Category Archives: Main Dish – Beef

Mom’s Meatloaf

by Sarah

I was lucky to grow up with great meatloaf.  After my parents got married, the story is that my mom tried many meatloaf recipes and my dad bravely ate them all.  There was much rejoicing in the house when she found this recipe:

For the meatloaf, you’ll need:

  • 1 ½  lb. ground beef
  •  2/3  cup instant oats, uncooked
  •  1  teaspoon minced, dried onion
  •  ¼  cup finely diced green pepper (I actually used yellow, red and green peppers this time.)
  •  1  teaspoon salt
  •  1  egg
  •  ¼  cup ketchup to moisten and extra for garnish on top

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix all the ingredients including the ketchup.   Shape into a ball and top with ketchup.  Place the meatloaf in a round casserole dish.  Bake covered at 350 degrees for 2 hours.  Put a cookie sheet on lower rack to keep bottom of meatloaf from burning.

Skinny French Dip

by Sarah

Well…  I’m back to buying cookbooks.  It’s an addiction really (see here, here and here).

Here is the most recent book I bought (sorry for the unfortunate glare).  I needed new dinner ideas that were relatively healthy.  As a side note, I hate the phrase “healthy”  because it is so meaningless.  So, what do I mean by healthy?  Low calorie.

I was very happy that each recipe has a nutritional breakdown.  I hate calculating calories for every dish I cook.  The ingredients in the book were more diverse than other crockpot books that I own.  I was also impressed with the number of vegetarian offerings.

My only qualm is that the serving sizes aren’t really helpful for measuring.  For example, a soup may serve 8.  Well, unless I measure the whole pot the first time, I’m just really guessing on serving size.  I much prefer a measurement as a serving size.  For example, 1 cup of soup is a serving.

The first thing we tried was the skinny french dip.  The book called for the following ingredients:

  • 2 pounds of lean bottom round roast
  • 1 sliced Vidalia onion
  • 2 cloves of garlic (I used 2 Tbsp of the prediced kind.)
  • 3 Tbsp of soy sauce
  • 1 Tbsp of thyme
  • 1 teaspoon of rosemary
  • 1 teaspoon of black pepper

When I looked at this recipe, I was shocked that the only liquid was 3 Tbsp of soy sauce.  There would be very little au jus and I knew that this would burn in my crockpot, so I added about 1 1/2 cups of water and a beef bouillon cube.  I also added a bay leaf cause I wanted to.

I sliced the beef into rounds and placed it in a 6 quart crock pot.  I added all the ingredients and cooked it on low for 10 hours.  I shredded the beef with two forks and made mini french dip sandwiches on Publix’s water rolls.   We deviated from a traditional sandwich and added provolone cheese.

These were really tasty, but I think the next time I make them I’ll add some salt.  I thought the bouillon cube would be salty enough, but alas, I was wrong.

Per serving of meat:

Calories – 160
Fat – 5 g
Sodium – 440 mg (probably higher because of the bouillon cube)
Carbohydrates – 3 g
Fiber – 0 g
Protein – 26 g
 
This serves 8, so I estimated the serving size was about 3/4 of a cup.  The rolls were approximately 100 calories a piece and the cheese was 80 calories a piece. 
 

Mushroom Beef Stew

by Sarah

It’s been a bit chilly here and what a better way to warm up than with a stew.  Cary was particularly enamored with a stew that could be served over potatoes.  A quick internet search led us to Pioneer Woman’s Beef Stew with Mushrooms.

First off, while I love Pioneer Woman’s recipes, sometimes they are a little time intensive.   With a few short cuts, I was quite pleased that this one didn’t take that much time.  I could easily make this on a work night.

Instead of using fresh onion and garlic, I used dried onion and ready to use garlic.  Don’t judge…  it cuts down an amazing amount of time.

Here’s what you need:

  • 2 pounds Beef Stew Meat
  •  Flour
  • 1/2 a Stick of Butter
  • 2 Tablespoons Olive Oil
  • 1 Tablespoon of Minced Garlic
  • 1 Tablespoon of Dried Onion
  • 16 Ounces of Baby Portabello Mushrooms or Button Mushrooms (I used both)
  • 1/2 cup Red Wine
  • 1 can Beef Consomme
  • Salt And Pepper, to taste
  • Mashed Potatoes

Coat the meat with a few tablespoons of flour.  Melt and butter with the olive oil and brown the meat in batches.  Set the meat aside.

Without cleaning the pot, add the garlic, onion flakes, consomme and mushrooms.  Let simmer for about 5 minutes.

Add the meat and red wine.  Cover and simmer for about 30 minutes.

Serve over mashed potatoes or egg noodles.  Delicious!

Easy Crockpot Corned Beef and Cabbage

by Sarah

Saint Patrick’s Day is upon us!  In our household, that calls for corned beef and cabbage.  My favorite corned beef and cabbage recipe comes from the Cooking Light Slow Cooker recipe cookbook.  I’ve adjusted the original recipe a bit to taste.

The ingredients we use are as follows:

  • 2 Tbsp dried onion (If you don’t like dried onions, 1 pound of peeled boiling onions can be substituted.)
  • 1 lb bag of baby carrots
  • 10 petite red potatoes
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 1 cured corned beef brisket with a spice packet
  • 2 bottles of beer
  • 1/2 cup of Dijon mustard (yellow mustard with do if you don’t happen to have Dijon around the house)
  • 3 Tbsp of molasses
  • 2 Tbsp of minced garlic
  • 1 cabbage, cut into wedges

Place the onions, potatoes, carrots and bay leaves in a crock pot.

Place the brisket on top of the vegetables.  Combine the spice packet, beer, mustard, garlic and molasses in a small bowl and mix.  Pour the mixture over the corned beef and vegetables.

The first time we made this, it bothered us that the liquid didn’t cover the corned beef.  So, we rearranged everything and the liquid covered the beef.  This resulted in a roast type texture instead of the normal corned beef texture.  While it was still good, it wasn’t what we were trying to achieve.  The take home message here is don’t worry that the liquid doesn’t cover the beef.

Cover the crock pot and cook on high for 1 hour.  Reduce to low and cook for an additional 5 hours.  Add the cabbages slices under the brisket and cook for an additional 2 hours.

Cut the brisket into slices and serve with the vegetables. Enjoy!

Brownie Stew and Cornbread

by Sarah

With the hard freeze last weekend, I feel like winter is upon us here in Middle Tennessee!  For some reason, I am more likely to make Brownie Stew and Cornbread in the winter.  It’s just good warm comfort food.

When I was in Girl Scouts, my mom and I tried a recipe called “Brownie Stew”.  It was a surprisingly hearty mix of meat and vegetables that was perfect when served over cornbread.

The cornbread recipe is my great grandmother’s.  This recipe is one of the first that my Mom taught me how to make.  When I was in fourth grade, I entered this recipe in a school 4H contest, won, and competed in the regional contest.

To make my great-grandmothers cornbread, pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees.  Pour 1 to 2 tablespoons Wesson oil (enough to cover the bottom) in a #5 iron skillet (small).  Put this into the oven while it is preheating.

In a small mixing bowl combine:

  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • ½ teaspoon soda
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1 tablespoon sugar, optional
  • 1 ¼ cups plain cornmeal (about enough to make a medium batter)
  • 1 egg
  • 1 cup buttermilk
  • 1/2 cup of creamed corn (My addition.  You can omit this and the cornbread still is excellent.)

Pour batter into the preheated, greased iron skillet.  Bake at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes.

While this is baking, start the Brownie Stew.   The ingredients are simple.  All you need is

  • 1 pound of ground beef
  • brown gravy mix
  • 1 to 2 cans of mixed vegetables

Brown the ground beef.  Mix in the vegetables (do not drain).  If you really like vegetables, mix in two cans but do drain one of the cans.  Pour in the brown gravy, mix well and let simmer for 5 to 10 minutes.

Remove the cornbread from the oven and immediately turn out onto a plate.  Now, this should work perfectly if your skillet is well-seasoned.  In the midst of moving, we have not been able to find our skillet, so Cary ran out and bought a new one.  You can see in the picture the crust is pulled away from the cornbread.  This shouldn’t happen if you have a well-seasoned skillet.

Pour the Brownie Stew over open-face cornbread.  This may not look beautiful, but I guarantee it tastes wonderful.

Meatballs

by Sarah

One of my favorite cookbooks is Pioneer Woman Cooks by Ree Drummond also known as Pioneer Woman.  The recipes I’ve tried so far have tasted great, but take quite a while to cook and probably have a sky high calorie count.  I wish she would write a cookbook that has recipes you can prepare in 15 minutes and are low calorie!

Cary and I wanted some comfort food for the first day of Fall and decided to try her Comfort Meatballs.  I changed the recipe from the book to better fit our tastes.   Here are the ingredients I used:

  • 1 and 1/4 pound of lean ground beef
  • 3/4 cup of oats
  • 2 tablespoons of dried onions
  • 1 cup of milk
  • 4 tablespoons of vegetable oil
  • 1/2 green pepper
  • fresh ground black pepper
  • pinch of salt

Mix the meat, oats, onions, milk, ground pepper, and salt in a bowl.

I decided to add green pepper, because I had some in my fridge and thought it would be a great addition.  There is no reason you couldn’t add it with all the other ingredients.

The recipe says you need to roll the meat into balls and chill them in the refrigerator for 30 to 45 minutes.   I was making these after a long day at work and didn’t have the time to do this step, so I just skipped it.  I rolled the meat into balls, dropped them into flour, and browned them in the skillet with vegetable oil.  My meatballs looked a little more like meat disks than balls (probably because I didn’t chill them).

I put the meatballs into a 9×12 inch pan that had been coated with nonstick cooking spray then preheated the oven to 350°F.

At this point, I made the sauce to put on the meatballs.  The ingredients that you need are

  • 1 cup ketchup
  • 2 tablespoons of sugar
  • 3 tablespoons of white vinegar
  • 2 tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce
  • 3 tablespoons of dried minced onion
  • Frank’s hot sauce to taste

Mix the ingredients together in a bowl.  Here is where I made a serious error.  I was in a rush and forgot that if you use Splenda instead of sugar, you need to half the amount.  Our sauce was super sweet because I put in 2 tablespoons of Splenda.  I do NOT advise this.

Pour the sauce over and meatballs and bake for 45 minutes.

We served the meatballs with mashed potatoes.  The finished product was delicious, even with the super sweet sauce.

Yoder Brothers Farm Ribeye

by Cary

In our CSA this past week, in addition to the usual bounty we received beef Ribeye steaks from Yoder Brothers Farms, out of Paris, TN.

We marinated the steaks in garlic salt, kosher salt and Worcestershire sauce.  These particular steaks were rather thin (maybe 3/4 of an inch), so they only really need a quick sear in the pan to form a decent crust and finish off the steaks.

After no more than 3-4 minutes in the pan (we know, it should be cast iron, but that, along with our grill, is still in storage),  a quick flip revealed a nice crust. The crust has to do with a Maillard Reaction, which if your interested, Macheesmo goes into more detail here.

We served the dinner with a nice, local red wine courtesy of Arrington Vineyards.  Their Red Fox Red was very light, but not sweet, and paired well with the strong flavor of the steaks.

We paired the steaks with some home fries and marinated tomatoes and cucumbers.  If you’ve never paired a steak  with the cool crispness of tomatoes and cucumbers marinated in Balsamic Vinaigrette, we highly recommend giving it a try when you’re not in the mood for a heavy, over the top steak dinner.


We topped it all off with some mushrooms sauteed with butter and finished with Arrington Vineyard’s wine.  It’s a nice reminder that simple preparations and easy to fix meals are sometimes your best options on a hot summer night.

Burger and Fries

by Sarah

With Memorial Day upon us, aside from remembering what this day is really about, what else do we think about this time of year?  Burgers, Barbecue, and cookouts are what most of us think of, and we here at the Nashville Fork aren’t any different.  Except that our current living situation doesn’t allow for a grill, or outdoor cookouts, or having guests over for that matter.  So, since we recently signed up for our CSA and are on a mission to find different ways to use the wonderful products included, we thought we’d try a little something different.  Specifically, we took a trip to Vegas a couple years ago and had a chance to try Hubert Keller’s Burger Bar , the chef’s take on the American classic.  Chef Keller’s take on burgers is not to put a french flair on the burgers, but rather how to make the burgers the best they can be.  He advocates grinding your own meat, using the freshest ingredients, seasoning lightly (but appropriately), and letting the meat and other pieces of the burger speak for themselves.  With that, we decided to give one of the recipes from his Burger Bar cookbook a try.  Namely his “burger and fries”.

We figured we might as well buy a mandoline to do the “fries” right.

Our “monkey” peeler.  Don’t judge.

First peel about 2 lbs of potatoes.

Be sure to use the hand guard.  I can safely report that I still have 10 fingers.

But wait.  These don’t look like fries!

The special thing about Chef Keller’s “burger and fries” is that it’s not a traditional burger on a bun, with fries on the side.  It’s actually a burger wrapped in thin strips of potatoes, fried in a pan, and finished in the oven (remember, no grill for us right now?).  We had a slight hiccup when we realized the mandoline would slice things super thin and do wonderful julienned potatoes, but not julienned potatoes super thin, so we had to improvise.  Basically, we took the super thin potato “chips”, and then julienned them by hand with a paring knife.  It wasn’t perfect, but it got the job done.

Then we moved on the meat.  Glorious meat!

This weeks Avalon Acres CSA box included 2 packages of ground beef from Yoder Farms.  The package was formed into two patties about a half pound each, seasoned only with salt and ground black pepper.

The burgers were placed on a bed of our potatoes, then topped with more potatoes.  We had a little bit of issue getting the potatoes to adhere, but that was mostly due to their thickness, and once fried, they stayed in place quite nicely.

The burgers about to go in.

The burgers were placed in a non-stick pan on medium-high heat, with a bit of olive oil to coat the pan.

After 3-5 minutes the burgers get flipped.  After another 3-5 minutes the pan is placed in a 450 degree oven for about 9 minutes for medium rare, or 14 minutes for just over medium.  We’ve found that with good quality beef, even if there is little to no pink in the burger, there’s still a great deal of juiciness and flavor.

The finished product.

So, the Nashville Fork’s inaugural Memorial Day challenge has been completed, and despite a few snafu’s, I’d call it a success, especially since we both definitely cleaned our plates.  After having time to reflect and digest, I’d suggest smaller burgers, maybe in the 4 – 6 oz. range, and definitely try to find a mandoline that can julienne potato strips very thinly.  Overall, the potatoes add a delicious crunch to the outside of the burger, while the meat itself needed nothing else, no cheese, no bacon, just a little bit of salt and pepper.  So folks, if you’re doing something special for Memorial Day, what are your plans?