Meat Group!

Mega Meatloaf.

This is somethin I started throwing together recently and I love how good it is. When you want something to cook that'll take a while and yet when you're done, fill you up solid.

In a big mixing bowl:

1/4 teaspoon Sage
1/2 teaspoon Salt
1/2 teaspoon Dry Mustard
1/4 teaspoon Ground Pepper
2 minced garlic cloves.
1/2 cup of bread crumbs.

I ususally shake it around at this point and get it all mixed in just right.

I also substitute the breadcrumbs for whatever's going to do the job. I've used:
Fritos
Doritos
Regular generic crunchy taco shells.
Oatmeal

And once that's blended nice, add 1 cup of BUTTERMILK. Or 1 cup of whole milk. Or hell, steal some cream from the coffee drinker who wants food too.

2 tablespoons Worcestershire Sauce. Now I've tried a few generics, but the old fashioned Lea & Perrins is the best I've come across so far. Bigger bottle means cheaper, btw. You should always have this stuff around, since it's a manly bachelor thing for steaks and marinades ... and meatloaf!

I usually mix that around till you get something mushy and consistent.

Then you pick two to three pounds of ground meat. I usually go with lean beef and italian sausage, or lean beef and lean pork, I pondered since it's the Holidays, trying turkey and beef. But usually just stick with what's cheap. Beef has a way of filling and sticking around a while.

Use your bachelor powers of messyness and mix it all up by hand. When it's nice and even, plop it into a 2 pound loaf pan. Smoosh it out kinda flat.

Take your favorite steak sauce and baste across the top of it good and thick.

Bake in the middle of the oven at 350 degrees for 90 minutes.

Now you have 90 minutes to finish doing the dishes. Or preparing side dishes. Or whatever.

The Bachelor Gets Health(ier)

Okay, so sitting around an office building all day, doing office work, and due to construction I can’t take the stairs for exercise. This has put a damper on my enjoying of delicious Bachelor foods, so how the heck have I managed to lose weight in all this?

Enh. Probably because of a reduction in processed sugars, and a consistent out of office curriculum.
Plus I’ve been packing lunches to work that are healthy and nutritious. Eeew. That doesn’t seem to fit does it? Healthy, easy to prepare, no dishes to care about. Hmmm, wait a minute, it might be … *gasp* good for me!

So, a while ago this started as just a penchant for some fingerfood, and snagging one of those little snack tray thingies with the slices of carrots, celery, tomatoes, broccoli and cauliflower, and a tub of Ranch Dip. These are sold in supermarkets now, and I like to think of them as ‘Lunchables for grown ups’ now if they just had meat!

So. I thought, how to make these, since I can get one of those little food tray thingys from the disposable inexpensive Tupperware section. Then I thought about how to get some jerky, since $5.99/pound would just suck, since any healthy bachelor knows this stuff is the best for a energy-packed snack.

Hello. Ebay?
http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?from=R40&_trksid=m37&satitle=ronco+food+dehydrator&category0=

Yep. You remember it. The Ronco Food Dehydrator, and all the ads, you saw because you were up late or early, or forgot to turn the television off and woke up with it talking into your head. Don’t worry. These things, there’s a jillion of them out there, and if you use one you get really good results. I particularly like to go and find random fruits and vegetables from the Asian supermarket and dry them down to dried up chunks. It’s always an experiment to see what will come out good, when it’s dried.

Mango, guava, pineapple bananas, sliced, cubed, dried, tossed in along with layers of … thin sliced beef/pork/chicken which is also available in the same supermarket, since those are a good place to grab stir-fry ingredients.
I marinate the meats and dry them according to whatever they are, and whatever they should be. When it’s deer & elk season this year I plan on doing the same with a good load of those, since I found one of the ’7 layer’ models.

Off to the store to get some granola, a good heaping bag of the crunchy kind. I mix about 1 part granola, 2 parts jerky (dried and cut into ½ inch squares /cubes to taste) 2 parts dried fruits, including the easiest of snack foods; raisins.
What’s that? My daily snack food / lunch food is trail mix?

Trail mix with MEAT.
Of course I also chop up celery and such, but I have to take those in daily, I can take in a week of my granola/jerky mix and leave it in my desk. The AC keeps the desk drawer somewhat above the melting point for chocolate (as has been found with stashes of Halloween candy / girl scout cookies, etc.) but I’d never think it cool enough to keep veggies.

So anyway, this mix has been keeping me away from going down and snagging the cheeseburger with fries & soda that I was getting for a while (when my weight was maintaining but I could add the stairs to my mix to get rid of it) … and now I’m also, since I’m nibbling on the small bits here and there, where most people would take ‘Smoke Breaks’ I’d be nibbling a handful of this snack mix to keep me on an even keel all day, blood sugar wise as well. Yeah I’m not diabetic, but it runs in the family so I learned to watch out for it, don’t want to develop it.
That and switching from soda to tea has saved a lot. I tossed together the math and tried to imagine ’30 teaspoons of sugar per liter of soda’ and I squinted at that really really hard.

I grabbed the next sports-bottle-sized fruit-juice from the Asian supermarket (on one of my trips) and after I’d emptied of it’s original contents, popped the label off (shrink wrap vs. razor blade is always a win for the razor) and ran two teabags in it. With lukewarm water that chilled to just below room temp, overnight it made some really good tea. I mean REALLY good caffeinated tea. About as strong as good coffee without the bitterness. And I added four teaspoons of raw sugar to that to sweeten it up a little. For a 2 liter bottle, 4 teaspoons of sugar, and it’s a 2 liter of coffee-equivalent energy drink. Zoom!
Trading calories around has allowed me to continue losing weight, continue having energy all day, and yet keep under my food budget and save for the two or three nights a week I’ll splurge and get myself some steak.

Alcohol!

A friend came up with this recipe and I've been drinking them ever since.

"Riker's Island Iced Tea"

1oz Vodka, Preferably Absolut Red Label
1oz Triple Sec
1oz Gin
1oz White Tequila (don't use Gold)
1/2 oz Bacardi 151
1/2 oz Clear Springs Grain Alcohol
4oz Sweet & Sour
2oz Coke

Mix in a colander and pour over crushed ice.

Add a little more Coke, a little more Sweet & Sour, until you like the taste.

The concept is, of course, is to get as much alcohol into your system as possible, without having to taste it.

This is a serious drink, for people who want to get serious buzzed, in a serious order. Don't expect to go into a bar and order this up. It's more than is legal in most states. Don't expect to have the ability to drive after drinking one of these without significant time to sober up.

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!

It has begun!

So I think to myself, out loud, so everyone can hear:

"Why not create an online recipe list for bachelors who want to eat more than Cup-O-Noodles(tm) and Crack Ramen?"

I thought this idea up, while making brunch snack food / meal food. Something simple. Something cheap. Something portable.

Recepie # 1

Hard Boiled Eggs.

Some nutritionist will probably tell me that eggs are good for you. Some may say that eggs are bad for you. I think eggs are eggs, they're one of the least respected food ingredients out there. But the thing is, they're blissfully cheap for the amount of nutrients contained therein.

Eggs exist as recipe ingredients for the most part.

But does this fit with the Bachelor Chow Mentality (Fast, Cheap, Easy to make, Filling?)

1) So onto the burner on a medium heat, goes a saucepan, cold water. Ordinary cheap tapwater will do. This isn't the Bourgeois Bachelor Blog. In goes 3 eggs per person intended to be fed. Gently of course, you don't want to crack them, and I generally leave a half an inch, to an inch above the top of the eggs to let them have some room to roll around when everything comes to a boil.
2) I have at my disposal a neat lid with a breathing hole, it's the lid for my ricemaker. It lets some but not all of the steam out, and adds just a little bit of pressure, and traps heat in.
3) Since you started with fresh cold water, and cold eggs out of the fridge, it should take a few unattended minutes to get going on a low boil.
4) After the cold water and the eggs comes up to a slow boil, I covered with the lid, to trap more heat in, and set my oven timer for ten minutes, because I like hard boiled eggs to be hard boiled.

I filled this time with my morning routines, made some coffee.

5) Here's the hard part. Taking it off the stove, and cooling the eggs to where you're not going to burn yourself eating them. Eggs are small round and hide their core heat pretty well when they're hard boiled. Just to make sure I tilted the saucepan to empty out as much of the hot water as possible, and ran cold water from the tap, again, into the pot for a minute or two while I cleaned up another dish or two from the previous night that got set into the sink late, or got found sitting somewhere and brought in as a straggler.

Yes, it's a Bachelor Blog. I'm a single bachelor, and I have two college roomies. Or sometimes I like to think of them as large primates in a zoo. After all, like Ernie Cline (google it!) says, 'We're All Just A Bunch Of Monkeys'

So I've got a saucepan and it's got a slow stream of cold water spilling over and down the drain.

This goes on for a few minutes until it's time to roll out for the morning carpool. I turn the water off, leave my share behind for me, and drop the other monkey's share into egg carriers I found under camping supplies.

These look like little egg cartons, only they're two piece ABS plastic shells, that you can toss this way and that. Great for carrying eggsg in. They're cheap and durable.

Today is -my- day off so I get to come home after the carpool, sit back and enjoy some nice hardboiled eggs. It was cheap, didn't really interrupt my day, and I got breakfast out of it. A nice breakfast that'll keep me going until I realize I've been puttering around the place too much, and it's afternoon, and I'm hungry again.

I like to eat my hardboiled eggs with a little liberated individual-serve salt & pepper from a fast-food restaurant chain. Light on the salt, heavy on the pepper. If I'm feeling fancy, a splash of Tobasco sauce or a squirt of taco sauce. Again, liberated.

In the end, I have three monkeys out and about, with a simple breakfast / snack food in their pocket, or ready to eat as time allows, one dirty pan, one dirty pan lid. since it was used for boiling water and rinsed, it's really quick to clean up and just set back on the stove for something else.

Next: Meat group!