Beef and Eggplant pie

After it was mentioned by Jon on facebook this week I've had several requests for my eggplant pie recipe, so here it is!

Beef and eggplant pie

Prep - peel and cube one medium eggplant, chop 1 medium onion, snip 1T of parsley, mince 2 cloves of garlic, chop 1-2 ribs of celery with leaves. 

Cooking - saute eggplant in 1/4C butter over medium heat until tender (~5 minutes) then remove and set aside.  Add onion, garlic, and ~1lb ground beef to hot pan and cook until beef is no longer pink, then add eggplant, celery, 8oz tomato sauce, parsley, and spices to taste (I use 1t oregano, 1t salt, 1t pepper), mix well, and bring to a boil.  Pour mixture into large pastry shell (I use my no-roll pie crust recipe in my large pie plate for this and it's perfect) and bake at 375 for 25 minutes, then cover top with shredded mozzarella cheese and bake for an additional 5-10 minutes or until cheese is melted.  Allow pie to sit for 10 minutes before cutting.  Serve warm with a side of red wine - yum!

Sorry, no pictures this time.  The next time I make it I'll do a photo shoot and come back to update.

Sinterklaas Vooravond: 3 dishes for a Dutch holiday dinner

We held our annual De Vooravond Van Sinterklaas party yesterday (a day late, yes) and spiced our holiday fun with three decidedly Dutch dishes - runderlappen, hutspot, and brussels lof.  Although we can't recommend the last one, the first two were quite fun, so here you are!

Runderlappen

Runderlappen is basically meat and onions slow cooked in traditional spices, so start with 3lbs of round steak, pound it, saltand pepper it, then cut it into serving size pieces. Browned these pieces on both sides in about 1/2C of bacon drippings (I reserved these from preparing the bacon for the hutspot), then remove them to a slow cooker (with so much meat this took me several batches, and a little additional butter fat). After the final batch of meat is removed add 3 onions, sliced, and fry them slightly before adding 1C water, 3T vinegar, 1T mustard, 2 bay leaves, 1t whole cloves, and 10 peppercorns. Bring this to a boil, stirring to mix in the drippings from bottom of the pan, then pour over meat in the slow cooker. Add enough water (or broth) to just barely cover the meat and cook for 2-4 hours or until very tender. Turn meat every 1/2 hour or so. Serve hot with onions and some of the juice.

Hutspot

Hutspot is boiled potoatoes, onions, and carrots mashed together and served with meat. It's as easy as that. The recipes that we have seen call for about 6 onions, 6 carrots, and 8 potatoes to be washed, pealed, cut into pieces, and boiled in salted water alongside smoked sausages (Gelderse rookworst, to be exact). The vegetables are then removed and mashed together with 1/2C milk and 4T butter, then served with the sausages and cubed pieces of well done bacon. That's the traditional dish, but I left out the sausage and served it as the side starch to the runderlappen. I did serve it with the bacon, however, since I conveniently needed bacon fat for that dish!

Brussels lof

My computer translates this literally as "brussels praise" but I found a few web pages that make me think this is simply what the dutch call endive.  In any case, endive is popular as a cooked vegetable in the Netherlands and several other European countries.  In fact, the endive we were finally able to locate stateside had been shipped from Holland, and we don't mean Michigan.  I washed our endive, then sauted them in butter over high heat for about 2 minutes per side, after which I reduced the heat and added 3T lemon juice, 1t salt, and 1T sugar to the butter, covered the pan, and let it simmer for about 20 minutes.  I can't say we enjoyed this dish.  It was relatively flavorless, and next year I might try a different endive recipe, or I might search for a completely different vegetable all together.  Who knows.

Happy (Dutch) holiday cooking!

Irish Boiled Dinner

Tonight was pumpkin carving night and that meant Irish dinner.  Why?  Because according to many sources the Irish brought us the Jack-o-lantern (and can really be thanked for much of Halloween, for that matter), and so to celebrate the roots of this season enjoyment we started our evening with Irish Boiled Dinner.  The way my mom makes this feast is by boiling corned beef, but I tried a new recipe tonight and boiled fresh organic brisket in beer.  I have to say, I'd rather have the corned beef and the beer on the side, and I disagree with the cooking times the original recipe listed, so I'll tell you what they said, and what I did.  The recipe came from Cooks.com:

Put 2lb beef brisket in dutch oven; add two 12oz bottles of Lager beer, 2c water (or enough to cover meat), 2 bay leaves, 10 black peppercorns, 1/2c parsley, and 2t salt; start water.

In saucepan add 2T olive oil, 3 cloves garlic (sliced), 2c leeks (chopped), 1 md onion (sliced); sauté for a few minutes, then add to dutch oven.

Bring water mixture to a boil then reduce heat and simmer for 2-3 hours or until meat is tender.  Meanwhile chopped your veggies to add later:  3/4lb carrots (cut in large pieces), 3/4lb red potatoes (peeled), 2lbs green cabbage (cut in sixths, leave part of the core in to keep leaves together).  Add carrots and potatoes in last 25 minutes and cabbage in last 15 minutes.  Remove from water and serve hot.

Notes:  I already mentioned that next time I'll use corned beef and drink the beer.  Also, I used more carrots and potatoes than they called for, and I think they're wrong on their cooking times, so next time I plan to cook my cabbage for 25 minutes and my other veggies for only 15.

March 17, 2009 -  I made this again tonight using the following alterations - I used corned beef (yes, you can buy it organic), boiled it in water, and drank the beer.  The cabbages and potatoes I added 35 minutes before the meat would be done, and the carrots only 15.  The carrots could have used a little less time, perhaps, but otherwise this was delightful.  Try it with Irish Soda bread - yum!

Juicy low fat burgers

It's an oxymoron, you say–the fat is what gives burgers their juice and palatability–and generally yes, that is true, so when we started buying leaner organic meats we started playing with recipes, because we are serious about watching our health and even more serious about buying only natural meats (no added hormones or antibiotics), but we didn't want to give up on taste either.  We perused several different recipes, tried a few of them, and ultimately came up with our own:

1lb all natural lean beef, ~1tbsp olive oil, cracked pepper, basil, and salt to taste.  Mix all ingredients together, then form burgers (based on PC guidelines (portion correctness, that is) this should make four burgers, but we usually make three) and cook to desired doneness.  We recommend grilling, of course (we grill over an all natural wood charcoal we get from Busch's, Full Circle, I think), topping with a fresh tomato and, if you're a cheese lover, provolone, and sandwiching between toasted whole wheat buns.  Yum.  We have no pictures of this one because when they come off the grill we want to get to them fast while they are still hot!

And for anyone who's interested, there are two pretty good all natural yet main stream beef providers out there.  The first, our favorite, is one that we have found at the fresh meat case in Meijer – Naturewell Natural Beef – and the second can be found at places like Kroger (not so local) and Country Market – Star Ranch Natural Beef.

Homemade pizza

Over the past few months we have grown increasingly wary of processed foods.  Not only are many of these products higher in all those things we are trying to avoid, such as calories, fats, and sodium, but many of them also come with extra packaging (hard on the landfills and, until we know more about BPA, possilby harder on your health), relatively high price tags, and a greater exposure to unwanted additives.  One of our personal goals for this winter is to significantly cut down on the amount of processed foods that we consume.  Tonight's foray into homemade food territory found us making pizza...from the crust up. 

Having never made bread of any kind without the help of our handy little machine I wasn't sure how this experiment would go over, but I'd have to say it was an extremely successful outcome!  I did a little recipe research first and, after some mixing and matching, came up with the following:

3 cups whole wheat flour, one .25 ounce package yeast, 1 cup warm water, 2 tbsp shortening, 1 tbsp garlic powder, 1 tbsp basil

Mix ingredients in large bowl until dough forms, cover with towel and let sit for 30 minutes

Knead dough several times (easypizzacrusts.com said 6-8), then roll to the desired shape, size, and thickness

I then spread the dough on our pizza stone, formed the outer crust, and let my miniature helper assist with the toppings.  It baked for 25 minutes, and we should have let it sit for five before we cut it, but we were too eager.  Yum!  This is definitely a keeper, and we'll give it five stars because not only was it easy, it was really goood!

Here's where I have a confession to make, though, because for all our attempts at avoiding processed foods we used a pre-prepared pizza sauce (in our defence, however, it was an organic sauce from Muir Glen, who is known for their BPA free processing and canning), our olives came in a can (if anyone can tell me where to find black olives in any other way please let me know), the mushrooms came in a plastic container (again, I have yet to see mushrooms sold unfettered), and we used pre-shredded cheeses (albeit organic, but of course they'd been processed and packaged).  The more we try, the more we realize how much we have left to do.  At least the pizza was good.