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Sunday Soup

We love pot roast. My mom makes THE BEST pot roast on the planet, but I can manage a decent imitation when called upon. We eat it a lot, which does tend to create leftovers. I like pot roast leftovers almost as much as the first-run version, but I also really like homemade soup. Some of the pot roast gets stashed in the freezer, so that later on I can make yummy soup. Today was the day, yippee!

I started with one finely chopped onion and few ribs of celery, also chopped (I actually did this yesterday when I was prepping the stuff for the Valentine's day pork chops - just call me Miss efficiency [ha!]). Drop a stick of butter into a large soup/stock pot, start melting it, and then add the chopped onions and celery. Saute the onions and celery until they're just getting soft, and once that happens and all the butter is melted, pour a 1/4 cup white flour over the vegetables. Stir like crazy to get the flour incorporated into the butter, and keep stirring gently for another 5 minutes or so so that the "raw" taste gets cooked out of the flour.

Add beefy liquid - I used 64 ounces of Swanson's beef broth. You can use homemade stock, granulated beef bullion crystals, or whatever works for you. I might mention here that this is the last time I'm going to be using broth from the giant juice box-type packages, as these are not easily recyclable. There's finally a half-way decent recycling program in my fair community, so I'll be sure to only buys cans of broth henceforth (I do not make my own broth/stock from carcasses, as previously discussed in this blog).

Stir the onions/celery and broth together, then whisk for awhile to make sure you don't end up with flour lumps. At this point I added 1/4 cup red wine, which imparts a nice, deep note. You could use a few "glugs" Worcestershire sauce instead. For spices I used 1 tsp. oregano, 1 tsp. marjoram, and some fine-ground black pepper. Bay leaves are a great addition - mine seemed a little small and not very pungent, so I put in two (and added them to the grocery list). Let all this simmer for while.

While the pot simmers happily, peel and chop some carrots. Mine were small-to-medium and somewhat skinny, so I did 7. Add the carrots to the pot, along with your beef - I had gallon-size Ziploc about 3/4 full of left-over pot roast, which had been frozen and which I defrosted yesterday (see, planning ahead). Simmer some more.

Here's where the soup gets more creative. I really like barely, and had planned to mke this a beef-barley soup, but discovered I didn't have any. Next choice: potatoes. The potatoes will cook quickly and become mush, so don't peel and cut them to put in until and hour or so before eating time. I also added two cans of corn in the last hour. If you want, you could put in green beans or peas (I declined).

I let my soup simmer for a good 5 hours or so (corn and potatoes added in the last hour) while I sat on my butt and caught up on TiVo'd episodes of "Grey's Anatomy." I also ran the bread machine (a basic white French loaf, for the curious among you) so that we'll have fresh bread with our soup.

There are no photos of this fine repast, because I think my camera's in the car, and it's too cold/I'm too lazy to go outside and get it (of course, if the garage weren't such a disaster area, the car would be in there and the camera would be more readily accessible).

Soup on Sunday is a happy thing.

Valentine's Dinner

Valentine's dinner was a family affair around here, featuring a tasty pork chop and stuffing bake. I got this recipe from Wombat, and I don't know where she got it, but neveryoumind - just try it!

Obtain 4 boneless pork chops. The grocery store ones are usually 3/4 - 1" thick, and will take 45 - 60 minutes to cook. The ones from Costco - which are AWESOME - are thicker, and will need to cook longer.

Preheat the oven to 400.

Chop one onion and a couple of ribs of celery (about 1/4 cup).

In a large mixing bowl, stir together the chopped onion and celery, one can of cream of celery soup, 2 - 2 1/2 cups or dry herb seasoned stuffing mix (NOT Stovetop, something like Mrs. Cubbison's or Pepperidge Farms), a can of drained corn, and 1/2 cup of dried cranberries (if you like them).

Spoon the mixture from the bowl into a casserole dish that has been sprayed with non-stick repellent. Lay the four pork chops on top of the stuffiing mix. If you have a cool electronic meat thermometer like the one GolfDad gave me, insert the probe into the thickest chop, entering from the side and going to the middle. This is an especially good idea if you are using the thicker Costco-type pork chops.

In a small bowl stir together 1 Tbl. packed brown sugar and 1 tsp. spicy brown mustard. I actually used a little more mustard when I made this, and it worked fine. Spoon the brown sugar/mustard over the porkchops.

Put the whole shebang in the oven. Cook until the porck chops reach a temperature of 160 - 170. They will cook a little more as they stand outside of the oven. You need to reach a final temp of at least 165 (for safety) but you don't want to over-cook and dry them out. Cooking time will be 45 - 60 minutes for thinner chops, and an hour to an hour and a half for thick chops.

I doubled all the amounts for the stuffing mixture and used 6 of the big, thick Costco pork chops. This was MORE than plenty for 7 people! I served a green salad, mashed potatoes, blueberry muffins, and Valentine's cake along with the main dish, and it was a rockin' dinner!

BTW, thanks to DarlingMan for the three lovely Valentine's cards!

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My mom can beat up your mom!

Okay, maybe not, but my mom's tuna casserole can beat up anybody else's, even my grammie's. Many years ago when I was visiting Grammie we had a tuna casserole cook-off (this involved about a week solid of eating the stuff, which may have been over-kill). In my opinion, Grammie's entry tanked due to the un-welcome addition of PEAS ("those round green things," as Wombat refers to them, rather derisively). We had Wombat's tuna casserole on a rainy Saturday night this week.

To make my mom's tuna casserole, start by preheating the oven to 350 and put on a pot of water to boil.

Once the water is boiling, add about 3/4 of a box of rotini (curly pasta). You already know that I prefer Barilla, but Walmart past works fine too. Boil the rotini for about 5 minutes - you want it slightly under-cooked.

While the pasta is boiling, dump two cans of cream of celery soup into a mixing bowl. Fill each soup can about 3/4 full of milk, and then pour that into the bowl. Whisk the soup and milk together.

Open and drain two cans of tuna (preferable dolphin-safe, white, packed in water).

After 5 minutes, drain the pasta and put it into a casserole that's been sprayed with your non-stick repellent of choice. Pour the soup/milk mix over the noodles and stir well. Use a fork to break up the tuna, and distribute the tuna through the pasta mix. Stir again.

My mom's tuna casserole is topped with bread crumbs tossed in melter butter (NOT potato chips, saltines, or antyhing else - REAL bread crumbs). Around here, we save the odd lonely hamburger bun, the end of the loaf of bread, etc. to have an on-going supply of bread crumbs stored in the freezer (let the bread dry out for a day or two, turn it into crumbs with a rolling pin or grater, and store in a Ziploc bag in the freezer). My brother Igor is not possessed of such foresight and is forced to buy paper cans of bread crumbs (Progresso and Walmart both make such items). Mine are better, but whatever works for you. Decide for yourself how much melted butter to use and how thick you want your bread crumb topping.

After adding the bread crumbs, put the casserole in the oven a bake for 45 - 60 minutes (depending on the depth/shallowness of your chosen casserole dish).

Don't forget to recycle the soup and tuna cans!

Where is everybody?

I subscribe to 56 feeds (blogs, news sites, etc.). At this exact moment (5:15 MST on 2/6/09) not a single one has "fed" anything into my inbox for me to read.

I am a lonely geek!

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Schoolmarm Sez...

A big-time techie website which shall remain nameless needs to hire better proofreaders. The imagery of naked Blackberry phones capering and cavorting is almost more than I can BEAR!

"After careful consideration, our takeaway here is that the Bold feels like the odd man out in terms of design direction for the company. It's clear that the Curve and Storm represent the new look for RIM's phones, while the Bold -- however handsome you may find it -- comes off as a bit out of shape and chintzy in comparison. The plastic metal bezel seems cheap by comparison to the Curve's similarly styled (yet refined) implementation, which bares more than just a passing resemblance to the Storm."

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Variations on a Theme

I have many variations of tomato-y ground beef/turkey casserole at my culinary disposal. I like such concoctions because I usually always have appropriate ingredients in my pantry, and the preparation requires next-to-no thinking on my part. Here's the one I made tonight:

Preheat oven to 350.

Start a pot of water heating. When it boils, add three cups of dry rigatoni (I prefer Barilla for my pasta, but whatever you like is fine). Cook the pasta until slightly under-done.

While the rigatoni is cooking, brown one pound of ground beef in a skillet. While browning, add a tiny bit of salt, some ground black pepper, and some minced garlic (I keep a ginormous jar of the Christopher Ranch stuff from Costco in the fridge at all times).

Once the meat is browned, add 4 cups prepared tomato sauce. Tonight I just used jarred spaghetti sauce. Heat through.

When pasta is done, drain and put into a casserole dish that has been sprayed with non-stick repellent. Pour the meat sauce onto the pasta in the casserole and stir. Add 1 cup of shredded mozzarella to the casserole and stir well. On top of the pasta mixture sprinkle an additional 1/2 cup of shredded mozzarella and 1/4 shredded Parmesan cheese.

Bake 30 minutes. Let stand 5 minutes before serving (or shoveling, as the case may be). Be sure to have some salad or other form of green veggie so I won't feel guilty that I told you to make something that's not a couscous-and-tofu casserole. DarlingMan's mom stopped by while it was baking and said it smelled good, so there ya go (but she didn't stay to eat any; her loss).

Take the Quiz here!

I realize that I'm being bitchy, but really...

My employer has a policy related to the donation of personal/vacation time. People who have a stockpile of days and would like to donate them to someone in need can do so. It's a nice policy that allows us to support our colleagues when they face severe medical or family difficulties.

Every so often, the benefits department sends out an email with requests from people. They can describe, to the extent they choose, their issue and state how many total additional days they are in need of to take care of things. Over the years people have requested days due to battles with cancer, car accidents, heart attacks, severely ill children/spouses, various major surgeries, etc. - the kinds of catastrophic health events that turn lives upside down. I rarely use all my own days, and have always gladly donated to colleagues facing extreme difficulties.

However... there's one type of request that REALLY irks me. There may be some who will say I'm being bitchy, and while they're entitled to their opinion, this is MY blog and I write it so that I CAN say whatever I want.

Every time a "Leave Donation Appeal" email goes out, there are always several whose content is along the lines of "I'm having my first baby. I'm a first year teacher and I don't have enough days yet to take a six-eight-ten week maternity leave..."

It's called FAMILY PLANNING, girls. Do you really think it's appropriate to take on an intense profession such as classroom teaching and then get pregnant a few months into it? Leaving a classroom full of children is not the same as leaving a desk or retail job. Trying to tend to an infant while worried about the classroom you left behind is pretty unfair to that new baby as well. OF COURSE you don't have enough days - you've barely been on the job, you haven't EARNED them! To ask those who have worked for years to support you financially (which is literally what those donated days do) because you chose to start your family two months into your teaching career is pretty darn presumptuous.

I am certainly in favor of mothers (and fathers, for that matter) spending time with their new babies. It's essential for healthy development. However, I am NOT in favor of young women who use the resources of the school district to theoretically begin a career as a classroom teacher but then turn around and start having babies before they've been on the job for half a year. A lot was invested in getting them into the classroom, and if they want to enjoy the fact that the job DOES come with good, family-friendly benefits, perhaps they need to be conscious of EARNING those benefits rather than asking me to give them what I have worked for.

So I'll gladly be donating days to the veteran teacher having long-overdue back surgery, and to a colleague dealing with metastasized cancer, and to teacher dealing with a traumatic event who needs a couple of weeks to be with her family. But for the young ladies who didn't make it through the first semester of their first year of teaching before starting the baby race - sorry, but no.

You, too, can make up dinner as you go along!

I knew that today was going to be long and stressful, so I tried to think about how to deal with dinner in a relatively low-intensity way (WITHOUT resorting to fast food/frozen pizza/etc). So...

Last night I got 4 boneless/skinless chicken breasts out of the freezer to defrost.

I then dumped one can of cream of chicken soup and one can of chicken broth into a bowl and whisked them together. To that I added 1/4 tsp. each of dried dill, basil, thyme, and fine-ground black pepper and whisked it some more. Finally, I chopped some onion, celery, and fresh parsley and stirred those into the bowl. The bowl (covered) then went into the fridge for the night.

This morning when I opened the bowl the blended ingredients smelled quite yummy! I got out my Crock-Pot and sprayed it with non-stick chemical repellant (aka Pam). I laid the four chicken breasts into the Crock-Pot and then poured the sauce I had made over them. The crock part of the Crock-Pot then went into the fridge, as I didn't think my little chickens were going to need to cook for 12 full hours!

At noon, GrandmaT put the crock back in to the pot and turned it on low. When I got home at 6:00 there was still plenty of liquid and the chicken was fairly tender. I dumped in a box of Chicken & Broccoli-flavored Rice-a-Roni (including both the rice AND the seasoning packet) and stirred things around. After another 30 minutes the chicken was starting to shred and the rice was fully cooked and tender.

Result: Two thumbs up, all around! Almost anything can be cooked in a Crock-Pot. They key is to have plenty of liquid and not let things dry out. This was a verrrrrry minimal-prep, minimal-mess dinner, and it tasted good. Use low-sodium versions of the soup and broth and it's not totally unhealthy either. Have a salad for your greens and you're all set!

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Ten Things Tuesday

Here it is, Tuesday again... seems like Tuesday just happened, like about a week ago...

Anyway, being that I just got back from my state's annual gifted education conference, I thought I'd base my T-T-T on that experience. We were very fortunate to have Dr. Del Siegle of the University of Connecticut as our keynote speaker on the final day of the conference. Dr. Siegle is also currently the president of the National Association for Gifted Children. He gave a wonderful talk on the "Gifted Children's Bill of Rights" which I have decided to share with you.

You have a right...

1. To know about your giftedness.
2. To learn soemthing new every day.
3. To be passionate about your talent area without apologies.
4. To have an identity beyond your talent area.
5. To feel good about your accomplishments.
6. To make mistakes.
7. To seek guidance in the development of your talent.
8. To have multiple peer groups and a variety of friends.
9. To choose which of your talent areas you wish to pursue.
10. Not to be gifted at everything.

~Del Siegle

Mamie's Movie-Palooza

Cute Kim Richards! Creepy Bette Davis! Crusty Eddie Albert!

Come over (if you're my family/friends and live close by) for a double-feature of the original "Witch Mountain" movies. Popcorn, movie candy, and soda will be provided (and NOT at concession-stand prices). Pizza will be ordered if the audience so desires (do bring some cash for this one).

Friday, February 6th, 6:00 p.m. at Casa Palomar. RSVP to Mamie.

Tamale Pie

Tonight's dinner was Tamale Pie. It was quite yummy! Here's what to do:

Preheat the oven to 350.

Chop one small or 1/2 of a medium onion. Saute the onion in a skillet or frying pan until it begins to soften. Add 1 lb. of ground beef or turkey to the onion and brown.

Stir 2/3 cup chunky salsa, 1 package of taco seasoning mix, and 1/4 cup water into the meat/onion mix. Cook on medium heat until things thicken up (4 - 5 minutes).

Add 1 can of (drained) whole-kernel corn and 1/2 cup (2.5 oz. can) sliced olives (drained) to the meat mixture. Stir well. I actually did not include the olives, as I don't really like them, but most people do, so I'm including that step. You can decide for yourself.

Spoon the meat/corn mixture into an 8"x8" glass baking dish.

In a separate mixing bowl, make one package of Jiffy corn muffin mix according to the directions on the box (you'll need 1/3 cup milk and 1 egg). Add 1 cup shredded cheddar or cheddar/jack cheese and 1/2 cup (4 oz. can) diced green chilies (drained). Stir well.

Spread prepared corn muffin batter over the meat mixture. Bake for 35 minutes or until the crust is golden-brown. Let it stand for a few minutes before serving.

Again, quite yummy!

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On a happier note...

I got a new book to read today. Well, it's not new new, since it was published in 1971. It's not even new to me, as I have read it before, 25 years or so ago. It's a new edition, and a brand-new copy purchased at my local B&N.

It's big, and thick, and intricate, and soppy, and very enjoyable reading.

It's.... THE WINDS OF WAR by Herman Wouk, soon to be followed by WAR AND REMEMBERANCE. Oh, happy saga-reading to meeeeeeee!!!!!

BTW, the purple words are links you can click on to get more information. Wombat didn't realize this in previous posts. She's been missing out!

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Stupid People and Rodents

This is my rant for the day:

1. Why are people just MEAN on the interstate? Between Point A (where I enter the interstate to travel home from work) and Point B (where I exit the interstate to drive east on the state highway) there are several large/long grades. The interstate is only two lanes in each direction. This particular interstate is a major trucking route and always has heavy truck traffic at all times of the day. Upon being stuck in a behind several laboring semis at the start of a series of grades this evening, I politely put my blinker on to indicate my desire to pop into the line of cars in the left-hand lane. Six - count them, SIX cars deliberately and meanly (I could see it on their crabby, greedy faces) sped up so that I could not change lanes. It really was intentional, as the speeding up each time to close the gap where I could slide in was quite noticeable.

2. Why is my neighbor to the east so STUPID about watering his lawn? Point in fact, his lawn looks like CRAP, he's done nothing to maintain the landscaping, he doesn't mow regularly, and it's WINTER - you don't need to continue to run your sprinklers three times a week, DumbAss! Everyone else on the block turned theirs off completely in October. Hello, it freezes regularly and even snows occasionally here. Do you not notice that every time your sprinklers run you turn the sidewalk and gutter into a sheet of ice? This is rather hazardous to the many kids in the neighborhood and to the people who walk their dogs, jog, etc. Furthermore, you are a colossal water-waster and I am tired of you flooding MY backyard because you are too lame to figure out how and when to run your sprinkler system. Catch a clue!

3. The hoopla around that stupid Pennsylvanian rodent is ridiculous. How the hell do they convince him to crawl out of his hole into that idiotically-dressed crowd? Why should we believe a groundhog - does it have actual meteorological training? And do the news channels really need to spend so much time on this nonsense?

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