How to make a man growl with pleasure, frugally.....

With the rising cost of meats around my neck of the woods, if you are not the president you can't afford beef, so I have decided to pull out my old tricks for turning a cheap cut of beef into a delicious smack yo mama meal for the hubs.

Way back we used to always raise a beef for the freezer.

Then somewhere along the line a Dr told Danny that his cholesterol was too high and he listened to her and decided that we didn't need a freezer full of beef any longer, or pig......BOO HOO!

Back when we had the whole beef we had all the nice tender scrumptious cuts and the less desirable cuts such as round steak.

Less desirable depending on how it was prepared, that is.

Just so happens I married into a family of FABULOUS cooks that knew all about how to pound a steak and slather it with some great sauce or gravy and slap it in either a pressure cooker or a slow cooker, depending on how limited for time,
and the outcome was an AWESOME dish that would please anyone!

To Danny these meals weren't any less valuable than the perfectly grilled T-bone!

To this day it is a fantasy of his, I know how he thinks and what he dreams about at work all day, to come home to a nice slow cooker full of Swiss Steak!

So around 5:30 PM today, give or take a few minutes either way, you may just hear a rumbling, growling, moaning, squalling, down right scary sound. You will think it's a noreaster moving thru or maybe even a winter tornado but have no fear, it's only Danny meeting head on with his fantasy! For the record, he also acts this way with my meatloaf, but so does Morgan, what can I say? I aim to please!

I have to admit my ways of making said Swiss Steak has changed over the years.

I now have one of those new fangled crock pots that cooks almost as fast as a pressure cooker and with me in the kitchen it has to be watched so I won't burn my meal. I already told you I can't afford beef! I also have really come to love cooking with Chicken broth and keep a box open in the fridge, or have my own homemade stock/broth in the freezer at any given time. I have stumbled upon Tomato Paste in a tube, probably Giada that taught me that one. This stuff is handier than sliced bread! Try it if you haven't! The possibilities are limitless!

Now to the wine......... I always love to cook with wine but since I am not a connoisseur of wine I usually don't even go down that aisle in the grocery store. I had Swiss Steak on my mind tho so I purposely made that trek on my last market day.

Actually........I just needed an excuse to use my gorgeous wine bottle stopper that I picked up somewhere at some cool wine bottle stopper store and haven't gotten around to using it yet.

Teehee! Cute, No?

LOVE!




My local convienence store has a great meat department in it and get this...... The name of the store used to be "Moran's Meat and Grocery"....or something like that. We moved to this town right around the same time the store was undergoing a remodel that included a new name. Yes the owner is some distant kin to Danny.
They have these nice little pre made/ semi-affordable hamburger patties that we grab on occasion for that quick pan fried burger. That was last nights supper. There was one left over for me to have for lunch today and you all know how well a cooked hamburger patty warms up, right? Can you say shoe leather?
However, I had just whipped up this awesome Swiss Steak concoction, I have to add spices until it is just so, and the sauce was out of this world. I decided on a whim to heat my burger patty up in a small skillet with a tad of this sauce to steam it in hopes of keeping the burger moist and flavorful. Well bless my heart, it turned into the best idea I have had today!







Danny and I have also recently made another discovery, seems we have decided that we like our hamburgers on white toast. Forget the hamburger buns! It's toast all the way for us!
My friends this was one delicious burger, patty steamed to perfection with a flavorful tomatoish sauce with onions, green peppers and garlic all in the sauce, mayo and dill pickles!
Mama was moaning and a groaning at lunch time and Daddy will be doing the same at suppertime! Watch out it might be scary!


Beef ~ It's what's for dinner!