Beef Taco Bake

I pinned this recipe from Thirty Handmade Days a while ago, thinking it be a nice change of pace from my usual Mexican routine: rice and bean burritos, refried bean nachos, and turkey tacos. I love one-dish meals but I'm usually cooking for one or two, so I am loathe to make a big pan of something that might not change my life.

But then a few things happened. One, it was a 90+ degree day where I had nothing better to do than cook all the things I'd been saving up all week while I sat in class. Two, my brother was going to be by for dinner, eventually. Three, I found some ground beef in the freezer. Four, I was sick to death of burritos.

So I popped open this recipe and that's when things got weird. I love the idea of the shredded tortillas and ground beef all mixed up in a tomatoey, cheesy sauce, and I love the sour cream sitting on top to cool it all off. But I am not a huge fan of tomato soup in recipes, and I wanted to use vegetables to give it a bit more texture, color, nutrition and flavor.

Anyway, here's what I used:


4 burrito sized tortillas, torn into 2" pieces
3/4 lb of ground beef
1 onion, diced
1 bell pepper, diced
1/4 of a large jalapeno, diced
2 cloves of garlic, minced
2 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp cumin
1 can red enchilada sauce
1 cup chunky salsa
2 cups shredded cheddar cheese
1 cup of frozen corn kernels
4 scallions, chopped
sour cream, for serving

Then I did this:

1. Sautee a chopped onion, green pepper, 2 cloves of garlic and a quarter of a jalapeno in bacon fat. (Oh, because another thing that happened is I already had the cast iron skillet out to cook bacon and onion for some baked beans).

2. Remove the veggies and brown the ground beef. I tossed in some chili powder and ground cumin, because who was going to stop me?
3. Toss the veggies back in the skillet, add a can of red enchilada sauce, salsa, 1 cup of shredded cheese and torn tortillas into a casserole.

4. Add a couple handfuls of frozen corn kernels.
5. Put the whole delicious disaster in an 8x8 13x9 baking dish
6. Bake, covered, at 400 degrees for 30 minutes. Uncover for 5 minutes or so to make the cheese crispy and bubbly and try not to dance around the kitchen.
7. Top with remaining shredded cheese and chopped scallions.
8. Completely forget to take a finished picture of the dish and serve with sour cream and beer.

I ended up making a larger pan than the recipe called for, because with the added vegetables, it would have overflowed the 8x8 pan. The four of us ate 80% of it. There was about one good-sized scoop left. I put it in a bowl in the fridge and put it in a burrito for brunch a couple days later. Still. So. Good.

Beans 2 Ways or Ingredient Obsession

During the school year, I am busier than I want to be, and it seems like in the summer there is always something going on that trumps the household stuff. But this year, I am making an effort to live in my house and cook in my kitchen.

I'm also on a frugality/nutrition/novelty/planning-ahead kick. All these forces have combined to make me a dried bean nut! It started out with some obsessive pinning to my food experiments board on Pinterest. And then came the reading about the bean-soaking controversy that apparently rages...somewhere.

In the end, I soaked a pound and a half of black beans, thinking I would throw them all in the slow cooker and make black refried beans like these to fill my tummy and my freezer. But then those beans, when soaked, FILLED a three-quart pot, so I had to expand my horizons. I put about 3 cups of them in the slow cooker in that freakishly simple recipe from 100 Days of Real Food.

Then I took the remaining cup and a half, simmered them on the stove, and started thinking baked beans.

I have only made baked beans once before, so I had about 7 browser tabs open while I compared techniques, recipes and traditions. I referred mostly to these:
-Boston Baked Beans from allrecipes.com
-Baked Beans from Scratch from Delightful Repast

I ended up with:

1/2 pound of bacon, roughly chopped and cooked until it renders some delicious fat, with the rationale that my cast iron skillet can always use a little more seasoning
1 onion, slivered and sauteed in the rendered bacon fat
1 1/2 cup black beans, simmered for about an hour in 6 cups of water

Sauce:
1/2 cup ketchup
2 or 3 TBSP spicy brown mustard
1 TBSP Worcestershire
1/2 tsp black pepper, fresh ground
1 tsp salt
3 TBSP brown sugar

I put the sauce ingredients in a saucepan like I was going to cook them, which I did once before, and then I decided they were going to be in the oven for hours and hours and that was really overkill, so I just scraped them over the beans.

Here's what went wrong:
The beans split while they were simmering, maybe because I cooked them in cold water and it took them so long to get up to a boil so I could simmer them.
I was out of brown sugar and I never have molasses in the house, so I had to wait for my brother, who was on his way over, to finish the sauce.
I don't have a casserole with a lid, so I had to cover the beans with foil.
It was 90 damned degrees out and I was slaving over a hot stove.

Then I got started thinking about what I was going to do with all these baked beans, so I threw together a loaf of no-knead bread to bake on Sunday morning. The beans smell amazing, carmelized and bacony. I can't wait until they happen to my face.

Update: I had them for breakfast with tea and toast Sunday morning. They were a little too rich and sweet, because there were not quite enough beans for the amount of bacon and sugar. I probably could have drained the bacon a little better, too. When I defrost the rest, I plan to serve them with something very simple, like a (not sweet) cornbread, or some slow-cooker roasted pork or beef.

Did I mention none of this wasn't even for dinner tonight? For dinner we had what started out as this Beef Taco Bake, with many modifications. We will have to chat about that later.

Craigslist Chair - Deconstructed and Reconstructed

I monitor the free page on my local Craigslist site daily. I am always looking for a piece of solid wood furniture, pretty much for any part of the house, that needs cleaning and TLC. One day recently, I hit the jackpot. I dragged my brother across town to pick up this chair. I got so excited that I didn't even take a before picture.

It was covered in pet hair, and the cushions were kind of dingy. The rubber webbing for the seat was cracked, dry, and broken in a few spots. Not a problem, because I planned to paint the frame, pull out the rubber webbing and replace it with jute, and make new cushions. Easy peasy!

Fast forward to a year later. I dragged the chair in off the enclosed porch and pulled off the dry, cracked webbing. No problem...EXCEPT that the hammer-wielding demons who put the chair together put in cheap staples and nails that were not removable. I tried to pull them out and the heads came right off the nails.

Crap. So we went to plan B. Kevin did some research and promised me that vinegar (in the spray bottle pictured below) would dissolve the wood glue holding the strips of wood ruined by nails and staples. I sprayed and scraped, sprayed and hammered, sprayed and mopped the living room floor (oops) over the course of one afternoon and then I was able to hammer the pieces loose. You can see one piece on the towel below and the other waiting to meet its end.

Eventually I got the pieces of wood off and bought an eight-foot 1x3 from Home Depot for $1.27. I had the guy cut it in half so it would fit in Thor, my Civic. At home, I measured the chair and cut two pieces, 23 inches each, with my trusty $5 toolbox saw. Yep, while wearing flip-flops and a dress.

I used this thingamabobber -  that I bought for a dollar at a yard sale because a lady should have tools, even if she doesn't know what they are called, exactly, really, or at all - did the job of shaving a bit off one end of the board to make it fit in the slot in the chair. The piece of wood I was replacing was narrower.

This part of the project, cutting, fitting and installing the replacement board, took less than an hour. I could have kept it to 30 minutes, except one of the screws hit a knot in the new wood and I stripped the head and had to go rummaging for wood screws.

I had very few choices, but the smaller one worked.

BUT I managed to outdo my own personal rule that every project takes 3 trips to the hardware store. I got this done in just one trip to the HD for wood!

This is starting to look like a chair! I am really excited to buy some jute strapping (next time I get a Jo-Ann's coupon) and then I have to track down foam and fabric for the cushions. Reading chair, here I come!

Black Raspberries! Literally homemade!!

My yard grows a few things well: a butterfly bush, forsythia, tall, grassy, mower-resistant weeds, poison ivy (like a boss) and black raspberries. Since the raspberries are currently my only food crop, I hold them very dear. But they grow in small numbers. One Saturday a couple weeks ago, I picked a single cup of them and made the teensiest batch of jam.

Over the next week, I picked another generous cup and decided to try my hand at black raspberry shrub. Fruity syrup with vinegar sounds a little crazy at first, but it's a formula I had come across in some of my vintage cookbooks and homemaking books, and when I saw this recipe at Food in Jars, I had to try it.

Like Marisa at Food in Jars says, I mashed the berries with a nearly equal amount of sugar, put them in a class spaghetti sauce jar, and ignored them in the fridge for about 5 days. (Um, she didn't say to use a spaghetti sauce jar, that is just how I roll. Don't judge her.) Then I strained the syrup (I need a food mill or something, this metal sieve and spoon thing is for the birds).

I ended up with 1 1/3 cups of syrup, so I added about 2/3 cup of apple cider vinegar to bring the total to 2 cups. Then I put the shrub back in the same (newly washed) jar. I put a piece of plastic wrap over the opening before I screwed the lid on because a) I am classy, and ii) the lid smells a little tomato-y, even after a fun-filled ride through the dishwasher.

Will it be delicious? Very possibly! I am trying to let it sit a couple days to "mellow" and I'll bring it to my brother and sister-in-law's on Friday. They are adventurous eaters, and I feel like maybe I will need a support system for this.

Furthermore, can we talk about my blackberry fixation these days? I bought this Wild Black beer the other day because it is blackberry flavored and has a creepy purple dog on the label. It's too sweet and not fruity enough, but it satisfied my curiosity.

Prepare for Christmas: The List

Every year, usually around December first, I start a list of people I will exchange Christmas gifts with. My immediate family is pretty small, just my parents, my brother and my sister-in-law. Over the years the list of family we exchange gifts with has gotten shorter as kids grow up and the economy shrinks everyone's disposable income.

Then there are a few friends, but that list is short, too, since I introduced the "Why don't we get together for a nice dinner in January?" policy.

Then come the co-workers, including the few people I supervise. For these people, I'm always looking for something unique, personal, inexpensive, and fair, so that each person in the group gets something that is exactly comparable to all the others. These kinds of gifts of obligation are my least favorite. Of course I appreciate my co-workers and of course I don't spend enough time expressing that, but something about doing it at Christmas just feels false, like I can never quite do the right thing to express how much I appreciate them in a season where we are all too busy to stop and appreciate a damn thing.

And then there is a Secret Santa in at least one group, and then...my list isn't short anymore.

I hate the idea of giving gifts just to have something in your hand at a party. I feel like everyone loses when I stand in front of the pre-boxed gifts at Target and pick the thing that will get me closest to the $10.00 gift limit set by the governing body of each social group.

Always, as the pressure mounts and the Christmas countdown accelerates and the lines get longer and my bank account gets smaller, I wish I had planned ahead. I start getting really creative with homemade gift ideas when the only way to finish them is to cut my sleep down to zero and eat Taco Bell every night so I don't have to give up any precious craft space for cooking. (Which, yes, defeats the purpose of homemade gifts to save money.)

So this year, I'm doing it differently. I'm going to start my list in the summer, set up space in my guest room for each project, and prepare everything I can, short of the edibles. Maybe I'll try shopping for those, too, stocking up on flour and sugar, sweetened condensed milk and chocolate chips, as soon as it's practical.

If you'd like to play along at home, today is the day to make your list. Don't forget anyone:

• immediate family
• secondary family: Now is the time to plant the seed of a Secret Santa gift exchange for everyone over the age of, say, 15, or a household-to-household Secret Santa exchange if you have a herd of in-laws, nieces and nephews.
• friends
• co-workers: Again, is it possible to inspire your office to give to a charitable organization or all chip in for a special lunch instead of individual gifts?
• business associates: Not a category I have, but I know it's a big one for some individuals and small business-people
• the "Help": This can be anyone from the paper boy to your children's teachers, all those people you have some kind of non-personal relationship with that you feel a need to recognize during the holidays - more on this group later as we plan gifts.
• charity - Think now about what organizations you would like to, or will be asked to, support as the holiday season goes on.