Tag Archives: Foodporn

Beef Rouladen

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Beef Rouladen is a German dish that is simple to make and an excellent way to break up the monotony of a tired recipe rotation.

Ingredients:

  • 6 beef round steaks sliced thin
  • Stone ground mustard or Dijon
  • 6 slices of bacon cooked
  • 6 green onions or scallions trimmed
  • 2 carrots peeled and quartered lengthwise
  • 6 dill pickle spears
  • Olive oil
  • 3 medium cloves of garlic minced
  • 2-1/2 cups of chicken stock
  • 1/2 cup red wine
  • 1/4 cup of all purpose flour
  • 3/4 cup water

Procedures.

Assemble your ingredients together ready to go. (mise en place) Thats a fancy French term for “get all your shit together and ready in place”.

Heres the cast of characters. Meat, carrot, green onion, bacon, pickle, and mustard.

NOTE* Tradition indicates the roulades are tied with butchers twine and at first I was motivated but then when I started putting the roulades together I was like, “damn this” and pulled out the tooth picks to secure the meat. So use toothpicks.

Ok so lets make some roulades. Take each one of your thin sliced round steaks and place between sheets of plastic wrap. Hammer the meat out flat with a meat mallet/tenderizer or a small frying pan. Hammer the meat flat like 1/4″ to 3/8″ thick. Not necessarily paper thin but thin.

Take the meat, and spread your spicy mustard all over it. Then very simply take a piece of each one of the following ingredients bacon, carrot, green onion, pickle and place on edge of mustard covered meat. Now simply roll up into a small cigar shaped roll.

Take your toothpicks and secure the end of the meat to itself so it stays together. One or two toothpicks is all you need. Continue the process until all the roulades have been assembled.

Heat a pan with some olive oil over medium high heat and brown the roulades on all sides. About six (6) minutes total. Season with salt and pepper.

Once you brown all the meat, add your chicken stock and wine. Reduce the heat to medium low, cover and simmer for about 1-1/2 hours.

After an hour and a half of simmering, carefully remove the roulades to a plate, and return the pan they came out of with cooking liquid to medium high heat.

Mix your flour and water together in a small bowl. Now pour the flour/water mixture into the pan with the cooking liquids. Stir together with a whisk and bring to a boil. The sauce will thicken to a gravy but bring it to a boil and continue to whisk for a couple minutes. Now you have gravy! Return the roulades to the pan with the gravy to heat through.

Heat through for about five minutes or so. You are ready to eat.

NOTE* Please remove the damn toothpicks! I know I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but really I don’t need any feedback about how one of you ate the freaking toothpicks and needed emergency surgery to get the thing out of your throat.

There you have it. Beef Rouladen is generally served with spaetzle, buttered noodles, mashed potatoes, boiled potatoes, red cabbage. Choices are endless.

Make this, its not hard and the time frame isn’t too bad. Probably not a weeknight meal, for the busy working and those with children but its so worth it. Don’t let the flavors of meat, gravy and pickles scare you. Its good.

When you eat this food, you’ll be compelled to making angry speeches, blitzkrieging your ass all over the house and wanting to bomb out the homeowners association with your Luftwaffe BMW and Volkswagens!

 

Steak Melt Sandwiches

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Steak Melt sandwiches are just like your typical patty melts the only exceptions being instead of using some kind of ground beef patty, you use shaved steak slices, regular white bread and a tablespoon of ghetto.

Here’s your cast of characters. (Please don’t mind the 70’s counter tops, it really brings out the color of my eyes!)

  • Cheap sliced Swiss cheese and if you cant get it free on a government food line then Walmart is your next best bet. Except at Walmart be sure to show a little butt crack when checking out.
  • Sliced steak like product. Could you use actual sliced rib-eye? Sure you could but what the hell are you some kind of aristocrat? You’re already at Walmart getting that cheap assed Swiss cheese with your plumbers crack, and needing a shave. Go over to those big open freezers everyone sneezes into after scratching their ass and pick up a box or two of the classic Steak-ums.
  • Bread. Decide how many sandwiches you want then multiply by a factor of 2. Three sandwiches? No problem. Your bread slice formula will look like this 3 X 2 = 6 slices of bread. See you just got some math learnin’ in for the day. We’ll clean that Walmart trip off you yet smartypants. Spread a little margarine or butter on each of those bread slices champ.
  • Two sliced yellow onions. Walmart these babies too. They’re over in the produce section in the big bins. Look for the ones grown in some south American country and cultivated by twelve year old slave labor. Walmart knows cheap food. Take advantage. Fan away the fruit flies and gnats at the onion bin and pick out two that look salmonella free.

Sauté up those sliced onions in a pan. A little olive oil salt medium heat 5-7 minutes and proper caramelization you’re good to go. Pour off into container.

Now in the same pan you just cooked the onions in, fry up the Steak-Um mechanically separated beef product slices. Now don’t worry. Steak-Um is 100% beef. It says so right on the package. Beef eyes, ass, lips, pecker its all beef 100%. Its good for you. Carnivores unite! The fond left over from the sautéed onions adds a rather nice piquant flavor to the Steak-Um.

Onions= Check!
Steak-Um= Check!
Buttered slices of bread= Check!
Swiss cheese slices= Check!

Now you have your miss en place ready to go.

If you’re like me and have a handy dandy panini grill set the temp to high and get ready to assemble your Steak Melts. Otherwise use the same pan you sautéed the onions and fried the Steak-Um in to make your sandwiches.

Assemble the sandwiches in the pan or on the grill. Don’t try and put them together on the counter or a plate or your hand. The bread is buttered numb nuts! Last thing we need is a bunch of lubricated slippery hands making a mess in the kitchen. This isn’t that kind of a movie.

So, place a slice of buttered bread on the pan or grill buttered side down. Put your Steak-Um beef product on the slice of bread, spoon on some of the sautéed onions, then cover with a slice or two of the Swiss cheese followed up by placing the other piece of buttered bread on top of the Swiss cheese. Only this time the buttered side of the bread is facing up. You get all that?

If you’re cooking in a panini press, just close it up and let it go. 5-7 minutes worked for me. Keep peeking till its done to your satisfaction. If you’re cooking in pan on the stove, 3-4 minutes, flip the sandwich over and let it go again for 3-4 minutes. Again just keep your eye on it and take it off when its done the way you like it.

Slice ’em diagonal. Why? Why not?

Not too bad for Ghetto Walmart eats and hey we didn’t even wind up on any web sites like this woman did.

There you have it. Steak Melt sandwiches.

 

 

Its so safe floating in the glass

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While above all your troubles pass.

Worked from home today on some programming issues for some clients, so I figured what better then to make a cake. Well sort of. Let me explain.

In my family anything and everything dessert pretty much revolves around the Italian pastry Baba rum cakes. Over the years “Baba” has pretty much become an adjective for any dessert of any kind. Often my father would reply in regards to someone asking about what was for dinner,  “To hell with dinner do we even have any Baba?” Roughly translated to who cares about dinner do we have dessert?

What does this have to do with what I am about to show and tell today? Nothing, other then I found myself in the kitchen this morning wondering about what I was going to eat for dinner. I caught myself thinking to hell with dinner, what do I have for dessert or more accurately “shit I have no Baba!”

I have become my father.

Now some people may not want to admit to becoming one of their parents. I think we all start out this way. Maybe some people have bad parents and truly never want to become what they are or were, but I think some genetic material is going to flow through and good or bad you’re going to display some of the same traits as your parents.

I am not too worried about it. My father was tough on me and my brothers growing up, and certainly not perfect. He showed us it was ok to make mistakes or wrong decisions, but you stand up and take it like a man and move on. So becoming like my father isn’t so bad, I could do a hell of a lot worse.

Folks, I made some “Baba” as it were. Oreo Cake.

I found this recipe on Serious Eats by a rather neat woman named Yvonne Ruperti. I had everything on hand and it was easy. You need a couple hours start to finish between cooking, cooling, and then chilling it down but I am convinced if you can follow the simplest instructions or say crop dust the sales department in the cube farm without ruining your shorts you can make this cake.

I stayed true to the recipe (provided in the recipe section) as published and what you see here is the end result. This is nothing more then a simple chocolate cake, crushed up Oreo cookies, and whipped cream.

Now I have some Baba for tonight. What I am eating for dinner is still a damn mystery. As I think about it, screw it. This is dinner. Diabetic shock and comma here I come.