Once again I was scrounging around the house last night looking for something to cook for dinner that also would provide leftovers. Had odds 'n' ends of this 'n' that, so here's what I came up with... Gotta say, when my son eats the leftovers today and says "Damn Mom, that's good!" I figure I did something right (considering his restaurant cooking experience). Here's what I did, along with commentary...
- 1 1/3 Cup brown sugar
- 1/2 Cup soy sauce (light or low sodium is fine)
- 1/4 Cup diced onion (I used red onion, any old onion will work the same)
- 1 tsp. minced garlic
- 1 Cup cider vinegar
- 1 big can of crushed pineapple (15 ounce?)
- 1 little can of water chestnuts (6 ounce?)
- 1 pint jar of home canned sliced carrots (try to avoid store-bought canned carrots, better off to use some frozen ones if you don't have fresh. If you have fresh, slice them and boil them for awhile first, 'til they start to get soft)
- 7 flash frozen chicken breast pieces (Safeway sells a huge resealable package of these for about $9.99, about 15 to a pack)
- A handful of Craisins
- Some cornstarch and some ketchup (I'll explain this later)
Much like the bbq chicken recipe earlier on, rub the chicken all over with a real light coating of mayo. I started out with frozen chicken, this worked fine. Sprinkle a bit of pepper, onion salt, garlic powder, and chili powder over both sides of the chicken, and put it in the oven on 300. Then you can go do whatever for half an hour or so. Drain the liquid from the chicken, then slice it into 1/4" strips, leaving it in the baking dish.
Drain the pineapple while the chicken is cooking. Put the juice, soy sauce, brown sugar, garlic, vinegar and Craisins into a kettle and heat to a boil. While this is heating, dice the onion and the water chestnuts. Once the liquid mixture comes to a boil, mix up about 4 heaping teaspoons of corn starch with about half a cup of ketchup and add to the boiling mixture. Stir it in good, then add the pineapple, drained carrots, onion and water chestnuts. Bring to a boil again while stirring, and if this mixture isn't thickening like you think it should, mix a bit more cornstarch in some cold water and add it in. Once the mixture is sort of thick, pour it over the sliced chicken, cover with tin foil and return to the oven. This can bake now at 325 for awhile, I think I did about 40 minutes but unsure 'cuz I got busy with other things. Take the dish out of the oven to "rest" while you make some rice.
Serve the sweet 'n' sour over the rice and enjoy :)
The ingredients I would have added to this if I'd had them include diced green peppers, diced celery and a bit of shredded cabbage. Feel free to use whatever veggies you like to have in a sweet 'n' sour, just stay true to the ratios of vinegar, brown sugar, soy sauce, pineapple juice and ketchup. Make as much or as little as you want. Don't worry if some of the ingredients don't "seem" to go together... they really do complement and enhance one another once combined. I didn't add any extra salt to the mixture, not even to the rice water. None needed.
11/08/2009
11/04/2009
Get It Now!! Only $3035.16 Per Month on Your Walmart Card!
So... hmmm... I was browsing walmart.com tonight just trying to get some basic price estimates for auxiliary heating...
How's this for a nice little space heater? It's only $36,499... pocket change, right?
I'm wondering just which of the People of Walmart.com folks will be making this purchase? Maybe they'll use the Bill Me Later financing option. Only $3035.16 per month on their Walmart card for the first year... hmmmm....
Seriously... who out there who's "in the business" will be web browsing at walmart.com deliberately looking something like this to buy from Walmart of all places? Or this even?
I've gotta say, these things really pegged my WTF meter.
How's this for a nice little space heater? It's only $36,499... pocket change, right?
I'm wondering just which of the People of Walmart.com folks will be making this purchase? Maybe they'll use the Bill Me Later financing option. Only $3035.16 per month on their Walmart card for the first year... hmmmm....
Seriously... who out there who's "in the business" will be web browsing at walmart.com deliberately looking something like this to buy from Walmart of all places? Or this even?
I've gotta say, these things really pegged my WTF meter.
11/02/2009
It's Venison Season!
It's the time of year to start dreaming of the meals you'll be making with all that fresh venison in your freezer. You spent the money on license and tags, you spent your time hunting and were gloriously successful, you spent more time and effort cutting and wrapping... now it's time to relax and savor the fruits of your labor :)
A lot of people won't bother with cutting roasts, just making steaks or hamburger instead, because they just don't quite know how to cook a venison roast to their liking. Let me throw in an idea for your hamburger while I'm here, a nice change from the usual mixtures of meat people use for their ground venison... Rather than using beef or pork to add the flavor and fat to the ground venison, try using 1/3 bacon instead. A 2 lb. package of bacon ends and pieces ground up with 5 lbs. of venison will provide all the fat needed to hold it all together and will give a fantastic flavor to the burgers :)
But back to venison roasts. I think of venison as being a "pure" meat. Unlike beef, it's not marbled with layers of fat, and hasn't been fed a ton of unknown antibiotics and growth hormones. This lack of marbling, however, can be a detriment in the roasts. While the fat and other connective tissues give the meat the "gamey" taste that causes many people to dislike venison, which is why we trim it off when we butcher, these two things also help provide the tenderness found in beef and pork.
Venison roasts do best when roasted with moist heat. While a beef roast is great to just stick in a pan and bake for awhile, your venison roast will be dry and tough using this method. There's no fat in it to help create the moisture needed for tenderness, so you'll have to add water to the pan. While I love a dry-roasted beef chuck, about all a dry-roasted venison roast is good for, in my opinion, is to grind into a sandwich meat. Pretty good that way, with mayo, relish, onions, etc. My preferred method of cooking a venison roast is in the slow cooker. The following recipe can be adapted to oven use if you don't have a slow cooker, simply by maintaining a temp of about 225 and ensuring your roasting pan has a good lid, and checking on it a bit more often.
You'll need:
A slow cooker
Some butcher string
A venison roast
1 onion
1 apple
1-2 cups Craisins or 1-2 cups dried blueberries
1-2 stalks celery, or 1 tsp. celery seed, or 2 tbs. celery flakes
1 can mushroom stems & pieces
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes
1/3 C. cherry wine
Dice the onion, apple, celery and mushrooms into small pieces. Plump the Craisins in some warm water, just enough to cover. Saute all these and the spices in a bit of olive oil. Save the Craisin water.
While these things are cooking, lay the roast out. Make a cut down the middle, to about an inch from going all the way through. Spread it out like a butterfly, and make several 1" deep horizontal slits in each side. When the saute is complete, spread the ingredients into the roast and fill the slits. Tie all this back together with the butcher string, and place into the slow cooker. Gather up all the filling that spilled out and put it over the top of the roast. Now go back to your sautee pan, heat it up again and put in the cherry wine and 1/3 cup of the reserved Craisin water. Bring this to a boil, scraping up all the pan stickings in the process, and drizzle it over the roast. Start out the slow cooker temp on high, then after an hour or so turn it down to low. If the liquid steams off, just add a bit of water, you'll want to check on it now and then so it doesn't dry out. If you have the roast in the cooker by 10am, you'll be sitting down to the finest gourmet melt-in-your-mouth venison dinner by 6pm. Since I'm a bit on the lazy side, I generally just put in a few carrots, potatoes and some cabbage around 4pm or so and do a one-dish pot roast meal. This would be great with some garlic mashed potatoes and some home-canned green beans on the side, though, maybe with some buttermilk biscuits too :)
Recipe adapts well to pork or beef roasts also. Use your imagination and let me know :)
A lot of people won't bother with cutting roasts, just making steaks or hamburger instead, because they just don't quite know how to cook a venison roast to their liking. Let me throw in an idea for your hamburger while I'm here, a nice change from the usual mixtures of meat people use for their ground venison... Rather than using beef or pork to add the flavor and fat to the ground venison, try using 1/3 bacon instead. A 2 lb. package of bacon ends and pieces ground up with 5 lbs. of venison will provide all the fat needed to hold it all together and will give a fantastic flavor to the burgers :)
But back to venison roasts. I think of venison as being a "pure" meat. Unlike beef, it's not marbled with layers of fat, and hasn't been fed a ton of unknown antibiotics and growth hormones. This lack of marbling, however, can be a detriment in the roasts. While the fat and other connective tissues give the meat the "gamey" taste that causes many people to dislike venison, which is why we trim it off when we butcher, these two things also help provide the tenderness found in beef and pork.
Venison roasts do best when roasted with moist heat. While a beef roast is great to just stick in a pan and bake for awhile, your venison roast will be dry and tough using this method. There's no fat in it to help create the moisture needed for tenderness, so you'll have to add water to the pan. While I love a dry-roasted beef chuck, about all a dry-roasted venison roast is good for, in my opinion, is to grind into a sandwich meat. Pretty good that way, with mayo, relish, onions, etc. My preferred method of cooking a venison roast is in the slow cooker. The following recipe can be adapted to oven use if you don't have a slow cooker, simply by maintaining a temp of about 225 and ensuring your roasting pan has a good lid, and checking on it a bit more often.
You'll need:
A slow cooker
Some butcher string
A venison roast
1 onion
1 apple
1-2 cups Craisins or 1-2 cups dried blueberries
1-2 stalks celery, or 1 tsp. celery seed, or 2 tbs. celery flakes
1 can mushroom stems & pieces
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes
1/3 C. cherry wine
Dice the onion, apple, celery and mushrooms into small pieces. Plump the Craisins in some warm water, just enough to cover. Saute all these and the spices in a bit of olive oil. Save the Craisin water.
While these things are cooking, lay the roast out. Make a cut down the middle, to about an inch from going all the way through. Spread it out like a butterfly, and make several 1" deep horizontal slits in each side. When the saute is complete, spread the ingredients into the roast and fill the slits. Tie all this back together with the butcher string, and place into the slow cooker. Gather up all the filling that spilled out and put it over the top of the roast. Now go back to your sautee pan, heat it up again and put in the cherry wine and 1/3 cup of the reserved Craisin water. Bring this to a boil, scraping up all the pan stickings in the process, and drizzle it over the roast. Start out the slow cooker temp on high, then after an hour or so turn it down to low. If the liquid steams off, just add a bit of water, you'll want to check on it now and then so it doesn't dry out. If you have the roast in the cooker by 10am, you'll be sitting down to the finest gourmet melt-in-your-mouth venison dinner by 6pm. Since I'm a bit on the lazy side, I generally just put in a few carrots, potatoes and some cabbage around 4pm or so and do a one-dish pot roast meal. This would be great with some garlic mashed potatoes and some home-canned green beans on the side, though, maybe with some buttermilk biscuits too :)
Recipe adapts well to pork or beef roasts also. Use your imagination and let me know :)
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