Ahhh, vacation… A time to kick back, relax, perhaps have a few drinks and enjoy some sun and maybe a good book. Or, if you are me, a time to spend countless hours at a casino poker table and to cram in the last few recipes from Ree Drummond’s “The Pioneer Woman Cooks” with your sister in your spare time! When we planned my last visit to sunny San Diego in August (at least I heard it was sunny; I didn’t notice since I was, as previously mentioned, ensconced at a poker table!) my sis generously volunteered to purchase the ingredients to make the last six recipes. It’s possible she didn’t realize quite how generous an offer it was at the time, although when I told her these recipes called for a metric ton of beef, she still followed through! Eventually… We chatted a few days before I arrived to go over the shopping list and prep times for the meat, and she promised to grab the groceries that day so we could start off vacation in the kitchen together. Fast forward a week when she picks me up at the airport and announces, “We have to stop to the grocery store; I haven’t been shopping yet!” Sigh… (To be fair, she works 24/7, so I wasn’t overly surprised!) This put a slight kink in the plans, as I thought the brisket had already been swimming in its 24-48 hour marinade bath, but we made adjustments. Not the least of which was ditching the 7-pound suggested weight for Roasted Beef Tenderloin (roughly $200) in favor of the “value priced and with-attached-coupon” packages of filet mignon. I used the same strategy when preparing the Magnolia Table (Joanna Gaines) recipe last year since I neither reside in bovine-rich Texas nor live on a working cattle ranch with cows literally tromping through my front yard. For the rest of us, beef prices are astronomical! But I digress… A filet mignon is essentially the same cut as a tenderloin, just already sliced, so we used the tried and true temperature check method rather than using the timeline in the recipe. Meat this good does NOT require much in the way of cooking or seasoning; salt and pepper (oddly, also a small amount of sugar) and just a few minutes at 450 degrees produced these perfectly mid-rare steaks. Recipe #59 marked off the list!
Recipe # 60 was another story. The best laid plans so often go awry, and there has never in recorded history been a vacation schedule that goes exactly as written anyway. We had every intention of making a mushroom side dish (one of the remaining recipes to knock out) to use as a steak topper, but as you may notice from the picture above, we ended up with a can of green beans. For the Braised Beef Brisket recipe below, we fully intended to make fried onion strings on the side, yet another straggler recipe. Guess what? Didn’t happen! I think we ended up shredding this ridiculously tender beef with two forks (or maybe we just blew on it, as it practically fell apart at the slightest provocation!) and piling it on buns with barbecue sauce. If you have a lot of hungry mouths to feed, I’d recommend this dish based on ease of prep (dump soy sauce and lemon juice into a pan along with a ton of chopped garlic, and let the acid do its thing to break down the beef fibers) and ease of cooking (stick it in the oven and forget about it for half a day.) You can’t mess it up! Plus it tasted pretty darn good!
After so much cholesterol, we decided to take a break and instead focus on too much sugar! Like, way, waaaaay too much sugar. With all due respect to Patsy, her Blackberry Cobbler was diabetes waiting to happen. Just look at the photo below: an actual sugar crust formed on top while this baked. As a point of reference, the ratio of sugar to flour was 1.35:1. That’s insane. As a kid I would have been all over this, but it was too much for me these days! As a variation, we swapped out blackberries (which I don’t especially like due to the seed situation) for blueberries. They tasted good, but I am unsure if the moisture content contributed to the cobbler being quite loose, or if any fruit would have yielded similar results. Other suggestions were peaches or raspberries, but I think I’ll stick with Ree’s previously discussed Peach Crisp, which was as close to flawless as you can get, except of course for not being crisp in any sense of the word. But I digress yet again! We ended up baking this a bit longer than suggested in order to get the browning achieved here, making those edges caramelly and sticky. Frankly that was delicious, but the principle here was that it contained too much sugar for anyone to finish a whole piece.
Ok, so my niece had two pieces…
Have Book, Will Cook 