What to do with that Omaha Steaks X-Mas Gift- Beef Bourguignon Shepard's Pie

Every year like clockwork a member of my extended family sends me an Omaha Steaks gift package for Christmas. I always appreciate the sentiment and some of the stuff that you get is actually pretty good, but me and the wife are not big "steak dinner" eaters. Usually the stuffed potatoes and the cheese cake get eaten fairly quickly. However, the steaks often languish in the freezer until forgotten. This year I decided to try to create a dish out of the gift package I received that would lead to all the components being consumed in one shot. I came up with a kind of a Beef Bourguignon/Shepard's Pie thing that was pretty tasty.

The components of the package I received were 4 tenderloin steaks, 4 bacon/cheese stuffed potatoes, 2 dishes of "roasted vegetables", and a large cheese cake sampler.





The cheesecake sampler was actually of very impressive proportions.



I decided that I could make a nice stew out of the beef and vegetables with the minimal addition of some bacon, onion, garlic, red wine and stock. I thought by dissecting the potatoes I could make a tasty potato topping and the whole thing would be kind of like a Shepard's Pie.

I started by sautéing up some bacon.



When this was good and crisp I removed it with a slotted spoon. I threw in the beef, which I seasoned and dredged in whole wheat flour, and browned it well.



When the beef was done I removed it and tossed in some onion and garlic. After that cooked for a little while, in went the "roasted vegetable" packs.



The veg packs were a mixture of cauliflower, peppers, snow peas, carrots, and some sort of weird goo that I took to be herbed butter. I removed the snow peas because I really hate them, a holdover from childhood. When the veg got some color I threw the beef back in.



In went a couple spoons of tomato paste, a couple cups of red wine, and the bacon bits. I let this reduce a little, transferred the mixture to a baking dish, added some stock, and threw it covered into a 250 degree oven for 2 hours.



The pseudo-beef bourguignon came out looking pretty solid. I tasted it for seasoning and it was really pretty good. My next step was to slice the stuffed potatoes lengthwise into segments and place them on top of the stew. There was not quite enough to cover the whole surface, but I think it actually looked kind of good. I put the whole thing back in the oven at 400 for about 25 minutes to cook and brown the potato topping.



Verdict: I brought this over to my friend K8's for a dinner party she was having. People seemed to like the dish and most of it got consumed. All in all, I thought this was an excellent way to use up an Omaha Steaks gift package. The large amount of food did not take up space in my freezer for months and not much went to waste. I don't know what Omaha does to their steaks, I have my suspicions that they have some sort of chemical "tenderization" process that they inflict on the meat. This combined with being frozen lends to the meat an almost unsettlingly tender mouth feel when cooked as an intact steak. I thought this characteristic actually lent itself to a stew recipe. I was happy to share this with friends and glad that the dish did not suck.

Bacon Cheese Monkey Bread

Cinnamon Monkey Bread has been one of my favorite desserts ever since being introduced to it by my wife's aunt some time ago. I love interactive food and who can resist pulling off sticky morsels of goodness and stuffing themselves until gorged? I think I am getting a little predictable here, but anyone want to guess what I added in my interpretation of Monkey Bread? Here comes the shocker- bacon and cheese.



I began by whipping up a simple yeast dough of flour, milk, and salt. Let this have a nice rise somewhere warm.



I happened to have a hearty slab of beautiful bacon in the icebox.



I laid the pleasantly thick strips on a foiled bacon sheet and let them get crispy in the oven.



Next, I moved on to cheese selection. My first instinct was to go for Raclette. I felt that the gooey nature of this cheese would be a good analogue for the the butter/sugar mixture used in traditional sweet monkey bread. However, I could not find any at the local grocers. I did not feel like trucking out to a specialty store so my mind, of course, turned to Velveeta. I also wanted a stringy component to the cheese mixture so I went with some fontina too.



To assemble the savory monkey bread I began by putting down a layer of cheese, chopped bacon, and butter into a greased bundt pan.



The next step is to form little balls of dough, about an inch in diameter, and thrown them into the bundt. I rolled these in some seasoned bread crumb to add a little texture and also to maintain the separation between the dough balls.



After each layer of dough balls put on another layer of cheese, butter, and bacon until the pan is filled almost to the top. Allow a little room for subsequent rising action.



Allow this to rise for about 15-20 minutes and then throw it into a 350 degree oven for about 40 minutes. After allowing the monkey bread to cool for a few minutes, I turned it out onto a plate. It actually came right out of the pan with out sticking which was nice. I thought it looked pretty damn good.



This is going to be something you are going to want to eat right away. If not the cheese mixture will congeal as it cools and you will have to slice the bread instead of having the fun of pulling off bacony/cheesy hunks. I think next time I make this I will take steps to ensure that the cheese stayed a little more liquid. I would perhaps use a cooled fondue recipe instead of hunks of cheese. But hey, we learn every day as we experiment in the kitchen. I will chalk this up as a success, I will see what other people think later tonight.

****Update*****

This was not very good, too dense and the velveeta tasted strange. Definitely need to go with a more fondue-esque cheese mixture.

Hitachino Nest Beer

I was rewarding myself for a week of hard work by purchasing a 4-pack of Tetley's English Ale and one of those big bottles of Ommegang's Three Philosopher's from the local Brew-Crew, when the above bottle of beer caught my eye. It was the oddly named "Hitachino Nest Beer", which after checking on the internet I found out is brewed by the Kiuchi Brewery in Japan. This was a case of me being lured into purchasing a product solely based on its quirky packaging. I liked the cute little owl. Hitachino Nest Beer? Is it made of nests? Hmmmm.... I was intrigued so I decided to pick it up and give it a whirl. I usually end up with at least one random bottle of novelty beer when I walk out of the Brew-Crew. This time I also had my eye on some 10 year aged ale which seemed to me to be at least an interesting concept. This will have to wait until next time. I cracked open the Nest Beer just a few minutes ago.



Upon popping off the cap I was greeted by a bunch of foam that did not subside for about a minute. This is something that has happened to me with my home brew when I bottle condition it and use too much sugar. As you can see by the cloudy, almost opaque, color of this ale it is obviously unfiltered. There was a nice layer of expended yeast at the bottom of the bottle which in my opinion is a good thing, it shows they are using at very least pseudo-traditional brewing methods. In any event, I blame the foam-up on the fact that this stuff was probably stored at a high temperature at some point during its life and a little fermentation happened due to the presence of some residual yeast. I enjoyed the flavor of this beer, it was nice and not as aggressively hoppy as I expected. The label said JCA for Japanese Classic Ale so I expected the ale to taste like IPA or something. I don't know if I would recommend that anyone run out right now and try to find this stuff. It wasn't bad for a random label inspired pick up though. Hope everyone had a really good Christmas.

Change of Heart...I guess I can find the time to throw bacon into something once in a while...

I was frankly surprised by the comments I received when I stated in my last (now deleted) post that I was going to take down the blog. I honestly did not think, despite the wife's assurance to the contrary, that anyone would give much of a crap. Lest you think I was simply fishing for some positive reinforcement, let me offer you a word of explanation. As I have stated before, I am gone during the week for some training and am not near a computer with internet access. Last Friday I got home and saw that there were like 5 or 8 thousand hits on this blog since that Monday, this worried me slightly. I happen to be involved in a couple lines of work (government, military, etc...) wherein many an eyebrow would be raised if it came to the surface that I was writing some "weirdo-commie" food blog on the internets. So as you can see, I periodically panic that too many people will read the blog and someone will "out" me. An irrational fear maybe, but I have always had a nervous disposition. I have recovered slightly and I guess I decided that I really do enjoy sharing the random crap I get up to with everyone. So look forward to sporadic posting and hopefully next summer I can get back to paying more attention to my hobbies.

So again I will leave you with Reindeer Lips on Santa's Sack, Merry Holidays! By the way, did I mention that the wife bought me a bad ass, shiny, new 3G iPhone!?! Woot.

The Capital District's Hot Dog Micro-Region. Hembold's Bockwursts with Hot Dog Charlie's Meat Sauce! Woot!

In the Wikipedia entry for Hot Dog Variations, there is a section entitled "New York State (especially Upstate)" with a description of the various hot dog styles of the Empire State. Of special interest to myself is the passage that states-

"The Capital District area (Albany, Troy, Schenectady) is home to a small hot dog. At about 3 inches in length, these are usually served with mustard, onions, and a thin 'meat' sauce. The best known purveyors of these dogs are Gus' in Watervliet, Hot Dog Charlie's at multiple locations, and Famous Lunch in Troy. A local manufacturer is Hembold's in Troy, NY. In Buffalo, New York the hotdog of choice is Sahlen's made by Redlinski meats."

I guess that I never realized that this style of hot dog was unique to our own neck of the woods. I grew up on Hot Dog Charlie's little dogs with cheese sauce and I always took it for granted that this was a pretty standard hot dog configuration throughout the nation. So when a few of the necessary ingredients for the "Capital Region" style dog fell into my hands I immediately felt the need to evangelize about it on the internet.

I got some Hembold's 3 inch Bockwursts (unfortunately, the storied Hembold's company of Troy, NY was recently bought out by a larger meat conglomerate). This is somewhat of a departure from the standard 3 inch Frankfurter style dog that Charlie's would have used, but these Bockwursts are pretty much shortened Rochester Whites which are my undisputed favorite wieners (click for a certain meat fire I started last summer).



I did not have a nice, greasy hot dog roller handy so I decided to brown the Bockwursts up in a skillet. You don't really see too many poached/boiled hot dogs in this part of the state, mostly hot dogs are crisped up a little before meeting the bun.



The next hallowed ingredient is the Hot Dog Charlie's meat sauce.



This a simple but pungent meat/chili sauce that is my absolute favorite. The primary flavors in this stuff are vinegar, sugar, onion, and paprika. It is a tart/sweet/savory (just the slightest bit of chili spiciness) symphony that is simply unrivaled in the hot dog world. It is not so much a "chili" per se, as it is a sauce, a condiment if you will. It does not overwhelm the hot dog, rather it elevates it to an epic level. Even the unsettlingly colored grease that rises to the top of the warming chili does not bother me, it is nectar of the the hot dog gods which our forefathers worshiped in strange ceremonies behind closed doors.



Unfortunately, I could not lay my hands on any 3 inch buns so halved Freihofer's buns made do for the bready vehicle.



There you have it folks. These delicious morsels were for all intents and purposes locally produced (albeit, heavily processed) and enjoyed in their own terroir. One of the things we often forget while living in post-modern American society is that we really do have local food traditions. I know a 3 inch hot dog with runny meat sauce is not exactly on par with Cassoulet or some other French farm house dish, but it is something we grew up on, it is a tradition. As someone who has spent a lot of time away from his home, in far flung corners of the country (and world), I can tell you that it is things like this that you will miss the most. Simple things like a hot dog (I remember my mother buying them for me at Crossgates mall when I was small) can conjure such nostalgic waves from the bottom of my soul that I can hardly keep myself from bawling. I remember being able to polish off about 3 little dogs at Charlie's by the time I was three, with a large mountain dew. They were my reward for behaving while my mother (minus many a gray hair) shopped for pants suits...

Crab Pretzel, Crab Pretzel. Looks Like Crab, Tastes Like Pretzel.

I was in the grocery store a couple weeks ago when I spotted this gem, the Phillips' Seafood Brand Crab Pretzel in the frozen seafood section. If you are perplexed by the zany title of this post see here- Crab People, for my dated Southpark reference. I thought that the Crab Pretzel concept was sufficiently strange to share, so I bought it and baked it up last night.



There are two things of note on the back of the crab pretzel box. First, is the creepy picture of a couple of members of the Phillips family waving a couple crabs around with maniacal smiles. The second thing is the absolutely horrid nutritional values of this thing. 12 grams of saturated fat and 580 calories in this bad boy. Somehow they squeezed a good amount of fiber into the thing, so you will have some poopin' to do later.



The uncooked pretzel was kind of strange looking, very unpretzel like. It looked kind of like a frozen cinnamon bun only with cheese instead of frosting. There was no definitive pretzel shape, I figured that once the cheese melted into the crannies it would assume a more pretzel-esque form. The thing went into the oven at 350 for a half of an hour.



This is the result. A mound of pretzel and crab. It did not, as I had predicted, morph into anything approaching the nice pretzel shape on the box. A strong melted cream cheese smell wafted off of the crab pretzel. I chopped it in half to get a look at the insides. I was surprised at the sheer doughiness of the pretzel component, it was a least 2 inches high. The topping looked to me like nothing more than a cream cheese amalgam with cheap melted american/cheddar processed cheese food. I did not see even one shred of recognizable crab meat. I took a hesitant bite, and folks, it was not good. Have you ever had some of the cheaper Japanese products that advertise themselves as "seafood" flavored? Cheap shrimp crackers would be a good example. They have that vaguely rotten, fake seafood flavor. This is what the crab pretzel reminded me of. It seemed as if, rather than crab meat, some nasty crab essence was added to the cheese mixture. As much as I hate wasting food I had to toss the rest of this thing, it tasted spoiled to me. Needless to say I will not be purchasing this particular delicacy of the deep again. However, I do admire the idea of seafood slapped on a soft pretzel, there is something uniquely American about the concept.