What are You Cooking the Week of January 7, 2018?

[BakerAunt]

I'm making soup on the wood stove for a late lunch, and for lunches throughout the week. It's my usual throw together of carrots, onion, celery, (yellow) bell pepper, garlic, ground turkey, Bob's Red Mill Vegi-Soup (mixture of lentils, split peas, and a bit of barley), along with additional pearl barley. I use my own chicken/turkey stock from the freezer. The seasoning this time is Herbs de Provence from Penzey's (salt-free, by the way). I'll add some minced parsley near the end of the cooking time.

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[Joan Simpson]

I made BBQ out of left over pork tenderloin and fries tonight.

[luvpyrpom]

I did all my big cooking at the end of last week. Froze some of the dishes so will be eating out of the freezer for the rest of week. Other than cooking fresh veggies for sides, I think that will be the most of my cooking this week. Tonight I did a quick stir-fry with lotus root and sugar snap peas to go with the leftover braised taro root.

[navlys]

Well I'm cleaning out the fridge and freezer and made a meaty tomato sauce to serve over sausage filled pasta pillows. I almost emptied my spice cabinet and threw "everything but the kitchen sink" into the sauce. Very tasty.

I also bagged some of almost every spice I have in my pantry. Pfew!!!

[aaronatthedoublef]

I roasted a chicken. I stuck an orange in the cavity (usually I use a lemon but I didn't have any lemons) and I rubbed butter and salt on the skin.

I also made a bistro steak. Bistro is what they call the cut and not a "bistro" recipe. It's kind of confusing. It is from the teres major which is from the shoulder and sometimes called a shoulder tender. It looks a lot like a tenderloin but is a third the price. The only place I have seen it around here is Whole Foods. It's a nice, tender piece of steak that has good flavor.

I use these for dinner and then use the leftovers for lunches.

Then I made pizza for dinner. Pizza has become our standard Sunday dinner. I usually will make a big batch of dough that will last for two to three pizza nights. I make five pizzas and save some for lunches on Monday.

My wife has a ground turkey recipe for me to make tonight. I hate the texture of raw ground turkey so shaping patties will not be pleasant.

[Mike Nolan]

I get annoyed when stores label cuts with non-standard names that don't give you any idea what primal it comes from. I once saw a big hunk of meat in one of the local stores called a 'steamship roast'. It was in the evening after the butchers had left for the day, so I couldn't ask anybody what it was. I did eventually find it but it is not a recognized cut. (It's the round with the rump cut off, which explained why it was so big.)

I looked in my meat cutting books and did not see bistro steak as a recognized cut from the teres major muscle in the shoulder. It is sometimes called a petite tender or the shoulder tender.

Here's a page on the teres major.

[aaronatthedoublef]

There are two Whole Foods (WF) in town, one with a more skilled butchery than the other. The more skilled butchers have always had bistro steaks and they are labeled as such without the teres major designation. When I was working there I tried finding it on the internet only to find recipes for how to cook steaks like in a bistro - not very useful for helping customers. My more knowledgeable colleagues told me where the cut was located and using diagrams of cattle I figured out where it was from and what it was called.

The second Whole Foods only began carrying this cut recently and they actually have it labeled "teres major" bistro steak but they do not know what the "teres major" is. The people there are good people who try to provide customer service but very few of them go home and study after work (a few in the specialty department do).

I bought roasted turkey and roast beef for my kids lunch. Now I am buying chicken breast and bistro steaks and roasting them myself. It saves some money and I have a little more control over what I am feeding them. And they do not know the difference.

[Mike Nolan]

After looking at the amount of sodium in the sliced deli meats at the store, I'm thinking of doing my own turkey breasts, I just wonder how much sodium they've injected into it?

How do you slice it?

[aaronatthedoublef]

The turkey breasts we had didn't have any sodium injected in them according to the packaging.

I have been slicing short slices diagonally against the bias. I may try slicing it the long way to get longer strips.

[BakerAunt]

Lunch meat is a quandary. After all the discussion on nitrates, I switched to nitrate-free lunch meats--fine, if refrigeration is close by--but not a good idea if it is not. I then worried about the salt--and the fact that it usually took at least three slices to make a decent sandwich. I finally gave up on lunch meat but will buy the nitrate-free salami for pizza (but the salt is still an issue there).

The healthy choice is to cook your own meat and slice it--and to watch out for whether it has a sodium solution injected into it.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by BakerAunt.

[aaronatthedoublef]

There was a lengthy article in the NY Time years ago that talked about nitrate-free. It included an interview with the head of Applegate at the time. He said that "nitrate-free" is a USDA designation that the feds require them to use because they do not add chemical nitrates to their meats. They do however, use celery salt as part of the curing process and this has a chemical reaction which causes the salt to produce nitrates so he felt uncomfortable using "nitrate-free" but did so to keep the feds happy.

[BakerAunt]

Interesting. So, are the Applegate meats actually any healthier? Inquiring minds (and their pocketbooks) want to know.

[Italiancook]

I cooked lamb loin chops last evening. I guess all this talk about salt is affecting me. After eating one, with no-salt raw veggies, I thought there was a lot of salt in the meat. I didn't put salt on them. I don't think they were injected with a sodium solution, but there was definitely something prolonging in them.

I have a large pot of tomato sauce on the stovetop. It'll cook for 4 hours. Most of it is for the freezer. I want to use some of it for pizza sauce, which leads me to a question:

Is pizza sauce supposed to be thicker than tomato sauce for pasta?

[aaronatthedoublef]

I can't tell you about whether celery salt is any better for you than nitrates produced in a lab. I would imagine that there are multiple millions of grant dollars and a bunch of articles on that can be written on this topic.

[Mike Nolan]

It always seems to me that pizza sauce is just a bit thicker than spaghetti sauce, though I know restaurants that use the same marinara for both.

Most pizza enthusiasts say pizza sauce should be applied rather sparingly. I've actually been known to use tomato paste straight from the can on a pizza.

With the salt in the crust, sauce, toppings like sausage or pepperoni and the cheese, pizza is going to be largely absent from my diet. :sigh:

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