me make food

Had a potluck over at a friends Friday night. There was corned beef with new potatoes, flank steak for burritos, and the kids made these awesome cupcakes. Lemon skittles make up the corn kernels and the butter is a melted lemon starburst. Too cute.

Then how do you feed 50 people at a cabin on the lake? 3 rocking charcoal grills. Those are bacon wrapped deer fillets. They were delicious. Tons of dogs and burgers left everybody stuffed.

The wind kept the smoke away most of the time, but every now and then we got smoked out big time.

I mention the peppercorn steaks often around here. It is so good. We have started doing it a bit differently. We take about 10 ounces of beef tenderloin I cut from a PSMO and cook it like a roast with a peppercorn cream sauce.

Alton Brown helped me get this down with his second episode on tenderloins. He shows how to make a chateaubriand which we make a peppercorn sauce from.

Vid long enough to be in two parts. I will get better at this, swears.

part 1

part 2

So with the PSMO there is a hunk on the side that is really fatty, but the awesome meat is there. I got prob 10 ounces or good meat out of the first PSMO. I took the little bits for the sammich tonight and saved the meaty hunk for the next sammich.

We have been rocking the ppepercorn steaks for a long time now. Watched some Alton Brown and got making tenderloin roasts down. A perfect medium throughout. It is awesome. I will update the post with the roast and perfect pink way here soon. Picked up a second PSMO Sat and got 7 roasts out of it. Amazing deal for sure. Cutting one of those up is fun and I am getting good at it.

The risotto came out pretty good, but I added salt which I forgot the broth would have. It will keep getting better I am sure. I coated the tato slices with olive oil, shredded garlic, butter, basil, and parsley. About 30 minutes at 400 degrees and they were yummy.

We have been kicking the peppercorn steaks almost every weekend for about 5 months now. It gets pricey buying fillets of loin roasts. I kinda said we need to do something different since we have it so often, but Sam’s club had the PSMO (Peeled Side Meat On tenderloin) for $5 a pound for choice which goes for $24 a pound at Ideal. I simply had to try it.

I used the fine instruction of Alton Brown of good eats to trim it down.
Episode part 1
Episode part 2

If you watch the first clip it will show how to carve one of these up. We got the side meat roast, 2 big chunks of the loin for Chateaubriand (how we do the recipe lately), two fillets, two mini end cuts I butterflied for a snack some day, and the chain meat I will make an awesome cheese steak from some time. The savings were absolutely unbelievable. I think I will be chopping a bunch of these up for years to come.

Been a while since I made jerky. Usually I get a really lean roast and hand slice it really thin. Blend up a red bell pepper, some soy sauce, salt, cayenne and black pepper. This time I decided to chop it all up and it turned out pretty good. I rolled it out a bit too thin, and getting it on the trays was a pain. I ended up freezing it to peel it off the waxed paper and on to the tray. When it dried it was paper thin and the peppercorns I thought would chop up good in the food processor hardly chopped up. So there are 1/2 and whole peppercorns in there.

roasts do not photograph well

went with the whole layer of aromatics for the meat to rest on again. Browned the roast a bit last night. 6-8 ounces of wine, 1/3 of a can of beef broth, and a can of concentrated broth for the liquid. Threw the roast in the oven at near noon at 200 degrees. I was hoping the roast and veg would give up enough juice to avoid the failed stew. At 5 PM the roast was beyond fork tender and sitting in a pool of very onion smelling juice. It was a cheap super saver roast and turned out amazingly well.

The juice left over made a good gravy. The aromatics make a huge difference. THat is a major reason we really like the dutch oven and it is gonna get used a bunch.

Look at the size of that thing. It did not even fit on my cutting board. In the package frozen it looked comically huge, but after opening I was stunned. We go through a lot of beef. We get really cheap steaks to make fake hot beef, stew, and stroganoff. I asked JR of Hollenbeck Farms for a lean cut of cheap beef and got three of these suckers.

Theresa likes simple lunches during the work week and thought beefy noodles would be quick and easy. I got to chopping that slab.

The grill was covered in ice last week and I did not feel like going out there. We wanted a simple meal and burgers are yummy. I loved the char from the skillet which added a unique flavor and slight crunch. Turned out awesome and we will switch it up from here on out.

Really wish I had some sort of range hood or something. Right now we open tha back door and put a fan up.

We use a bunch of beef broth for our meals. For gravy I usually mix swansons broth and campbells condensed broth. While preparing this broth last night I looked at the ingredients in the condensed broth and was pretty bummed. They use caramel coloring in it, lame. We make out chicken stock often and well figured the beef broth would be pretty good as well.

Not a fan of onions, and I think for the first time ever one passed through the door into my abode. I took necessary precautions.