dinner tonight

We were at the store a few days ago and chuck roast was on sale.  I was feeling a little nostalgic and thinking about my mom, and I remembered that she always cooked her pot roast with Lipton onion soup mix packets.  I remember really loving that meal - the way you could shred the meat with your fork into perfect, tiny bits, the flavor of the carrots and potatoes and onions - yum.  So I bought soup mix (which has a helpful recipe on the back) and chuck roast and tossed it all in the crockpot.  I was in a huge hurry, trying to get it all going and still get Spencer to Discovery Days, so I didn't have time to dice anything.  It took me 3 minutes to get this meal going, and that included making lunch for us and singing to a grouchy baby at the same time.  I put in baby carrots and sliced portobello mushrooms, browned the meat in oil, and added the meat and water with the soup mix blended in to the crockpot.  If I had been thinking, I would have deglazed the pan with the water to get a little extra flavor, but I didn't think of it until it was too late.  Maybe next time.  I made baked potatoes and a salad to go along side.  Not earth shattering, but really tasty, and it made me think of childhood.   Also, I liked the contrast between the soft meat and veggies and the crispy baked potato shell and flaky interior.

So the chuck roast made a ton, and a day later, I made a great beef barley soup out of the leftovers.  I sauteed shallots (since I was out of onions) and celery and a bit of garlic in a little butter.  Once the shallots were translucent, I added a 28 oz can of crushed tomatoes.  I meant to add diced, but grabbed the wrong can accidentally, and once it was open, that was it!  I added a few cups of water to thin it out and then diced and added some of the leftover meat, all the leftover juices, and the leftover mushrooms.  I sliced the leftover baby carrots in half and added a little rosemary and shook in some quick cooking barley.  Then I let the whole thing cook while I made cheddar biscuits and butterscotch pudding.  Both of those recipes were from the old Betty Crocker cookbook that my mom used when I was little, and that I enjoyed a lot of experimenting with in my early teen years.  I served it with a salad and everyone was pretty happy with it.  My husband thinks I can only cook from a recipe - but he is wrong!

I saved a fair amount of the leftover roast, and tonight, we will have basil blue cheese stroganoff.  I haven't tried this one before, but I love stroganoff and basil and blue cheese and beef  are delicious together, so hopefully it will be great.  I am trying to use the things we have instead of heading to the store whenever I am out of something (because at the store, I inevitably find a LOT more to buy than just, say, mushrooms and egg noodles, which is what I need for dinner tonight).  So I will use the dehydrated mushrooms I keep in the fridge for emergency substitution, and I think we will probably have our dinner over rice instead of noodles, and it should all be good.  I am going to just use our basic stroganoff recipe, which isn't written down - basically onions (or shallots, since I am still out of onions) and garlic sauteed with mushroom, and then a little beef broth (or rehydrating liquid from the mushrooms) to catch all the fond on the bottom of the pan, and then sour cream, thinned to taste.  Maybe some spinach added, or not.

I find I am always intrigued by those leftover chain meals, where one meal begets the next in a long string of meals, and I am pleased to have come up with my own.  (I think the chain will probably stop here, though.)  I think the combo of winter and still feeling pretty sad has left me craving comfort food, and all of these meals are high on my comfort list.

I get to S's bedtime feeling completely drained now; all the testing just sucks the energy out of me.  He is so sweet and so good with his brother and so loving - and then, unpredictably, so naughty and frustrating and rude.  Typical little boy behavior, I am sure.  He tries hard.  I found this post to be helpful in trying to change my own reactions to his "typical" behavior, and though I won't say today went perfectly, or even necessarily well, it had a lot of really nice moments.