JustWalt's Mental Meanderings: comfort food

Showing posts with label comfort food. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Cheap Bastid Finally Kills Off the Thanksgiving Turkey

It’s taken me 2 months but that bird is finally gone. Well not completely. We’re having the last of the turkey noodle soup tonight with home made French bread and I’ve got a bunch of turkey stock that will last me several months.

But that damned turkey breast carcass is finally out of the freezer. All that’s left is a small mound of bones which now resides in the garbage.

The weather forecast for the weekend was for rain and blustery winds—which is the closest thing that the San Diego area will ever get to a blizzard. So I decided it was time to finish off the carcass with stock and soup.

You can make your own any time you want. All you need is to keep the carcass of a turkey, turkey breast or chicken with shreds of meat still attached. Do what I did, take out your slow cooker or your stock pot and put in about 6-8 cups of water and put it on slow heat. Now toss in your carcass (I mean I just took mine out of the freezer, pulled it out of the freezer bag and dropped it into the slow cooker).

That’s all you need to do. Except if you’re like me, go check it occasionally, especially after it starts to send off that fantastic aroma. After a couple of hours it’ll start to look like weak broth and a couple hours after that it will look and smell rich and start to taste a bit richer. I’m going for stock here, not broth. Broth is for wusses.

And after 4 or 5 hours you might want to add another cup or so of water. So after 6 to 8 hours I turn off the heat and slide the cooker pot into the fridge overnight. The next morning what I’m going to do is skim any congealed solids off the top and throw it away.

Then, strain the liquid getting out all those meat bits and bones which could cause a problem. After you do that, just pour the liquid into ice cube trays and turn it into “stock-cicles”. Let them freeze solid and then put the cubes into freezer bags for use throughout the year.

But I wasn’t done. I was going to make stock AND soup. I kept about a cup and a half of the stock for “stock-cicles”. And I used the rest—about 2 ½ cups as my soup base. Then I picked through the meat—shredding it and discarding the bones and any remaining skin. What I had left was just about a pound of turkey.

Sample the broth! Add salt and pepper a little bit at a time. I also add garlic powder and cumin (why do I add cumin? Because we like cumin!). Remember, go easy with the spices—you can always add more, but once it’s in, you can’t take it out.

That went into the pot and I let it simmer for several hours. From there, I added a little over a cup each of diced onion, diced carrot, diced celery and diced jalapeno. I let that cook for a couple more hours and added 2 or 3 handsful of frozen corn.

Now about an hour before serving, toss in about half a bag of egg noodles. By now this is going to be smelling so fantastic that you’ll be drooling. Sometimes I make drop dumplings for this soup, but not this time. They’re fantastically easy to make. Instead, I sliced some French bread and lightly toasted it in the oven for dipping into the soup.

Oh man, it was fantastic. Stick to the ribs good. Silky, tasty texture—just enough spices to bring out the full flavor of the soup. And what’s best is that this was really inexpensive.

The Cheap Bastid Test: This started out as an 8 pound turkey breast. We got 3 dinners and several sandwiches from it. And we just got 2 more nights of dinner out of the soup plus multiple meals with a flavor boost from the homemade stock. That’s a bargain. And for the soup, I used the left-over carcass and meat and added about $2.50 worth of vegetables and noodles.

In today’s world, you have to stretch every dollar. It’s even better when the result of the stretching is comfort food this tasty and nourishing.

That’s the Cheap Bastid Way: Eat Good. Eat Cheap. Be Grateful!

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Cheap Bastid Chewing on "The Chew" and Blasting Yahoo

Cheap Bastid has done enough Cheap Bastidly cooking and writing by now to be entitled to express an opinion or two. So that’s what I’m going to do today.

I’m going to take a swipe at ABC’s new food show “The Chew”, a cutsey play on “The View”, and take a swipe at an insipid piece that showed up yesterday on Yahoo finance.

First, “The Chew”. This new show features Karla Hall who was a contestant on Top Chef along with Food Network Iron Chefs Mario Batalli and Michael Symon. It’s been on for a little over a month now. And it’s all right although a bit vapid. They’ve even made some efforts at showing how to cook good food fast and on a budget.

But yesterday they managed to pretty much alienate me with their snarky, almost condescending, take on “Southern Cooking”. Sure, they paid some lip service to the traditions of Southern or country cooking but they also managed to insert a recorded “Yeehaw” everytime they mentioned the theme or took a commercial break.

Hey jackasses, southern or country cooking is the epitome of making food dollars stretch. It’s not fancy but its inexpensive and filling and good and, most importantly, is usually made with more pinches of love than the paid shills manage to add.

To stand up in front of America spewing fake southern/country/Texas accents in the cause of entertainment demeans what they do and disrespects the food that they’re supposed to be extolling.

Certainly it’s entertainment but there are people from all over watching—not just foodies from the East coast. I thought it was offensive. Oh, and remember when earlier I said the show was all right? Too bad, because their audience (including me, at least for now) deserves something better than “all right”.

Now on to Yahoo. There was an article yesterday in Yahoo Finance—Financially Fit titled “How to Feed a Family on $15 a Day”. OK, not bad. It got my attention—I’m the Cheap Bastid. Fifteen bucks seems a bit generous, but it’s for a family of 4.

The article rubbed me the wrong way with its lead which said that the “average family of four” spends upwards of $1200 a month on groceries. Say what? The author was citing data from the USDA on monthly food costs—the $1200 a month comes from the column titled “Liberal Plan”. Even the “Thrifty Plan” at $615 per month struck me as high.

More particularly, the author was interviewing some expert who had “stopped by her kitchen” to share some advice. This expert, Allison Fishman, contributing editor to “Cooking Light”. Fishman was right when she said the important thing is to plan menus and plan shopping. I started doing that when my kids were little. Planning a menu prior to shopping was the key to making sure that ingredients were on hand and, even better, it had the result of significantly reducing the total grocery bill.

But Fishman was also suggesting that meat be used “almost like a condiment” rather than as the main feature of a meal. Huh? Meat, a condiment? She suggested that beef at $5.99 a pound and chicken breast at $5 per pound was out of reach for many to be able to provide other than a sampling of it in a meal.

That’s all well and good. But where the hell is she buying her boneless, skinless chicken breast? I pay $1.97 a pound for it. The same with beef. I now buy “lesser” cuts such as bottom round (London Broil). I can get ground beef for about $2.50 a pound by having my grocer’s meat department grind it for me when chuck or round is on special. And maybe Southern California (or at least my neighborhood) isn’t as expensive as someplace like New York City but it’s still plenty expensive.

The way this expert was presenting herself, I kind of got the impression that she was trying to educate the ignorant masses to eat a diet based on beans and squash and legumes along with using the same chicken bone for a couple of weeks to flavor the meager soups.

The “average family” spends far less than $1200 a month on food. The average family spends less than $600 a month on food. Who are they kidding. And this kind of advice does little, if anything, to enlighten or encourage or educate. What it does instead is frustrate and infuriate.

And Cheap Bastid sees that as a disservice not as being helpful.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Cheap Bastid's Savory Salisbury Steak

Remember mystery meat? Brown, rubbery, almost tasteless gunk sitting on the bottom of the main dish aluminum section of the “Hungryman” Swanson’s TV dinners you buy when you’re starved and want something which at least resembles meat but you don’t want to cook.

Or the stuff that found its way onto your school lunch tray with a heap of bad mashed potatoes on the side glopped with deep brown goo and a side of corn that was boiled to death by the denizens of the lunchroom kitchen. Both versions of the dish would typically feature bits of “pencil eraser”—cooked canned mushrooms which somehow have become rubbery.

Yep, that’s Salisbury Steak. It’s a venerable dish which, thanks to the TV dinner industry has been sorely abused. We’ve all had it. It fills our belly and satisfies a primal urge for beef but usually in a form that only technically qualifies as a meal.

I’ve eaten it as a “treat”—something to “reward” an evening of independence from kids and the duties of a household. I’ve eaten it when I didn’t want to cook but wanted something to fill me up—a default pretend feast of gargantuan proportions fresh from the freezer section of the grocery store.

Note: for more Cheap Bastid Recipes go to my new website:

http://www.cheap-bastid-cooks.com/

Now, I have come up with a way to make it a “stick to your ribs celebration of flavor and comfort food.” And it’s good. Flavorful, savory, aromatic.

It’s not hard to make, but there are several steps and start to finish it takes about 2 hours. And sometimes good comfort food takes a bit of time to come together. It’s worth the wait and you’ll be rewarded with some terrific aromas while it’s cooking.

Cheap Bastid’s Salisbury Steak

• 1 ½ lbs. 85% ground beef
• 1 cup diced onion
• 1 tbsp minced garlic
• 2 eggs
• ¾ cup bread or cracker crumbs
• 2 cups sliced mushrooms
• ½ cup diced mushrooms
• 2 tbsp flour
• 16 oz beef or veal stock

Directions
First do all your prep. Dice the onions, clean and slice the mushrooms, dice the ½ cup of mushrooms. Prep the crumbs. Get out your eggs, flour and stock. Be ready to cook. Get out a medium mixing bowl for the meat mixture, a large sauté pan and a good size baking dish.

Put a large sauté pan on the stove over medium high heat and add a couple of tablespoons of oil or butter. Add ¾ of the diced onion and the minced garlic. Give it a stir to get going then add the ½ cup of diced mushrooms. Cook until onion is translucent. Remove from heat and scrape contents into the mixing bowl. (Don’t rinse or clean the pan yet). Give it about 5 minutes to cool back to room temperature.

When cool, add the meat then add the eggs and crumbs. (I used cracker crumbs because I didn’t have any bread crumbs and I like the slightly different flavor the cracker crumbs give). Mix all this up really well. (I used a blend of 12 oz. ground round, 6 oz. ground chuck and 2 oz. pork sausage.) Form the meat into patties about ½ inch thick and about 6 oz. each (just eyeball it).

Now, put the pan back on the stove, turn the heat to medium-high and add 2-3 tablespoons of oil. Put the patties down in the pan and brown on each side (it’ll take 2-3 minutes per side). Remove and put the patties in a single layer in a baking dish.

OK, so the meat is ready. Now on to the gravy. (See what I mean, this is just a little bit involved, but it’s worth it!).

Add a bit of oil/butter to the pan you used to sauté the onions and mushrooms and brown the meat (about 3 tablespoons total). Sprinkle 3 tablespoons of flour into the oil and whisk it into a roux. This is a “quick roux” and will only take a couple of minutes to come together. Add the stock about a third at a time and keep whisking/stirring. Make sure there are no lumps. Add the rest of the mushrooms and simmer for 20-30 minutes until it thickens.

Preheat the oven to 375. This is when the kitchen is going to really start smelling great with the richness of the beef stock and the earthiness of the mushrooms.

Pour the gravy over the browned meat patties. Cover the dish with foil and put into the oven for about 45 minutes.

Now is the time to make a pot of mashed potatoes and start anticipating the goodness that’s going to come out of the oven.

When done, serve it up. Slather some of the gravy over the mashed potatoes and a bit more on the meat and enjoy.

The meat will me moist and flavorful. The aroma will make your mouth water in anticipation. This ain’t no TV dinner! It’s the real deal. But you can eat it in front of the TV anyway.

The Cheap Bastid Test: This isn’t the cheapest recipe Cheap Bastid has ever done but it’s reasonable. The total for the meat (about 1 ½ lbs) was $3. The stock cost $1 for a 32 oz. box plus I used stock ice cubes that I make myself and freeze. There’s maybe $.50 worth of onion. The priciest item is the mushrooms which were $2.79/lb. and I used about ¾ lb. or $2.10 worth. So the total for this meal for 3 (at our home anyway) was $6.60 but let’s call it $7.00 with stuff like garlic and crumbs added. For 3 servings, that comes to $2.33 each—less than a Hungry Man TV dinner and a lot better. The downside is it takes 2 hours plus to make—but it’s worth it.

That’s the Cheap Bastid Way: Eat Good, Eat Cheap, Be Grateful!

If you liked this and want to read more Cheap Bastid recipes click this link to my new Cheap Bastid Cooks website: http://www.cheap-bastid-cooks.com/

Monday, March 1, 2010

Cheap Bastid's Chicken & Dumpling Soup

Cheap Bastid’s thing is to try to cook really tasty food on a tight budget. I like sharing that and maybe getting some other folks whose budgets are pretty tight thinking about food in a different way.

This week we’re talking Chicken and Dumpling Soup. Why? Well, a couple of weeks ago I was looking for something to cook that would provide some left-overs because my work schedule had me working until 8:30 several days in a row. I got rummaging around in both my brain and in the freezer and came up with chicken but wanted to do something different and old-fashioned. I had never cooked dumplings before and wanted to try them to be able to say I have done it and for the flavor and “old fashioned” idea of Chicken and Dumplings.

And in going through the freezer, I came across a couple of freezer bags with some freezer burned chicken legs and thighs. Once upon a time they would have gotten tossed. But I figured that it wouldn’t make any difference because I was tossing them in the slow cooker and making soup. I was right. So here’s another Cheap Bastid, stick-to-your-ribs, old-fashioned recipe that you may just enjoy.

Cheap Bastid’s Chicken and Dumpling Soup
4-5 pieces of chicken (legs, thighs, breast it can still be frozen)
2 cups chopped carrots
1 ½ cups chopped onion
½ cups chopped celery
16 oz chicken broth
3-4 cups water
Garlic
Salt, pepper, cumin, rosemary or thyme
Pancake mix

Directions:
Get out your slow cooker or a dutch oven (whichever you prefer to use). Put it on the stove at medium or turn the cooker on high. Dump in the chicken broth and water, then add the chicken. I also like to add some heartier broth by dumping in 3 or 4 beef or pork broth “ice cubes” that I keep in the freezer. Add salt, pepper, garlic and herbs (dried herbs work just fine). Start chopping your veggies and dump them in when you’ve got them prepped. (All of this is more or less depending on how much veggies you like in your soup).

Now you can relax and let this cook for 2-3 hours. Get the pot simmering—a slow roll works good—and cover the pot. Read the newspaper, watch some TV, whatever. This is going to start smelling good within an hour. After 2-3 hours check the chicken. When it’s about ready to fall off the bone (stick a fork in it and twist—if the meat wants to fall off, then it’s ready). Take the Chicken out of the pot, put it on a cutting board and then remove first the skin and put aside, then the meat from the bone. Toss the skin and the bone and shred the meat then chop it into about ½-3/4 inch pieces. Then toss all that back into the pot and clean up your cutting board. Taste test the soup for flavor. It should be starting to taste real “chickeny” and you should be getting some flavor from both the veggies as well as the seasonings. I really like the way this soup smells while cooking with the combination of chicken, celery and herbs.

Now is the time to leave the cover “cracked open”. This will release steam and let the liquid cook down a bit intensifying the flavor and thickening it a bit. Make sure you’ve got plenty of liquid in the pot so this can happen.

After about another hour of simmering, taste test again. This time it’s to check on the “doneness” of the vegetables. A bit of texture is a good thing—you don’t want “crunchy” and “mushy” is overdone. So, if they’re just a bit “al dente” now would be a good time to prep your dumplings.

I came across a recipe online that suggested using pancake mix for dumplings. That’s good because I didn’t have any “Jiffy” biscuit mix and didn’t have any baking powder to make the dumplings from scratch. The secret is that rather than the 2 to 1 ratio of mix to water that pancakes require, use a 1 ½ to 1 ratio—so that it’s a bit thicker.

Use 2 teaspoons to “drop” the batter into the pot. One to pick up the batter and the other to slide it off into the soup. Cover the whole top of the soup with the dumplings. Turn the heat down so that it’s not bubbling, cover and let it simmer for 45 minutes to an hour until the dumplings are nicely puffed up and bobbing around like pasty, yellowish buoys.

Soups on! It’s time to eat. The dumplings will give the soup a smooth silky texture and provide that something extra that takes a good chicken soup and turns it into something special—Chicken and Dumpling Soup. A fantastic, tasty, home-cooked, comfort food, country-style meal in a bowl.

The Cheap Bastid Test: Well, I should say that old, freezer burned chicken isn’t worth anything but, it was about 1 ½ lbs. of chicken that cost about $2.50 at the grocery store. The veggies cost maybe $1, the broth added about $.50 and I used about $.50 worth of pancake mix. Total for the meal: $4.50. This fed us dinner for 2 nights and lunch for 2 days—a total of 8 meals. That’s stretching a food budget dollar and making something incredibly tasty at the same time. Give it a try. Your family will love it.

That’s the Cheap Bastid Way: Eat Good! Eat Cheap! Be Grateful!

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Cheap Bastid's Chicken Fried Steak and Pan Gravy

I had the weekend off and it was time to cook some Comfort Food. Friday night I whipped up some Guinea Grinders; Saturday night I did Chicken Fried Steak and Pan Gravy and yesterday I made a big slow cooker full of Chicken and Dumpling Soup.

All 3 of these dinners not only met the Cheap Bastid test but they were really tasty too. I rummaged around in the freezer to see what I had for cooking and pulled out a couple of packages of sirloin. And quite frankly, virtually everything in the freezer was bought on special. I stocked up on sirloin when Stater Bros. had it for $1.99/lb. I won't go out and pick up dead cow or any other meat just because I have a hankering for it unless it's on special. That's the Cheap Bastid Way.

So today we’re going to talk about Chicken Fried Steak. It’s one of the ultimate Southern style comfort foods. I don’t cook it very often because it’s a bit messy but sometimes the mess is worth the effort for the flavor. The flavor is terrific and the steak is tender and tasty. I use real steak rather than cube steak or, as some people do, hamburger. And, with just a bit of practice you can get the breading crispy and golden while cooking your meat to the “doneness” you like—even medium rare.

Cheap Bastid’s Chicken Fried Steak and Pan Gravy
1 ½-2 lb Steak (sirloin or round about ¾-1 inch thick)
1 ½-2 cups flour
1 egg
Milk
1/3-1/2 cup cooking oil

Directions
Get out a good heavy skillet, cutting board, ½-1 gal. freezer bag, knife and heavy sauce pan—and put on an apron. Cut thawed steak into 2-3 chunks roughly 6 inches square. Put the steak in the freezer bag. Now pound the crap out of the meat using the sauce pan until it’s a uniform thickness of about ½ inch. (Don’t get the meat cut ½ inch thick because the pounding also tenderizes the meat). After I do this step I use a meat mallet to put the “indentations” into the meat which helps further tenderize it but I don’t wallop it, I just mark it. This step also allows you to let go of some of your frustrations by pounding on the steak. You may need to cut the meat after you tenderize it so that the portions are about 6 or 8 inches by about 3 inches.

2 Handed dredging--one for dry and one for wet.

You’re going to “double dredge so get out a couple of bowls or containers which have flat bottoms and are big enough to put the meat into flat. In one bowl dump in your flour (I also like to use some sort of crumb—about 1/3-1/2 cup bread crumbs or just take 10-12 saltines and schmoosh them into little crumbs). Break the egg in the other bowl and add about ¼ cup milk. Then whisk it thoroughly.

Put your skillet on a stove burner, turn the heat to between medium and medium high and let it heat up. Add about 1/4” of oil to the bottom. If it smokes it’s too hot and will instantly burn the breading. Season the meat with salt and pepper. (To me, this works better than seasoning the flour. You have to add to much salt & pepper to the flour to season the meat so just put it right on the meat before you dredge it). Now, you’re going to dredge your meat and lay it in the oil.

Carefully put it in the pan over medium/medium high heat and brown it.

Use 2 hands to dredge your meat—one for dry and one for wet (this is important). With one hand pick up a piece of the meat by an edge and lay it in the flour. Coat it on both sides with the flour. With your other hand lift it out of the flour and put it in the egg/milk mix and coat both sides. Then put it back in the flour still using your “wet hand” and coat both sides of the now wet meat with the flour again. Then gently put the meat into the skillet without flipping the hot oil onto your fingers. Put 2-3 pieces of the steak in the skillet. Make sure that there is space between each piece of meat in the skillet so that it fries rather than steams.

Do it 2-3 batches. As each is done, put on a plate/platter with a double layer of paper towels on it to absorb the oil. Then put the platter into a warm oven (set at 200).

Pan Gravy:
Now that the steak is done, it’s time to do the gravy. Pour oil out of the pan so that you have about ¼-1/3 cup remaining. Put pan back on the burner with the heat on medium-medium low. Add an equal amount of the leftover flour to the oil and start to whisk, whisk, whisk this into a roux. It’s going to take about 5 minutes or so of whisking to make a good roux. When you’ve got your roux made up, slowly add a cup of milk (or half a cup each of milk and chicken broth). Turn your heat up just a skosh and whisk, whisk, whisk until the mixture starts to bubble and thicken. Add some salt and a nice heavy dose of pepper. Add more milk if needed to make the quantity of gravy you want.

Mashed ‘Taters
Now I’m not going to repeat my mashed potato recipe (if you want it, check out Cheap Bastid’s Swiss Steak post). Suffice it to say, that you want mashed ‘taters with your Chicken Fried Steak and Pan Gravy. NO garlic. NO cheese. Just mashed ‘taters. Make sure that you time them so that they’re done about the same time as your gravy—it takes a bit of practice.

Plating
Put a mound of Mashed ‘Taters on a plate and add a couple of good hunks of Chicken Fried Steak. Smother the ‘Taters with gravy and put a healthy coat of it on the steak. Salt & pepper to taste and enjoy! Oh man! You’re going to love the stick to your ribs flavor of this dish!

The Cheap Bastid Test: About 1 ½ pounds of sirloin cost me $3 for this recipe. I used maybe $.50 worth of potatoes, $.25 worth of oil and $.10 worth of milk. With the egg and flour, let’s call the whole thing $4.00. We had a hearty, stick to the ribs dinner Saturday night and we’re just about to polish off the left-overs for lunch today. So that comes out to $1 per serving. That’s a terrific value for a Home Cooked, Comfort Food meal!

That’s the Cheap Bastid Way: Eat Good! Eat Cheap! Be Grateful!

Monday, January 11, 2010

Cheap Bastid's Comfort Food--Swiss Steak

It's a new year and time for Cheap Bastid to get back in the swing of things. For those of you who aren't familiar with Cheap Bastid, let me just say that I like cheap! More particularly, I believe passionately in saving money, especially on food. It is totally possible to have a severely limited budget and to eat well. You just have to do a couple of things: shop smart and cook.

Now, I don't mean that you cook either by opening a carton of stuff you bought pre-cooked and heat it up. And I don't mean that you have to make something like they do on "Top Chef"--gourmet techniques using expensive ingredients from expensive grocers like Whole Foods. But you can use simple ingredients and prepare home cooked meals that taste good, are nutritious and which are inexpensive. And, Cheap Bastid tries to do that and share with interested readers.

Oh, and by the way, I got a new Christmas apron for from my bride and she took the following picture of me which shall hereinafter be my "official" Cheap Bastid "portrait". (Extra bonus points for those who get the Christmas message on the apron).

When it's really, really cold outside like it has been throughout most of the country so far in 2010, what you crave is home-cooked comfort food. Something that's going to fill your home with some fantastic aromas for a few hours and then taste as good and be as warm and filling as those aromas have been promising.

That's why I'm sharing my all-time, absolute favorite comfort food recipe with you today. I have loved this dish since I was a little kid and my Mom would make it. I've been fixing it a couple of times a year for 30+ years and my daughter's request for the recipe about 4 years ago is what prompted me to write a cookbook for my children titled "Dad's Kitchen Survival Guide and Cookbook". (Word document copies available via e-mail for free upon request).

I fixed this last week and took the pictures. I'm not the world's greatest photographer and I'm not a food stylist. I prefer to plop it on a plate and have at it with a hearty appetite. If you want me to play with your food and make it a pretty little sculpture, forget it. Others might be able to make this gorgeous and maybe I could too if I wasn't so impatient to get on to the best part--the eating!

And, I made one big mistake. I bought the wrong kind of tomatoes. Buy whole canned tomatoes and squish them in your hands (a great way to release a bit of tension) or buy diced. I bought crushed and it was more like a puree and it just wasn't quite the same--although the taste was fine. The final texture was off just a bit. A smaller mistake was too much oil in the skillet to brown the meat and my old nemesis of too much heat. (Standing joke at our place is that I start off with too much heat in cooking where my wife starts with too little. I seem to prefer to turn it down while Carolyn prefers to turn it up).

And for God's sake, make real mashed potatoes. Peel them, cut them and cook them. No instant!

This dish takes about 20 minutes worth of prep (meat tenderizing, veggie cutting, etc.) and about 30 minutes of prep cooking (browning the meat). And then it's about 1 1/2 hours in the oven which is what's going to make your home smell really, really good.

Unfortunately, there is no scratch and sniff computer program or else I'd attach the aroma of this dish. But, give it a try. It's a tremendous family meal that'll fill everybody up and make your tastebuds happy and wanting more. (By the way, I also like this dish with bisquits for sopping or just for eating, slathered with butter or margerine). My mouth is watering just reviewing this recipe and thinking about how tasty it is.

Dad's Swiss Steak

2 lbs Top Round or Sirloin Steak (3/4-1” thick)
1 lg can (28 oz) Roma tomatoes—whole or sliced
1 green bell pepper
1 medium (baseball size) onion
2 stalks celery
1 fresh jalapeno pepper (optional)
1 12 oz can “Snappy Tom” juice or spicy V-8
2 cups flour
1/2 cup cooking oil
Lg Casserole dish with cover or heavy duty foil for
Cover

Directions: On a cutting board, cut meat first into 2-3 equal size pieces (this makes it easier to work with). Put one of the “hunks” of meat either into a freezer bag & seal it or between 2 pieces of plastic wrap. Once you do that, put it on flat on the cutting board & tenderize the meat by whacking it repeatedly with a meat mallet/tenderizer. What you’re doing is making the meat more tender. Pound all over until the meat is about ½ inch thick. Do this to all the meat and then cut each hunk into about 3”x 3” pieces.

Put flour in a shallow dish or paper plate & liberally season it with salt & pepper (about a tablespoon of each if you’re using 2 cups of flour) OR season each piece of meat on both sides before dredging it through the flour.

In either a large, heavy skillet or an electric frying pan, pour enough oil so that it’s about 1/8” or so deep, Turn heat to medium high (375 on electric frying pan).

Cook meat in batches. Dredge pieces of meat through the flour, liberally coating all sides. Then shake off excess and put in the hot oil (lay it in—don’t plop it!) You want a quick browning of the meat so after a couple of minutes, gently turn it over with a fork or with tongs. Don’t worry about getting the meat done—medium is great, or just nicely browned—it’s going into the oven anyway.

When browned, remove the meat and “drain” on paper towel covered plate or pan & do another batch. It’s best to brown the meat in 2-3 batches and also to let the oil heat back up between batches. Add more oil if needed to keep about ¼” depth in the pan.

The veggies: It’s simple, chop the pepper, onion and celery into about 3/8” pieces. This will go into the baking dish along with the tomatoes--BUT, I kind of like to toss the veggies into the hot skillet with just a couple of tablespoons of the leftover cooking oil and sweat them for 3 or 4 minutes before combining with the tomatoes. Then dump the canned tomatoes (if you’re using whole tomatoes you can just grab each tomato and squish it to break it up or rough chop it) into the casserole dish along with the spicy tomato juice.

Add the browned meat. Try and get it flat and down in all the red stuff. Cover it and put into the oven pre-heated to 375. Give it a good 1 ½ hours. It’s done when you stab a piece of meat and it wants to fall apart--that's "fork tender". I really like it when the meat falls apart when you just show it the fork.

If you want, you can remove the meat from the baking dish and then, depending on how the sauce came out either thicken it with a cornstarch slurry to get it to a gravy consistency or you can thin it out with either a bit of water or broth to get the consistency you want. Or, just leave it alone like I did the other night when the finished dish's sauce was pretty thick. Either way, you'll want to let it cool down for a good 10-15 minutes so you can eat it.

Serve with mashed potatoes and use the sauce for gravy. It smells great cooking and it tastes great too!

Mashed Taters (NO garlic, NO cheese, NO "smashed" with chunks--just good 'ole mashed 'taters)

About 1 ½ potatoes per person, peeled and sliced about 1/2” thick
Large pot—big enough so that all the potatoes coverd with water only fills the pot 2/3 full.
Several generous shakes of salt in the water.
Butter or margarine
Milk

Put pot with the peeled potatoes in it on the stove turned to medium high. Bring to a boil and adjust the heat so that the water stays bubbling but not at “full blast”. When the potatoes are “fork tender”, they’re done. (Fork tender is just that—jab it with a fork and it breaks apart).
Drain the water—easiest way is to pour the water through a colander at the sink and then dump the potatoes back into the pot.

Add 2 tablespoons of butter or margarine. Using a potato masher, start mashing the potatoes. This is when you make sure there are no lumps. Push down and twist the masher & keep repeating until they’re all broken up.

Drizzle about a half cup of milk into the ‘taters and start mashing and mixing in a circular motion. Liberally pepper the potatoes. If you want the potatoes creamier, add more margarine and milk—just remember, too much milk makes them soupie. You can always add more—but you can’t take any out!

Serving: Plop a small mountain of mashed 'taters in the middle of a plate, lean 4 or 5 hunks of Swiss Steak against the sides and cover with as much or little of the red sauce as you like. Oh Man! That's good, old fashioned, home cooked, comfort food delicious!

Cheap Bastid Test: Well, I used about 1 1/2 lbs of sirloin steak that I got at the grocery store on special for $1.99/lb so that's $3.00. The 'taters were the last of a bag that I bought for $.49 for 10 lbs but let's be realistic and say it was $.50 worth of potatoes. The can of tomatoes was $1.39 and the green pepper, jalapeno, onion and celery cost about another $1.50. The total if my arithmetic is right was $6.39. Now, this made about 4+ good size servings (I had seconds and we had enough for 2 lunches left over). So that works out to $1.60 a serving. That's pretty good!

That's the Cheap Bastid Way: Eat Good. Eat Cheap. Be Grateful.