Soup - Veggies, Beef, Coconut Milk

This soup was inspired by:
The ingredients in the fridge.
A hot pot restaurant in California that you cooked thinly-sliced meat in a pot of hot soup in front of you.
Thinly sliced beef I had taken out of my freezer.
A soup recipe from a friend of TG.

Saute in oil (and add as completed during the chopping process):
a couple onions
a hunk of ginger
a small handful of peeled garlic
a big couple handfuls of carrots
a small sweet potato, peeled and diced
a couple stalks of celery
a red bell pepper

After it has sauteed for a bit (5 min. after adding the bell pepper), add some amount of broth, covering the veggies by about two inches.  (I used the Better-Than-Bouillon beef stuff.  Might not be strictly paleo, but it is gluten-free.)  Bring to a boil, then cover and simmer for 10 minutes.

Bring it back to a boil - add the thinly sliced beef pieces.  Reduce heat, cover, simmer for 10 minutes.

Add a can of coconut milk, wait 'til warmed through, serve.

All in all, more delicious than I thought it would be considering the lack of spices in there.  I recommend it.  I also recommend cutting the thin slices of beef into even smaller pieces, or in lieu of that, using a spork to eat the soup - the beef pieces were a little difficult to get onto the spoon and into the mouth.

Scooter

More Beef-Broccoli-Ginger Stir Ffy

I had purchased some eye of round roast to make beef jerky, but apparently had a mis-communication with the butcher when I asked them to slice it real thin.  It was thin-ish, but not quite right for beef jerky.  I decided to cut it into chunks and stir fry it somehow.

So, here's a minimal ingredient stir fry.

Chop up two onions, saute with sesame oil and mongolian fire oil in a large pan.  Add some freshly grated ginger after 5 minutes.  When the onions are done, add the beef chunks, cook until don, stirring often.  Add a big head of broccoli, chopped into florets, and cook until the broccoli is tender crisp.

Sprinkle some sesame seeds on top and serve!

Scooter

Tried to do a super close up shot with the camera.....

Garlic Beef Stew - Crockpot

This is another one out of Sarah Fragoso's Everyday Paleo.

Combine and stir together in a crockpot:
3 onions (sliced), 1-2 lbs stew meat, a head of garlic (chopped), some chicken broth, some ground salt and pepper, and a few shakes of marjoram.

Then halve a butternut squash, scoop out seeds, and place skin side up on top of everything else.

Cook on low for 8 hours.

Simple, good, easy but could use either more or less spices.  (I suspect just salt and pepper would have been fine.)  I'd never cooked a squash in the crockpot before, and it worked well.  Next time I might also throw in a bag of baby carrots. 

Scooter

Mustard Beef and Veggies

This was based off a recipe in Sarah Fragaso's Everyday Paleo book.  Excellent book, by the way.

Chop onion, garlic, and ginger.  Start sauteing in olive oil.
Add sirloin steak, cut into bite-size pieces.  When the meat has browned, add 1/2 cup chicken stock, 1 Tbl dijon mustard, and 1 tsp of thyme that have already been combined.
Add a 1/2 bunch of kale leaves, torn off the stalks, and about 1/3 head of red cabbage.  Simmer everything together until the latest veggie entrants are wilted to your satisfaction.

This was really, really good!

Scooter

I've got some beef jerky spinning in the dehydrator right now, I'll let you know how it comes out!

Beef and Bok Choy Soup

After plowing through leftovers all week, I finally made something new.  Using mostly the vegetables that had been in my fridge the longest.
Add the following to a soup pot as you're preparing them:
Sesame oil.
Medium heat.
Chopped onion.
Minced ginger.  After two-three minutes add
Gound beef.  When browned add
Handful of chopped carrots.
1 large chopped and peeled parsnip.
3/4 head chopped cauliflower.
Chicken broth and water to cover, plus a little bit.
A bunch of baby bok choy.  They are about 2 inches long.  I rinsed these and just cut off the bottom of the stalk and threw them in like that.
Some salt, pepper, and dried garlic.  (Horror of horrors - I am out of fresh!  Something is not right in the universe.)
Turn up the heat, bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer for 25 minutes.

So, if you photograph a steaming bowl of soup from directly above it, your camera lens will fog up. 

Good soup - simple tasting, easy on the spice level, very warm and filling.

Scooter

Curry Beef Soup

I've almost decided there should be a weekly (maybe bi-monthly, realistically, on average) curry recipe on the blog.  Yum, curry.  It could be like an homage to Bridget Jones - a blog version of a turkey curry buffet.  With other meats.  This one is based on this recipe from Everyday Paleo.

Shop:
1 white onion
1/2 red onion
thumb-sized piece of ginger
8 cloves garlic (yes, I love garlic.  I recommend scaling for many people.)

Start this all sauteeing with a slug of sesame oil, mongolian fire oil, and about a tablespoon of curry paste on the low end of medium-low.
After about 5 minutes, add 1 lb ground beef.  Add the following spices:
bunch of shakes curry powder
couple+ shakes turmeric
couple+ shakes cumin
couple shakes saigon cinnamon  (I've never added cinnamon to a curry, and the smell was divine!)

Continue chopping some broccoli into small florets, and add when the beef is pretty done.  After a few minutes, add a can of coconut milk, and enough broth, water, or more coconut milk to cover.  (I added water and some of my paprika surprise! chicken broth cubes.  What do you know, I found a use for them quickly.)

Chop:
1/2 bell pepper
1 zucchini

Add these to the mix.  Bring to a boil, turn down to a simmer, and let simmer for 10 minutes.  I ate it as was, and didn't serve it over cauliflower or anything like that.

Reflections:  One might wonder why this is called a soup, when it's basically very similar to any other curry I've made.  The answer:  I usually make curries in my large, deep saute pan, and this time I made it in a soup pot.  It's a geography is destiny kind of thing.

Plans for the weekend:  I'd like to muck around with some old/some new kitchen toys.  The new: a food processor.  I'm thinking pesto to break the thing in.  The old: a mandoline slicer and a food dehydrator.  I'm thinking zucchini chips.  The old/new:  paleo muffins in my silicon muffin pan.  If I finally remember to bring the pan home from work, where it is currently acting as a block to anyone trying to put anything else on my desk.

Gherkin on a stick,
scooter

Bok Choy Recipe-Off Competition. It's ON!!!!

Triangle Girl and I are going to have a recipe-off with bok choy.  We'll both submit a recipe, and Flash (the requester) gets to judge.

Bok Choy:  It looks like a combo of cabbage and chard.  The stalks are edible without cooking, with a celery-like aspect (crunchy and refreshing), sans the stringiness.  I heard it's good with almond butter (or pb), but I haven't tried that yet.  It comes in the baby version (1/3 the size, 4x the price), but I went with the big boy version.  If you're buying it, make sure to shake out all the water before it gets weighed - these things can store some water in them.

I'm calling this thing: Bok FIRE.

Aesthetic note: I like to slice or julienne (cut into longer, thinner strips) veggies for stir frys.

Slice an onion, chop up a bunch of garlic and ginger, to taste.  My taste runs to a LOT of garlic and ginger.

Get some sesame oil down from the cupboard.  Realize that the measly couple teaspoons-ish left in the container will hardly suffice.  Ponder the other oils you have that could go in combination with the sesame.  Olive oil, definitely not.  Almond Oil, hmmmm.  Mongolian Fire Oil, winner winner bok fire dinner!

Heat up oils in a large frying pan (wish I had a wok)!   I used the high side of medium.  Toss in the onion, garlic, and ginger when the oil is hot.  I then pondered the order to add the rest of the ingredients using some sort of logic about the relative cooking times of the vegetables, and as I sliced everything, I just added it in.

Slice a handful of baby carrots.  Add.  De-leaf the bok choy (save the greens!) and slice the white stalks.  Add.  Since the bunch of bok choy I had picked up was pretty substantial, I used about half of it.

Add 1 lb. ground beef.  Strips of beef would also work swimmingly.  Let the meat and veggies cook for a little bit (5ish minutes), stirring occasionally.

Slice a red pepper.  Add when the ground beef is no longer pinkish.  Realize that once again, you're putting in way too much food for the pan size.  Oh, well.  Slice up 0.5 of a zucchini.  Add.  Saute everything until the newest vegetable entrants are tender-crisp.  Then add the bok choy greens, cook until they are wilted.  Broccoli was on deck, but I left it riding the pine due to lack of field space.  It looked like:

Action shot of the crowded pan.

Garnish the whole thing with some sesame seeds for serving.  If you're going to get sesame seeds, go to one of the Asian markets to get them - it's an unbelievably better deal there.

I considered sprinkling some red pepper flakes on top, but decided that the mongolian fire oil had probably spiced it enough for me.  I was right.

Prep-start to food-in-mouth time: 25 minutes.  This has definitely made enough to share with Flash and TG at lunch tomorrow, plus some extra for leftovers for me alone!

Random note: Favorite knife for chopping things like garlic and ginger:

Well, favorite knife all around.  A gift from TG.

You just semi-rotate your wrist back and forth quickly, and chop-chop-chop.  V. fun.  If chopping things can be considered fun.

Although I dislike it when the news does this, I'll go ahead and do it on the blog.  Coming-up-soon recipes: Paleo Pizza; soup involving cranberries and the leftovers from the chicken; and something-kale-something.

Scooter