Meat Group!

Meat Group!

Meat is a requirement for my vision of a Bachelor’s diet.

I’ve grown up with meat on the table. When there wasn’t, we went out and fished, hunted, raised more meat.

From Rabbits, which we also tanned hides & sold pelts from (A decent half acre can support a fairly large amount of rabbit pens.) which we raised when I was growing up, to Deer and Elk, which my family has always hunted, year in, year out, to fishing for various things, such as Pacific Chinook salmon, or even meager Tainbow Trout.

An elk split amongst two families that participated in the hunt generally filled our freezers, kept meat on the table year-round. When you consider the comparison cost, it’s so much cheaper to go hunting. We got to know one of the butchers near where our family has their hunting grounds, and for a take of the kill (10% by weight) the butcher cuts everything up & wraps it for us. This is still a standing freezer full of meat per family. If by some chance you should try this, make sure that the butcher double-plastic-wraps the meat inside the paper, otherwise you may have some freezer burn in some cases.

Fine quality family dining to be had, a steak, or ground burger, or pan fried summer sausage, a baked potato, some homegrown corn, maybe zucchini or summer squash, salad made from fresh picked spinach, or whatever else was handy and cook able. Potatoes were store bought; we grew corn and other vegetables, canned / froze it every year.

So, let’s see…

What are the fundamentals of Bachelor Chow:

1. Edible
2. Filling
3. Cheap
4. Easy to make
5. Little cleanup
6. Keeps in the fridge for a day or two

Let’s see what we have…

Courtesy of a friend of mine, whose name I haven’t gotten permission to use:

Taco Casserole

• 1 to 1.5 pounds of ground chuck, (not ground beef, which is a lot of grease that cooks out)
• 16 ounces of sour cream. Not lowfat
• A 1 pound bag of frozen corn
• 2 bags of yellow corn tortilla chips, pounded to bits easy way to do this is pop a hole in the corner of the bag, and use the bag to mash the chips up.
• 1 large jar of salsa. Hit up the grocery isle and choose a flavor you like.
• 2 or 3 of the bags of ‘Taco and Mexican cheese’ Store generic works well.

Cook the beef, in Ye Olde Cast Iron Skillet, or an electric, or a non-stick Teflon wonder-skillet, drain the fat, add the frozen corn, the salsa, the sour cream. Alternatively you can use half sour cream, half miracle whip, or half sour cream, half yogurt. But I like the way it tastes with sour cream most.

In a baking pan, layer crushed taco bits, then a layer of the meat mix, then cheese, and repeat until you’ve got your casserole ready.

Now for the easy part. Bake at 375 degrees F, for 45-50 minutes.

This gives you time to wash up your prep gear, wash some plates because someone else didn’t do the dishes. I recommend this method for coercing dish washers to do their damned job when you cook:

Do: Fill the house with the smell of good food

Don’t: Let them have any till they do the dishes

Do: Do enough dishes to serve yourself.

Don’t: Let them have any, period.

I’ve also pulled a few things out of my ‘sneaky tricks for fooling dishwashers into doing their damned job’ …

1) Buy enough steaks for everyone, hide all but yours in the crisper. Cook yours and dinner. When they ask why there’s no other steak, tell them that you gave it to the dishwashing fairy.

2) Pack away all the dishes except for 1 plate, 1 glass/stein/mug/coffee mug, 1 bowl, one salad plate, one fork, one knife, one spoon per person. Make sure that everyone knows which one is there. This is easy if there’s a mismatched set. Or multiple sets.

3) For when they don’t do their job and one of your pieces of cookware ends up crispified (this happens to my broiler pan quite a bit), grab the box of baking soda off of the shelf in the fridge where it’s probably in need of replacing anyway… Soak the item and sprinkle baking soda over it. Sprinkle more water, more baking soda, and make slurry of water and baking soda over whatever. Put it on the stove or in the oven and crank up the heat till the stuff bakes dry. Voila. Crusty carbon buildup flakes right off. I’ve had to do this for a ceramic-coated deep 3 gallon cook pot that my roomie cooked pasta in, and let the pasta burn on the bottom, a lasagna tin that someone let get scorched and extra-cheese overflowed down the sides and burned, a cookie sheet, the pizza pan, and my broiler pan. It works marvelously.

Steaks

In the old country, you would go to your village butcher, and the butcher would have hanging meats. You would point at the meat you wanted and specify the type you want, the butcher would then cut what you wanted, trim it, and wrap it.

I’ve never lived in ‘the Old Country’ but I’m told they had many hardships there that we don’t have here. I’m not sure even, which old country that side of my family is from.

Today we have vac-pac’d family sets of steak. These are cut thin, almost petite trim style compared to a good steakhouse steak. There were for a while a few good steakhouse chains that countered this myth. Sayler’s Old Country Kitchen focused primarily as beef as the main menu item, and if you called ahead you could order a 72 oz steak If you ate it within the specified time, you didn’t pay for it. Otherwise it was roughly $1/ounce.

God those were good. They also had really good prices on various things, such as steak & lobster, a 20 ounce New York cut steak about an inch thick, cooked just right. And a big thick juicy lobster tail, with mashed potatoes salad & bread, for $25. It’s a crying shame they got shut down and their parking lot and restaurant bulldozed into a strip mall.

Like the writers of Penny Arcade once put, ‘you can have McDonalds every day or Steak On Friday’ … I used to treat myself to steak on Fridays, because I used to get paid a decent amount, then the tech industry crashed. And I was forced to compromise. I had to add a roommate to make ends meet. Then another, currently I’ve just completed three years of college, wrapping up my Bachelor’s Degree, and have a bit of time on my hands now that I’m not working full time and doing school. Work ran out right before school ended, which was ironic in it’s own right. I was looking for a way to have more time to finish up my final projects. I got it all right!

My favorite quick and easy method of steaks is to wait till they’re on sale, these will usually be red-tagged at the supermarket, discounted; what this means is they’ve been cut and out for a few days, maybe a week in refrigeration, so they’re just about the point the store has to get rid of them. This is the dark truth of discounted meat …

As bachelors we cannot afford the freshest stuff.

I’ll grab a ‘family pack’ of steaks, keep it chilled on the way home (picking up ice cream as well sometimes) when I get it home, it’s marinate time for the one(s) I’ll cook right then, and freezer time for the rest. Knowing a little about how freezer burn sets in, I started repacking steaks in marinate sauce and double-plastic wrapping them quite some time ago. Into the freezer go the rest. Individually repackaged steaks stack nicely when raw, but I tend to set them so they’ll freeze individually, then re-stack neatly, so they freeze faster.

Remember how I was talking about my broiler pan earlier? It should be good and clean by the time I’m cooking steaks. My roomies learned that when I clean off the broiler pan it’s time for steaks. They learned quickly to do the fucking dishes or they get no steak. It’s really all about filling the house with the smell of good food and making their mouths water. Pavlov’s dogs indeed. Ding ding!

I broil steak; it seals in the juicyness and takes next to no time at all. I usually turn steaks an inch thick at about the 5-7 minute mark They’re usually done in 15. This is one of the not so easy things to do, since steaks need to be monitored. But it gives you time to add things (other than steak) to the menu, like mashed potatoes, mac’n cheese, corn, or, heaven forbid, slice up a salad (I stopped tearing salads up a while ago, a sharp knife does

much less damage to the leaves).

My favorite marinades are also a blended taste;

1 part Lea & Perrins’ Worcestershire sauce

3 parts Big Dan’s Original Teriyaki Sauce

1 part Mirin seasoned rice vinegar.

I add to this based on what I want the meal to be themed.

For instance; I’ll add tobasco sauce to warm it up.

I’ll add Da Bomb to make it even more spicy…

( http://www.originaljuan.com/ssl/shopping/products/?pg=f556c3d5-1e9c-4a02-8b32-1d44e8d9e112)

I’ll add Kansas City style steak seasonings at the time of baking.

Sometimes I’ll add various packets of seasoning I’ve squirreled away from takeout!

Enjoy! Experiment!