
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.


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.

some of it as a bit thick so I smashed it down with a mallet and some cling wrap.

A bit of clarified butter and olive oil mixture. I have tried many cheese steaks before and I try to keep them no too greasy. But when I eat a cheese streak the grease is what makes it good. So I hardly skimped.

Wrapped the slightly charred hunks in foil and moved to the mushrooms.

I hollowed out the ghetto Russ’s sammich bun, squirted a bit of butter on it and broiled it to a golden brown.

chopped up the meat and tossed it in with the shrooms at the end to warm it back up. Assembled the sammich with some provolone and broiled it to melt the cheese.

The meat was amazingly tender and even though it had some fat in it you would never notice. I made it kinda small and did not finish since I had plans for my second attempt at scampi. I am looking forward to lunch tomorrow for sure.
« OK close it up please

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.

Was gonna take a good amount of gravy so I made a bunch of roux.


the skillet was pretty full, but it worked. I blotted off most of the grease after this pic.

She should get a good 4-5 meals out of this.

« OK close it up please

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.

Picked up some soup bones from Hollenbeck Farms and browned them up a bit. Some onion, celery, garlic, carrots, and peppercorns got pressure cooked for 50 minutes and the resulting broth looks awesome. Should make a delicious gravy for our roast tonight.
The soup bones were pretty big so I only got one in on the first batch then strained everything out and pressure cooked a few more bones in the broth to kick it up even more. Smelled awesome.




« OK close it up please