ICanhascheezburger macaroni

Mmmm. This turned out -much- better than I had expected! It is filling, and a little bit addictive, which is the downside, but oooh so good. For a simple lazy I-don't-know-what-to-cook meal. For this you will need:

500g beef mince
1 cup of cheddar, grated (around a 2-3cm thick slice)
1/2 cup parmesan cheese, finely grated (the smaller holes)
2 garlic cloves, finely diced
1/2 tsp minced ginger
1/4 tsp onion salt
1/4 tsp siracha hot sauce
1 tsp bonox (beef stock paste)
1 tsp worchestershire sauce
2 tsp tomato sauce
1 tsp oregano, mixed herbs, onion salt
2 tsp parsley
3-4L of water
1 Tablespoon of oil
2-3 handfuls ...uh, around 1 1/2 cups of macaroni
500ml of milk
2 Tablespoons of flour
2 Tabelspoons of butter.

I know I know, it looks like a -lot- of ingredients, but really, it's very simple.

Fill up a medium sized saucepan/pot with water and oil, and the siracha sauce. This is going to have your macaroni in it, but you don't put it in yet, the water has to boil first! The mince goes into a frying pan/skillet/saucepan, with a spray over of oil, so that it doesn't stick. Break it up with a spoon, and brown the meat off.

While it's cooking, chop the base off of your garlic cloves, peel off the papery shell, slice and dice the two cloves into teeny pieces. Make a space in the pan with the mince, put the cloves in. Fry them lightly for ten to fifteen seconds -- basically as long as it takes you to put the ginger in -- and stir it through the meat.

Add the bonox, the herbs, onion salt, worchestershire sauce, tomato sauce (ketchup) and parsley, stir through, add a half cup of water to the mix, stir it through so that the seasoning is evenly mixed through the mince. Leave to simmer on low heat while the water for the macaroni reaches the boil.

When that is bubbling away happily, grate your cheeses, get out a smaller saucepan, and melt your butter in the bottom, over low heat. Add the flour, stirring to lightly toast it. Add the milk a little bit at a time, stirring constantly. If you have issues getting lumps out of the sauce, use a whisk. It can only be used for the flour part of the mixture. Bring the milk temperature up to warm or hot, -without- boiling, and add the cheese a half-handful to handful at a time, crumbling it over the hot milk as you stir.

Once the sauce has thickened -- it should still be fairly thin though, so that you can mix it in with the rest so less cheese is better, or more milk -- leave it to rest, as you strain the water out of the macaroni, mix the meat in with the pasta, serve it into a bowl (or two, depending on how many you are feeding) and top with the cheese sauce.

The more people you are feeding, the more pasta you cook. ~1 handful per person, cupped, for me and my father, I had 2 and a half handfuls.

Deliciousness Delivered.

Beef Jerky -- In the oven

Beeeeeeef jerky! -- yes yes I know it's got white powder. That's flour. This is my first attempt, and I am sharing where it worked and where I failed with you people so that you don't fail on your first attempt too! Even if the setup is -incredibly- easy.

For this you'll need:
500g beef steak (lean, preferrably, though rump does just as well)
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/4 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper (or more if you want it spicy!)
~1 handful of plain flour

Preheat your oven to 90 degrees celcius -- you don't want it very hot, because the idea is to dehydrate the meat, not cook and crucify it into charred strips.

Pull out your steak, cut away as much of the fat as you can (and gristle if you got a crappy cut) and cut your beef into strips, roughly the same width, thickness and length. To unify the dehydrating times and remove as much variance as possible.



Put the spices/seasoning into a bag, add your slight amount of flour, and the meat. Hold the top of the bag closed and shake the living daylights out of it to cover the strips with the seasoning. With the flour, less is more. It is merely there to stop the seasoning from becoming overpowering and making the meat taste blech. The flour -will- cook in the oven, so you don't have to worry about the raw flour taste.

If you have a roasting tray, which has a rack above a fat catcher thing, use that as the best choice. Make sure the rack is -clean- however, lay the bottom of the tray with paper towels to catch any drips, and lay your strips of seasoned meat out on the rack, tapping off excess flour in the process. The more flour that is on the strip, the higher chance of it -retaining- moisture, and that is not what we want.



Now, you put it into the oven and 'forget' about it. This takes a LONG time. I put mine in for 3 and a half hours, and they were still a little hmm, soft in the middle. Four, five, six and some recipe's I've seen recommend 8 to 10 hours dehydrating. Either way, if you're not sure, poke them with a knife. If the meat squishes, they're not done.

Once they -are- done, take them out of the oven, and leave them to cool down completely. Then, you can eat, or seal them away. Heat introduces moisture in an airtight container, which allows bacteria to grow. If done properly, and completely perfectly, beef jerky can keep for up to two years like this. :)

Deliciousness ...almost delivered. They tasted delicious still slightly warm! Once in the container though... well, there was too much flour alas.

Rolled-Roast beef, warm pasta salad and 'edible' zuccini

Okay! First off, this is focusing nigh exclusively on the vegetables or 'side dishes' on the plate. I -loathe- zuccini. Ugh. It's the vilest most despicable vegetable on the earth, in close competition with aubergine for repulsiveness. So, this was my attempt to make it an 'edible' part of my meal. Why, you ask, if I hate it with such a passion? Because we have a garden. The garden has vegetables. One of those vegetables growing are zuccini. And tomatoes. MY GOD. So many tomatoes. Avalanche of tomatoes! In any case, to the meal! For this you will need:

1 rolled roast
1-2 cups bow tie pasta
4-5 tomatoes
2-3 tsp sour cream
1 large brown onion
2 tsp tumeric
1-2 cups finely chopped zuccini
1-2 spring onions
1-2 Tbsp oil (vegetable or olive)
2 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp oregano
2 tsp powdered chicken stock
1/2-1 cup of grated cheese

Complicated list huh? But don't worry! It will aaaaaaaall make sense in a few moments. First, top, tail, peel and slice the onion. Slice, not dice. The difference is that you have half-moons of onion rings, you can cut them in half again if you wish, but the idea is to have fairly long 'strings' of the onion. Put the oil in a wok (if you have one, if not a large frying pan would do just as well) let it heat up and then toss the onions in. You want them to start to brown.

While they're doing the cooking thing, and you've broken them up into the individual layers with some deft applications of bashery with a spoon or pair of tongs. Slice and dice the zuccini (leave the skin on) into around 1cm cubes, or there about. Put the water on to boil, add some more oil so that the pasta doesn't stick together. Chicken stock and garlic powder in the oil and the water, add the oregano to the water as well. Once it is boiling add in the pasta.

Your onions ought to be real nice by now, and three quarters cooked, add in the zuccini. (Remember to turn your roast whatever) Dice and chop up your spring onion. To do this, slice off the roots and perhaps a half inch above, peel off any 'dead' leaves, or brown layers around the outside (should only need to do one or two) then slice even rings off of the spring onion. Toss it in with the Zuccini and onion, making sure that it is all stirred through and left to cook and soften and absorb delicious flavour.

At this point, add the tumeric, and some salt and pepper if you desire. Stir through so that everything coated evenly. When the pasta is cooked, turn off the water, and drain it. Yes, drain before the rest of the meal is done. Slice the top off of the tomatoes, and dice them into even squares and pieces. Put the cold tomato into the warm past, stir through with the sour cream and cheese, leave to cool/warm/whatever.

Take your roast out, snip and peel off the string (if you used a rolled one, like I did) and carve, put on a plate with the zuccini onion mix and the pasta salad. The pasta tomato thing tastes best warm. Not hot, not cold, but warm, enough for the tomato and stuff to be 'cool' and for the sour cream to be slightly melted.

The best thing about the way I cooked the zuccini? It gained the flavour of the onion and spring onion, which is what the plant is best for, and made it taste nice! The pasta was my favourite part as for me, the beef was a little undercooked (oops, my bad) but my father loved it all. So for that, I can say that this one is again;

Deliciousness Delivered.

Steak, gravy, sweet potato, carrot and garlic mushroom

Well, the title says it all really! This is one of your basic 'meat and three veg' healthy sort of dinners, something you can toss together with minimum of effort and get the delicious food out of the way and into the family. First off, sweet potatoes, while much more expensive than the 'normal' potato varieties, are SO GOOD for you. Seriously. Nearly zippo carbohydrates, they are a 'low GI' food, which means they leave you feeling fuller, for longer, on less! Which is great.

I was having an 'orange' food day. Which is why we have sweet potato and carrot. The mushrooms match the steak and the gravy links it all together. So, what you are going to need for this is:

Steak! One piece per person you're feeding.
Sweet potato: 1 inch slice per person, cut in half.
1/2 carrot per person.
1 cup diced mushroom (fresh)
1 tsp butter
2 cloves of garlic.

Whenever I cook root vegetables (they're the ones that come from under the dirt, potatoes, carrots) and pumpkin or whichever, the really -long- cooking ones, I always peel and chop and put them on to cook -first-. That way you can cook them on low heat for a good long time, without overcooking and they would be nice and tender. This singular pot is the start of my timing for the rest of my meal.

Once the sweet potato and carrot (put them in the same pot, the carrot cut into little disks, each slice of sweet potato cut in half) are boiling, you turn the heat down, leave the lid on with just a little gap to let the steam out, and put your meat on to cook.

Let the blood rise to the surface of the steak, cooking on a mid to low heat -- if you cook too high, the surface will be burnt and the centre still raw, which is blech to me. I don't want to have to fight my meat for the vegetables on the plate. Once the blood has risen, and formed a shallow puddle, turn it over. Why puddle? Because -- and this is possibly icky to a lot of people to think about -- all the delicious flavour, the moisture in the meat that we all know and adore? It is in the blood. So the blood rises through, flavouring, you turn it over, and it caramelises on the out side of the steak.

At this point, if you were cooking other vegetables, like frozen peas, frozen corn, or beans and so on, -now- would be when you put them on to cook. As it is, we are cooking garlic mushrooms.

Put your teaspoon (or so) of butter, into the same frying pan as your meat (save on washing up if you have room) let it melt -completely- but not start caramelising, bubbling or burning. Toss the diced/sliced mushroom and diced garlic cloves in, turning them with a pair of tongs, so that the butter is absorbed by the mushrooms before they really start cooking, they're just getting warm. Make sure that you don't have mushrooms ontop of each other, and let them simmer for a few minutes.

Turn your meat a second time (it should have gotten another fine layer of blood risen through) and this makes it what the chef's and restaurants call 'medium well done'. I like my food a little more cooked than that, hence the second turning. Toss the mushrooms, they should be smelling deliciously garlicly by now. Leave them, and the meat to sizzle lightly. Now, -now- is when you put the gravy on.

Just use packet gravy mix, around six teaspoons of the powder into a glass, mix in the water, stir thoroughly, pour into pot, and heat, stirring continuously. I have cheaty gravy, in that you boil the kettle, put six teaspoons of the powder into a measuring jug, add 250-300mL boiling water, stirring while you add the water, and keep stirring until all the lumps are gone and it's thick and delicious.

Strain out your vegetables (turn the meat one last time to seal the juices so they don't dribble all over the plate) put on the plate, turn off the heat, put the steak straight onto your plate, put the mushrooms either on the meat, or on the plate itself (it looks like more, and we eat as much with our eyes as our mouths) and pour the gravy over as desired.

Tada! Deliciousness served.