasco, but it flipped.

Ooooh yes. See that brown bit on the bottom? That is not burned. That is crispy and delicious and how things are supposed to be. It would have formed all around the edges, too-- if not for the incredibly crappy burners on this campus kitchen stovetop.

Continue cooking the kugel until it is crispy on the other side, too-- but not burned. The vegetables should be done the way you like them, that's not my call.

So when those two things are done, take your meat fork, or Almighty Tongs or whatever implement you so desire to extract your beef from the bubbling ambrosia of meaty fluid.

Your beef will be well done.

But it will also be tender and juicy. Let it rest for a few minutes before you cut into it.

Serve the meat over the kugel (or whatever starch dish you make) and cover it with the DELICIOUS BEEFY BROTH you made, and serve a helping of your vegetables with it. The broccoli we cooked was just a bonus.


Mmmmm! So good! SAVE THE BROTH WITH THE VEGETABLES! That can become sauce, stock, or even just soup for you!


Now clean up after.