Friday Food: All Beef, All the Time

Only two meals this week did not feature beef. This is what happens when you have a whole cow in your freezer. I am not complaining.

Friday

Short version: Bunless cheeseburgers, fried onions, bread and butter, green peas

Long version: Oh man. I really, really, reeeeeally did not want to cook this night. Had I the ability to make a Wendy's magically appear closer than 120 miles from my house (literally--I just looked it up), I would totally have gone to Wendy's.

However. That magical ability has yet to be granted to me--and let's be honest, it's really for the best--so I made the hamburgers myself. Some of the ground beef from the whole cow had already started to defrost, so I used those packages in this meal.

The only reason my lazy self even bothered to slice an onion and fry it in one of the hamburger skillets was because there was a half of an onion sitting in my refrigerator, and I hate partial onions in my refrigerator. I can smell it every time I open the door.

I also hate waking up to a dirty kitchen, but guess who was also too lazy to wash all the pots and pans? Yup. At least I managed to load and run the dishwasher. And rinse out my French press, so I could make coffee first thing. Priorities.

Saturday

Short version: Chicken-fried steak with cream gravy, boiled potato chunks, vegetable soup

Long version: The butcher that cut up our cow is actually just over the line in Texas. Thus, when I was giving my cutting instructions, the guy asked if I wanted my flank steaks "chicken fried." Meaning cut thin and pounded into cube steaks.

Thinking of A. and his fondness of chicken-fried steaks, and my own fondness for grillades, I said yes.

They are pretty convenient. Quick-cooking, you know. Or at least, they would be if I wasn't cooking six of them and thus shuffling steaks in and out of the skillet to brown them and then putting them in the oven to finish cooking.

I still have the print-out of the recipe for "Texas Chicken-fried Steak" I found online all those years ago, and the most amusing thing about it is that in the note in the instruction about dredging the meat in flour, then egg, then flour again, "Your fingers will get messy, so remove your rings."

I guess you can tell I'm not from Texas, because I didn't even have to remove one ring, much less plural rings.

I probably should have mashed the potatoes, but I didn't feel like it.

The vegetable soup was mostly to use up two jars of venison broth I took out of the freezer to make room for all the beef. This soup had onion, garlic, celery, carrots, mushrooms, frozen zucchini, frozen green beans, the liquid left from making the Italian chicken a few days prior, and pinto beans. I managed to get those cooked in the morning, so I had beans in my soup this time. Yay.

Sunday

Short version: Leftovers and regrettable peanut butter balls

Long version: The peanut butter balls were not regrettable because they were bad. Quite the contrary. I fear that now that I know how easy it is to make a superior version of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups at home, they will become a regular feature and my jeans will never fit again.

I used this recipe, but added a bit of coconut oil to the chocolate chips when I melted them to make the dipping chocolate a little bit looser. This is a five-star dessert. So good. So, so good.

Monday

Short version: Pot roast, bread and butter, frozen green beans

Long version: We went to a 5 p.m. Christmas Eve Mass that was 35 miles away, which meant we were gone during dinnertime. I made the pot roast--an arm roast--before we left and then just turned the oven off at 4:15 when we left the house, leaving the meat in the warm oven. It was still warm enough to serve when we got home at 6:45 p.m.

Then all I had to do was microwave the green beans and slice the bread, butter it, and force my children to sit down and put something besides sugar in their stomachs. I did this by means of bribery. This is also how I got them to behave at Mass. You sit still (well, still-ish) and don't shove your brother for an hour and eat your dinner and you can open the presents from your Florida relatives.

It worked. Hooray for presents.

Tuesday

Short version: A Little House on the Prairie Christmas

Long version: I'm still working (read: have not even started, but have the best of intentions--and photos) on a post about this, but I'll just say that we sort of re-created the Christmas dinner Laura's family had in By the Shores of Silver Lake. And if you know what that is, you are my kind of person.

Teaser photo of the Mystery Main Course:

Definitely not a supermarket ham.

Wednesday

Short version: Prairie Pie and other leftovers, salad

Long version: I made a version of shepherd's pie with the leftovers from Christmas dinner for the children. A. ate yet more of his ponudo and I ate a salad with some leftover hamburgers that really needed to be eaten.

Thursday

Short version: Tacos, ice cream with peanut butter hot fudge sauce

Long version: Yeah, this is what I chose for my birthday meal. Mostly because I had the ground beef in the little freezer, so it was the most accessible, and also because it's easy to make and I really like taco salad.

You may notice I omitted cake this year. I'm so tired of baking--and, incredibly, eating what I bake--that I didn't even want to make or eat a cake.

I know. It's like I don't even know who I am anymore.

But! We did have some vanilla ice cream, and that sounded like a good idea with hot fudge sauce. But this time, I had the brilliant idea of adding peanut butter to the hot fudge. With my love of all combinations of chocolate and peanut butter, I don't know why this didn't occur to me before.

What I should have done was use my favorite recipe for hot fudge sauce and then just stir in creamy peanut butter. Instead I looked at actual recipes for peanut butter hot fudge sauce and used this one. I made a half recipe, and it made a very thin sauce. I should have known it would, given the half and half instead of heavy cream and cocoa powder instead of chocolate. It was not at all fudgy. Also, not enough peanut butter flavor.

I added some semi-sweet chocolate chips to thicken it up, then stirred in peanut butter until it tasted like liquified peanut butter cups, which of course is what I was going for. Yum.

My only request for a birthday gift from my children was a photo with all four of them. I told them that included everyone smiling nicely and not making silly faces. This is what I got.

Close enough.

Okay, your turn! What'd you eat this week?