My grandmother use to come and stay with us while my Dad and step Mom were at work. She was essentially the baby sitter. She helped out around the house, cooked for us since we were too young to cook. I remember her making these and I always really enjoyed them. I haven’t made them in a while and today I decided to make some.

Ingredients:

• Leftover mashed potatoes (cold)
• Flour
• Butter

Take the leftover mashed potatoes and pat them out like you would a hamburger, not as big though. Then take the potato cake patty and roll it around in the flour, making sure you coat it pretty good. You may have to flatten it out again once you are done. Once you do that put the potato cake in a skillet with butter already melted. Make sure you don’t turn the skillet up too high, you don’t want to burn it. A medium heat will work best for this. Brown it like you would a grilled cheese.

Once they are done plate them up and you can either have them with salt and pepper or if you really want to try something different, put some jelly on top of them. They make an excellent lunch item.

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The other night I made a really good pot of stew. I got a lot of compliments on it. That’s the first time that everyone agreed that it was really good. I froze some of it and as I was getting it out of the freezer to have again for supper tonight I remembered that I had not wrote down how I fixed it, so I thought I had better before I forget it!

The Meat:

I used deer tenderloin for the meat in the stew. When we have our deer processed we have them to cut the tenderloin into small pieces. I took the tenderloin and washed it, got all the blood out of it that I could. I then took the meat and put it onto the George Foreman grill. I added salt and pepper to one grill full of meat. The next batch of meat that I put on I put some Montreal Steak Seasoning onto the meat. I would have used it on all of the meat but you really don’t want to overpower the stew with Montreal Steak Seasoning.

The great thing about preparing the meat this way is that it is already thoroughly cooked through so when you add it to your stew pot you’re only adding it so it can absorb the flavors of everything else. This will also allow your meal to be finished a whole lot quicker.

The Stew:

Now obviously you can add as much or as little to a stew as you’d like but these are the ingredients I added:

• 1 onion, diced
• 1 green pepper, diced
• 1 tomato, diced
• 3 cans tomato sauce
• 1 can peas, drained
• 1 can green beans, drained
• 1 can whole kernel corn, drained
• 2 can carrots, drained
• 2 tablespoons tobassco sauce
• 1 tablespoon ground black pepper
• Water

Mix all of those ingredients up in a big stew pot. One of the reasons this meal was quick is because I did not put any potatoes into the stew. The potatoes would have taken a long time to soften up. If you want potatoes but still have a quick meal you might consider using canned potatoes.

You might also want to do the stew before you fix the meat on the grill. This way your stew is already getting cooked while your meat is cooking, which lessens the cooking time. It also allows you to simply add the meat to the stew pot as it finishes cooking on the grill.

I didn’t specify an amount of water I used. I used almost a gallon but not completely. I didn’t want the stew to be too thick but also not too thin. This is one of those things that you just have to decide for yourself with your own eyes. However thick or thin you think the stew should be, adjust your water accordingly. If you add too much water and want to get it thick again, add another can of tomato sauce. Keep tomato sauce on hand, it’s useful in a lot of things in the kitchen. Any brand will do, it’s all the same. The cheaper, the better!

The stew is done once the green peppers have softened and the onions have went somewhat transparent. In my opinion, the stew will get better over the course of a couple of days. If you can’t eat it all in a few days, freeze it like we do. It will last for at least a month in the freezer. It’s really nice to be able to pull it out of the freezer on a night you don’t feel like cooking, throw it into the microwave and have an almost fresh bowl of stew. Fresher than what you’d get from a can.

Technorati Tags: cooking, recipe, stew, venison, deer stew, venison stew, stewpot, southern food

Last night I made some meatballs that I thought were really good so I thought I’d make sure to get the recipe onto my blog so I wouldn’t lose it! I don’t recall how much of each ingredient that I used, I just kind of added a little bit of this and a little bit of that until I thought it smelled right.

So the first thing I did was took the ground beef, the usual 3lbs that we get on sale at the grocery store, put it into a large bowl. I then added a little bit of soy sauce, chili powder, montreal steak seasoning, barbecue sauce (Jack Daniel’s, spicy original), onion powder, garlic powder and 2 eggs. I think that is all I put into them. If we had onions and green peppers I would have diced those up and added them in, but of course, we didn’t! If you’re wondering, the eggs help keep the meatballs from falling apart.

I mixed everything up with my hands and then rolled out 1-inch balls. I didn’t measure them of course, just estimated. Some of them were about 2 inches. The 3lbs of meat made about 2 & 1/2 plates of meatballs.

Once I had got the meatballs rolled out I put them into the frying pan and fried them until they were done. Rotating them occasionally so that all sides got browned. After each batch, it’s best to clean the junk out of the frying pan. You don’t have to wash it, just scrape all that junk out.

Once I had got them all fried up I put them on paper towels so that the remaining grease could drain. Once I felt they were as un-greasy as they would get, I put them into the croc-pot. Once they were in the croc-pot I poured two cans of mushroom gravy over them. I let them cook for a while to let the flavors soak in.

With the meatballs we had mashed potatoes and a can of peas. It was really good. I am going to have some for my lunch today!

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Last night I made a big pot of chili. We usually make a big pot of chili because we eat on it the rest of the week and after we’re done with it that week, we’ll freeze the rest of it. I think this pot of chili that I made last night was one of the best pots that I have made in a long time. I figured since this was one of the best I’ve made in a while I’d jot down the recipe, I figured I’d put it on my blog because if I don’t I’ll lose the recipe!

1 - Very large can of Bush’s chili beans in mild sauce
1 - Large can of tomato sauce
2 - Cans of Hunt’s Seasoned Diced Tomato Sauce for Chili
1 - Can of Rotel diced tomatoes and green chilies
3 - lbs of ground beef, browned and drained.
1/4 - cup of Asian Sweet & Sour Sauce (will be a deep red color)
2 - Tablespoons of salt
2 - Tablespoons of black pepper
2 - Tablespoons of yellow mustard
3 - Tablespoons of ketchup
1 - Tablespoon of sugar
Water - Use as much as you desire.

Other than the canned stuff, I’m not exactly sure how much of everything I used. I don’t measure things out. I usually just add to the big stew pot as I think of things to add. The sweet and sour sauce, it seems like I used more than 1/4 of a cup but again, I’m not really sure.

You can obviously use as much ground beef as you like, little or more. Everyone in my family prefers a really meaty chili. It’s always a battle for me to please them because I like my chili with a little bit of soupiness to it!

Also, I really like my chili with some onion and diced green peppers in it. No one else here likes an onion in their chili and we didn’t have any green peppers. Both of those make the chili, any pot I’ve ever made, a lot better.

Hopefully sometime in the future I can make a video with this recipe.

Technorati Tags: recipe, chili, chili recipe, sweet and sour chili, spicy chili