Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free Meatloaf

I have no picture today.  Let’s blame it on how good this was, how fast it went.  No leftovers!  I usually take pictures BEFORE I sit down to eat.  Alas, the four vials of blood drawn from my arm this morning are taking their toll.

 

Meatloaf usually isn’t my thing, but this had just the right flavor.  I also wanted to post something to prove (to two people in particular – you know who you are) that I’m human, and I don’t make every single ingredient from scratch.  Maybe someday, eh?

 

Why the need for a gluten- and dairy-free meatloaf recipe?  Well, normally I use breadcrumbs to bind with the egg, and before my daughter came along I added parmesan cheese.  This isn’t a dish I make too often, but it was Husband’s request, and I like to cook only one dinner.  It’s just easier that way.

 

Meatloaf (gluten-free, dairy-free)

 

1 egg

1-2 tbsp brown teff flour

1 ½ lbs ground beef

¼ cup green bell pepper, diced

½ cup onion, diced

2-3 cloves of garlic, minced

¼ cup ketchup (organic, no HFCS)

2 tsp Worcestershire sauce

Salt and pepper to taste

 

1.  Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

 

2.  Whisk egg in a bowl, then add teff flour and combine.  Add meat to the bowl and fold the egg mixture into the meat.  I used my fingers – disgusting, but more effective.  Then add the rest of the ingredients and combine well.

 

3.  Press the meat mixture into a greased baking dish.  At this point, you can add some more ketchup to the top of the meatloaf if you wish.

 

4.  Cook until a meat thermometer inserted in the middle reads 155 degrees.

 

I hope you enjoy this!

 

Oh, and you know how I said I thought the menu plan would end up getting changed?  Well, I remembered today that we’re travelling this weekend.  So next week will have lots o’ repeats again.  But at least I should have some fun pictures to share!

 

Part of the Grocery Cart Challenge Recipe Swap.

Short Rib Soup/Stew

This boiled dinner is best made ahead of time.  Short ribs are an inexpensive, fatty cut of meat that can really be stretched.  In addition to the soup, you get some great marrowy bones and a bunch of fat that can be rendered for later cooking. 

 

Bones on the left; solidified fat on the right

 

 

 

Not that I’ve ever done the rendering before, but I’ve been doing some research on how to do it, so I think I have the confidence to try it out next week!

 

Short Rib Soup/Stew

 

2 lbs. short ribs with bones

2 tbsp. rice vinegar

1 tsp. ground anise

2 potatoes

3 carrots

1 onion

3 cloves garlic

Salt and pepper to taste

Water to cover (more water = soup, less = stew)

 

1. Put all the ingredients into a large pot with enough water to cover (more if you want it even brothier – I did).  Bring to a boil, then drop to a simmer (I used my lowest gas setting) and cook covered for several hours.

 

2. When done, remove short ribs and chop them up into bite-sized pieces.  The bones should easily slide out if they haven’t already come out into the soup.  The chopped meat goes back into the soup.

 

The soup can be eaten at this point, but the fatty mouthfeel is a bit odd.  So let it sit until it reaches room temperature, then store in the refrigerator until the fat solidifies at the top.  Skim the larger fat pieces, reheat, and serve.

 

I think I need a camera with a macro setting.

 

For more nourishing, frugal recipes, visit The Nourishing Gourmet.  I also submitted this to the Grocery Cart Challenge Recipe Swap.

 

Chuck Roast with Mushrooms and Bacon

Yes, you’re right, we were supposed to have Swiss Steak tonight – but I forgot to buy an extra bell pepper from Whole Foods (the only place with semi-local bells this time of year), and I just happened to buy too many mushrooms for last night’s spaghetti, so this is what we ended up with.  Husband wasn’t the least bit unhappy, since this resembles his favorite dish at a local restaurant.

 

In a stainless steel sauté pan, I placed:

 

-         a 1.25 lb. chuck blade roast, seasoned with salt, pepper, and sage

-         1 tbsp olive oil

-         enough water to braise the meat(but not too much to steam or boil it)

-         more salt, pepper, and sage

-         sliced white mushrooms (the generic white ones from the produce department, which I bought whole and sliced myself – you could use something fancier)

 

 

This braised on top of the stove for about two hours, but this would cook well in a Crock Pot, too, or even in the oven, but I’m making an oven roast tomorrow, so I thought I’d mix it up a bit.  And since Swiss Steak is a stove top sort of meal, I was already in that frame of mind.  So there!

 

In a separate pan, about half an hour before the meat finished, I cooked four slices of bacon.  When the bacon was done, I removed it from the pan and added some kale to sauté in the drippings.  (Can you tell we live in the South?)  I crumbled the bacon to add to the steak and mushrooms on the plates.

 

I still served mashed potatoes and gravy with it, but I made the gravy out of the leftover braise juice and cornstarch.  I’m still a novice gravy maker, so it wasn’t quite thick enough.  A little more cornstarch or flour would’ve probably helped.

 

 

Overall, this was a little greasy, but we’ll definitely do something like this again.  Mainly, I need to work on my gravy skills!  Any suggestions?

My Spaghetti Sauce

 

This recipe is also on my recipes page, but not for long – I’m in the process of switching things around, and I’ve decided to get rid of the recipes page in favor of adding a search bar and just plain categorizing my posts better.  So enough of the technical stuff…

 

Today was busy with breadmaking, as my friend CF and I have been on vacation (well, I was just on a two-week break) and haven’t made any bread in two weeks.  But today we made five loaves of our best bread ever!  We’ve finally worked out the textural issues, so I’m almost ready to share the recipe, but I just don’t feel like we’re pros yet.  Soon, hopefully!  By the time we were done, I didn’t feel like doing anything but making the spaghetti, so I skipped the Italian bread – the fresh sandwich bread filled in pretty well, though.  I’ve been looking for a new Italian bread recipe anyway – one that doesn’t use the breadmaker, and perhaps one that works well with freshly ground flour – and I was just too tired to experiment after baking all afternoon.

 

This recipe has endured some tweaking over the years to make it even better.  It is very chunky, so if you like the thinner stuff, this may not be for you.  I use to leave out some of the veggies if I had certain friends over, but I no longer do that.

 

Here is what you need:

 

1 tbsp. olive oil

1 onion, diced

3-4 cloves of garlic, minced

1/2 cup of fresh mushrooms or 1 small can of mushroom pieces and stems

1 green bell pepper, diced

Italian seasoning, to taste

3/4 of a pound ground beef or turkey

2 inches of stick pepperoni, diced

2 15-ounce cans of tomato sauce

1 small can of tomato paste

 

1) Caramelize the onion in the olive oil.  I try to use a very small amount of oil, since the sauce will get more oily with the addition of the meat.

2) Once the onions have changed color, add the garlic, mushrooms, and bell pepper, then cover with a layer of Italian seasoning (or your favorite combination of Italian spices).  Saute until the garlic has softened.

3) Add ground meat and brown.  Once browned, add pepperoni, tomato sauce, and tomato paste.  Let simmer until ready to serve.

 

I’m hoping to have a bumper crop of tomatoes this summer so I can preserve my own tomato sauce and tomato paste.  I do have a problem with rabbits eating my crops, though, so I’ve got to get that figured out before my spring garden goes in.  Any ideas?

This post listed at the Grocery Cart Challenge Recipe Swap.

How To Make A TV Dinner

I don’t normally throw together a bunch of packaged things and call it dinner, but I’m still climbing out of the ditch from last week.  I also totally forgot what I had planned tonight, so this was not on Monday’s menu plan.  Impromptu dinner: chili, cornbread, and sauteed chard.  This is how we did it…

 

Whole Foods has cans of chili beans (meaning they’re already seasoned) on sale for 37 cents, and I bought some a few weeks ago just because.  I also bought a bag of Trader Joe’s Chard of Many Colors last week, because I knew I didn’t feel like doing a lot of prep work.  So those were my prepared foods.

 

 

Husband’s been craving a chili made with beef, so I sauteed a shallot, some bell pepper, and tomatoes in a pot and then browned half a pound of ground beef.  Just add the canned chili beans, and there’s the main dish.  These were all items I just happened to have on hand.

 

The chard is easy to prepare, even if you don’t buy the washed/cut/bagged variety.  This mixture from Trader Joe’s was really good, though, because it had a few different types of chard and kale.  Just prepare this the same way you would spinach — put a tablespoon (or more, if you prefer) of olive oil in a skillet, throw in some minced garlic once it’s hot, then wilt the chard.  I just dump it all in and use tongs to evenly distribute the hot oil over the leaves.

 

 

Isn’t that pretty?  I like to cook it down a bit so it’s not too crunchy, but not so much that it’s like canned spinach.  You can taste test it while it cooks to find the perfect texture for you.  This cooks pretty quickly, so you do have to watch it so it doesn’t get too mushy.

 

Earlier in the day, I made some cornbread to go with all this.  I always have the cornbread ingredients on hand, and it’s incredibly simple to make. 

 

 

Yummy!

’50s Style Comfort Food

It’s FINALLY starting to seem like fall here…the leaves are starting to change color, it’s getting dark earlier, and we had frost warnings last night.  Thankfully it wasn’t a freeze warning, because I wouldn’t have felt like going outside to cover my plants at 10pm when I found out about it!  It was still short-sleeve weather last week when we took the kids to the pumpkin patch…

 

 

…yep, that’s my daughter wearing a tank top and shorts in the middle of October.  Within a week’s time, though, summer has officially been phased out.  It’s all comfort food on the menu this week at our house!

 

At my husband’s request, I made Swiss Steak tonight.  Having never made this before, I searched for a recipe that seemed close to what my Grandma Jean used to make – memories of her making this when I was very young are what is evoked when I think of this dish.  Because I remember her making it often, I’d always gotten the impression that this was the sort of thing people ate in the 1950s, when mod young-marrieds dressed impeccably for any life event (even a mundane weekday dinner) and life, in general, was peachy-keen.  Perhaps this dish has gone out of fashion because it features a tough cut of beef — red meat has gotten such a bad rap over the years, my whole lifetime really — but I think that’s what we liked about it.  The steak simmered in tomato juices, onions, and spices for well over an hour, then we served the whole thing over mashed potatoes, with the juices acting as a gravy.  The only thing missing from my childhood recollection was green bell peppers.  Husband and I realized that after taking the first bite!

 

To make the mashed potatoes dairy-free, I add a liberal amount of Smart Balance margarine, some unsweetened soy milk, and salt and pepper (to taste).  We’re looking forward to the day we can use REAL milk products in our potatoes, instead of creating a fake, soy imposter.  I’m looking into a substitute for all the soy, since my husband and I are not big fans of soy, and we’re starting to think our daughter is developing a sensitivity toward it. 

 

For a vegetable side, I braised four turnips.  To back up a bit, let me mention that when I plan out the week’s menu, I usually plan for certain vegetables to be used (according to what’s in season, what I’ve found locally) and come up with the exact preparation later.  So when I did a search for “braised turnips” earlier today, I was pleasantly surprised that the first item it came up with was from a blog I’ve been following, the Nourished Kitchen.  Her recipe calls for ghee, bone broth, and parsley, which sounds wonderful, especially when looking at the pictures!  But since I can’t use ghee, didn’t have bone broth, and only had dried parsley, I opted instead to go simple with some oil, stock, and salt and pepper.  I melted a teaspoon of coconut oil in the pan, added the turnips, then drizzled a little bit of walnut oil on top of the turnips.  (The combination of oils wasn’t for any particular reason, except that we’re still getting used to coconut oil.)  I didn’t leave them there long enough to brown — everything else was ready, I had started the turnips too late — but that would’ve made them even better.  I let them simmer in some boxed chicken stock until the liquid was almost completely reduced, then dressed them up with some sea salt and freshly ground pepper. 

 

So here’s the whole thing, with a slice of my homemade bread on the side:

 

 

In spite of looking too white with the mashed potatoes and uncaramelized turnips, it all tasted good and homey.  Now, let’s just hope my photography skills improve.