Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Beef tips and gravy over rice, served with vegetables

Tonight's dinner, Beef Tips with rice and gravy and cooked vegetables, was exceptionally good and will be on our menu on a regular basis. Unfortunately, there are no pictures of it because it got woofed down quickly!

Generally, beef tips are made with a pricey cut of beef like sirloin steak or even porterhouse steak. Well, I don't know about you but that's out of my price range! However, chuck roast pieces make a good substitute if they're cooked the right way.

I bought three chuck roasts on sale for $1.79 lb and wanted to cook one but since I'm trying to reduce our consumption of meat, I hoped to make it last for two meals. That's hard to do around here but I gave it some thought this morning and came up with a plan.

About one third of the roast I cut into bite sized pieces and the rest I left as one piece. I browned all the meat in the pressure cooker then removed the chunks and put them in the fridge. To the large portion of roast, I added one cup of water mixed with half an envelope of onion soup mix and one envelope of brown gravy mix. I let that come to pressure and cook for 22 minutes with natural release. When it was finished, I put the beef chunks back in and added onions, carrots, whole green beans and thickly sliced zucchini fresh from the garden. I let it come to pressure again and cooked it for 10 minutes, again with natural release. About half way through the 10 minutes I started rice cooking in the microwave.

Once the pressure had been released I put the large piece of meat and half the vegetables in the fridge for another night and removed the chunks of meat to a small bowl. I turned the cooker on brown and when the liquid was hot, I added about 1/3 cup of water with 2 spoons of flour blended in. Using a whisk I whisked that well until the watery soup mixes and meat juices had turned into a nice thick gravy.

I put the meat chunks back in and turned the cooker to the warm setting. Once it was hot we had the 'beef tips and gravy' over rice with some of the most delicious vegetables I've ever had! Every bite of meat was eaten as were the rice and gravy. It really was a scrumptious dinner and the remainder of the roast is safely tucked in it's bed of veggies in the back of the fridge.

Hopefully it will last until tomorrow or Friday night.

2 comments:

Bobbisox said...

So Denise, how is that browning function, easy to use? It seemed from the PC group that it might not be too "function-able". I haven't even done my water test. Still on the kitchen table.

CookinsForMe said...

Thanks for stopping by. :)

The browning function works very well! I've browned a whole chicken and the roast and the cut up beef and they all browned beautifully and were quite tasty!

Oh, you need to do that water test and get going. You're missing out. :)