The pot roast is in the oven, but not without some minor worries.

The searing went OK, next time I need to use the larger skillet I have.

Rubbed it in S&P and some minced garlic before searing. Into the dutch oven, added the potatoes, carrots & onions.

Added about 1/2 bottle of beer (Guinness) and then equal parts chicken & beef stock, until the meat was about 1/2 covered. Could be too much liquid, we’ll know for sure later!

Into the oven at 250 degrees (yes, you’re reading that right.) Decided to go with low & slow. (I have a friend that does his at 200 degrees for most of the day with the veggies in from the start. However, given my relatively late start, I figured 250 would speed it up somewhat, but not make it too fast.) Mainly, I wanted to put all the veggies in now rather than trying to guess at when a good time would be to put them in.

The biggest problem is that I couldn’t get the meat thermometer to sit properly in the pot with the lid on… So, I’ll check the temp in an hour and then every 30 minutes. Given that it’s only a 2# roast, hopefully we’ll be eating before 8PM.

More than anything, I just want it to taste good and be as good as Mom made.

Or quesadillas. Or nachos. All of which will be happily consumed in the next 48 hours.

The prefolded version – post folded, all you’d see is tortilla. :)

Super easy taco filling:

The original came from somewhere on allrecipes.com, but I can’t find it for the life of me now.  Here’s my version.

1/2 c. chopped onion
2-3 cloves, finely diced
1# lean ground beef
1/4 c. (yes, 1/4 c.) chili powder
1/2 t. oregano
1/2 t. cumin
1 t. salt
1 c. tomato sauce

Saute the onions & garlic in a bit of butter or oil – until onions are soft/translucent.  Add the ground beef and brown it.  Set aside for a quick drain, return to pan.  Add tomato sauce and spices.  Let simmer for 10-20 minutes.  (It may seem a little “soupy” at first, the excess liquid will drain off.)  If you’re concerned about the large amounts of chili powder, start with half as much and halfway through the simmering, taste and add more if you like.

It’s a bit of a “wing-it” recipe – one I’ve done for years and there isn’t much in the way of measuring that goes on in the process – but I can at least tell you what all goes in it!

1 # 90% lean ground beef
1-2 cloves of very finely diced garlic
~1/2 c. finely diced onion
Couple shakes of basil, oregano and thyme
Small handful of chives
1 egg
splash of milk
couple shakes of 57 sauce (about 1/3 of a cup)
enough breadcrumbs to get it all to the right consistency (I use “Italian Style” but regular should be fine, too.)

Mix everything together, adding the breadcrumbs last – you need it at a consistency where you can form it into a big ol’ ball without it falling apart. Also, I’ve found that having toss-away latex gloves to wear while mixing is really nice as you don’t end up with ground beef under your nails…

Bake @ 400 degrees for 1 hour on a broiler/roasting pan so the excess fat can just drain off while it’s cooking – no loaf pans! I let it rest for about 5 minutes before trying to slice.

I glaze the outside w/more of the 57 sauce and usually reglaze one or two more times while it’s cooking. It’s great hot, and awesome cold the next day in a sandwich. :-D

Tonight I took another swing at them – changed the veggie stock to chicken stock, and heavy cream for the milk.  Damn near perfect. :-D

My Mom used to make these with a packet mix from McCormick or Lowrys or one of those folks. Now, it was always tasty so I certainly can’t complain by any means. But, I’ve kind of gone a personal crusade for “packet-free food” – I truly think that just about anything you can make with a seasoning packet can be done just as well (if not better) on your own. The big hurdles I got over were chili & spaghetti sauce. (Don’t laugh!) Well, once I got those to a point where I was pleased with them, I decided it was time to tackle the Swedish Meatballs.

In scouring recipes across the internet, I found there are as many recipes for Swedish Meatballs as there are stars in the sky. (And I am still convinced if you asked someone from Sweden about them, they would look at you as though you’d lost your mind, the Ikea cafeteria menu notwithstanding.) My first go at it, I used this recipe from allrecipes.com, and of course had to make some variations on it…

It wasn’t bad by any means, but it was just ALL WRONG. I seem to recall throwing in a bit of beef stock in the sauce instead of water, and overall the sauce was just too “beefy” – like I said, not bad, but certainly not what Mom used to make. My brother ate it but readily admitted it just didn’t cut it for what we used to get. (And isn’t Mom always the yardstick by which we measure so many comfort foods?)

That night, I had the “OMG, I am such a dumbass” moment. Mom’s (and McCormick’s) sauce was a thickened *cream* sauce. I remember looking at my brother and saying, “Good lord, it’s nothing more than another variation on red-eye gravy, and I can do THAT.” I felt like an idiot.

So, tonight, it was me vs. the Swedes again. :) I stuck somewhat to the original meatball recipe I’d found, with more variations (it’s almost my meatloaf recipe, sans the 57 sauce, LOL.) and then when it came time for the sauce, it came out MUCH better than before, and damn close to what I remember my Mom making. Gotta love that. My brother says it’s not quite there, but very close, but neither one of us can quite figure it out (and I can’t find a damn McCormick package to see what other spices I’m missing in the sauce.)

So, here we go – Swedish Meatballs after the jump:
Meatballs:

1 – 1.5 # of ground beef & pork (2:1 ratio) – the easy way? Get the markets “meatloaf mix” which is ground beef, pork & lamb. (Which I have never actually used for meatloaf, but constantly use for meatballs and lumpia.)
1/2 c. finely diced/chopped onion
1-2 cloves finely diced garlic
1 egg
1/2 c. milk
1 t dried parsley (I have no doubt fresh would be better, but dried was all I had on hand)
1t Worchestershire sauce (could the culinary world have come up with a more used sauce that was HARDER to spell properly?)
2 t salt (I know I went much lighter than this, probably 1t)
1 t pepper
3/4 c. bread crumbs (I use the “italian style” which is marketspeak for “we’ll charge you $1 more for 3 cents worth of oregano and basil in the mix)

Mix it all up, in a chilled bowl if at all possible (don’t know why, just seems to make the meatballs form up easier) – I add the breadcrumbs last, just a little at a time, because I tend to eyeball the liquids I put in and that way I don’t have to add more liquids at the end cause I dumped in too much breadcrumbs. I’ve done this both with my KA mixer on low and by hand – upside to the KA is that you don’t end up with meatball mix stuck under your fingernails, but doing it by hand seems to just work a little bit better.

Once it’s all mixed up, toss 1 to 1.5 T of butter in your favorite meatball browning pan of choice on low to start melting and get the meatballs formed. I have zero luck with the meatball scoop things, so I just do rounded teaspoons (like cookies) onto a plate so they’re of a fairly uniform volume and the go back and actually make them round. Doesn’t take more an an extra minute or two. The extra time might not fly in a restaurant kitchen, but this is my kitchen and I can do whatever I want. :-D

While you’re doing this, keep an eye on the butter and as you get close to done on getting the meatballs formed, crank up the heat on the butter to about medium (this is going to be different on every friggin’ rangetop – basically hot but below the smoke point.) Toss in the meatballs and brown them. I couldn’t even begin to tell you how long this takes. (Another reason I am not a professional chef.) I can tell you that I have a great wide silicone spatula/pancake turner that is great for turning meatballs, and I just kept turning them every few minutes. Just be prepared to sacrifice a couple meatballs for “doneness checks” – that’s the upside to being the cook – checking for taste along the way.

Once they’re done, set them aside to drain. (I just chuck them in a colander and set them in the sink – some may scream food poisoning, but I’ve never had the time it takes for meatballs to drain @ room temp result in my being at death’s door.)

Now it’s on to the sauce – my albatross the last time around.

Sauce:
~ 2 T AP flour
~ 1/2 c. White wine (anything you’d be willing to drink)
~ 1 c. Veggie stock  Chicken Stock
1 T parsley
Salt & Pepper
~1/4 c. finely diced onions
~1/2 c. milk (or heavy cream – I had milk on hand) <<<heavy cream is better
Cornstarch if it won’t thicken
This is where it gets into “Cindy just winging it”, but I made note of everything I did.

Have the heat at medium for all this.

I decided I wanted a little more butter in the mix and tossed in another 1/2 T. In retrospect, I probably could have skipped this.

Then, I deglazed the pan with the white wine, working through all the browned butter and meatball yumminess and adding the additional onions and the flour.
Next was the vegetable stock. (Each time letting it warm back up.)

The flour had decided to be a bastard and just clump up, so there was a LOT of whisking. Next time I either skip the flour or put that in FIRST and whisk the hell out of it.

Then the milk, parsley, salt and pepper. More whisking and stirring and cussing the fact that it won’t freakin’ thicken up.

Now, keep going until it gets to a bubble – if it still doesn’t want to thicken up at that point, go ahead and toss in a bit of cornstarch. (I panicked too soon and probably didn’t need the cornstarch if I had waited another 30-60 seconds.)

The texture I was going for was a little less than a heavy cream soup (like a baked potato soup) but still ahead of “hot cream sauce” – hard to describe, but if you think about it, you’ll recognize it when you see it.

Once you hit that point, turn the heat as low as it will go, add the meatballs back in and let it simmer on low (covered) for 5 minutes. Stir once or twice during the process.

Serve as is, or over egg noodles. If you’re going to put this in a chafing dish with a handful of toothpicks and let folks just go to town, it’s great that way, but you might want to be prepared to stir it up every now and again depending on how hot your chafing dish gets.

Forgive the incredibly informal plating, but dinner was a free for all this evening (and yes, that is flour all over the place) – the sauce is lighter than the orange/yellow that is coming out, but I assume that is just a combination of my flash and the weird under-micro lighting that I use for my rangetop.

Well, at least it LOOKED good. Having not made shrimp satay before, I snagged some beef to marinate as well just in case the shrimp didn’t go well – it did go well and so tonight was beef satay. Awful. WAY too much citrus to it – I thought the shrimp was a touch too citrusy so I added some more peanut butter & soy to the beef marinate – didn’t work at all. So, next time I know to cut back some on the lime juice – weird cause it didn’t seem that way when I did the chicken version of it. Also flaked and got a half-sirloin instead of flank steak, so not only was it too limed out, it was tough as hell, too. But, it looked nice.