Linguine with tomato sauce, green beans, and cheese garlic sticks

Last night's dinner wasn't too exciting - we had the roast and vegetables cooked in the electric pressure cooker. They were great, though. The roast was fork tender and the vegetables were just right.

My other half's cousin showed up today from Louisiana and his impromptu visit reminded me of one of the reasons I keep a well stocked pantry. It's great to know that you can feed unexpected company, whether it's one person or ten!

Tonight's dinner was linguine with homemade sauce, green beans, sliced tomatoes, and homemade cheese garlic sticks.

I often make pasta dishes (and other dishes) with ground turkey. We prefer it over beef and when it's on sale we buy a lot of it. So tonight's dinner was made with ground turkey. A lot of people don't like the texture of it but we've found that if you cook it in a little water, it breaks up easier and the texture ends up being more like ground beef.



Here's the ground turkey cooking in a little water. When it's done, I drain the water, return the turkey to the wok, add one can of Italian stewed tomatoes, a jar of tomato sauce, and some canned mushrooms. To that I add some garlic powder or minced garlic, a bit of oregano and basil, and stir it all well. Then I let it simmer on a low flame for awhile.



Here's the sauce as it's cooking down. Yum! About 10 minutes before the sauce is ready, I cook the pasta (tonight it's whole wheat linguine) in water with just a bit of EVOO added, then drain it and dab a little butter on it.

While the sauce was cooking down I whipped up the cheese sticks using plenty of minced garlic, mozzarella and cheddar, and just a dash of basil. I didn't bother to roll them out;instead I just patted the dough down, pricked it all over with a fork, cut it into strips the size we like and baked them at 375.



We don't like ours very brown and we like them a little doughy so I baked them for about 10 minutes.

The linguine was a hit and so were the bread sticks. It's all gone so no leftovers for tomorrow's lunch. Hmm, we'll more than likely have smoked sausage sandwiches on toasted bread, fresh corn on the cob, and sliced tomatoes.

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.

Those were the days, my friend

There's no entry about dinner tonight because I'm meeting some of the women from the local Flylady group for dinner at Cracker Barrel. I don't know if the man person and 16 year old are going or if they're going to stay here. In lieu of talking about our dinner tonight, I thought I'd address a subject near and dear to my heart...cookbooks.

I love cookbooks, just about any kind of cookbook. Among my favorites are church and community cookbooks and cookbooks that serve as basic guides to the culinary arts. I don't own a single gourmet cooking cookbook and probably never will unless someone gives me one. It just isn't something I'll buy myself because I don't cook that way for the most part.

I especially love old cookbooks - you know, the kind you find in attics, basements, languishing in thrift shops, and sometimes cruelly dumped in the trash. I don't mind the funky smell or the crackling pages or the smudges from years gone by streaking the pages, sometimes causing me to have to squint to read the ingredients. I wish those pages could talk. And I really love the images in those cookbooks. I smile a lot when I see the retro housewives with their perfectly coiffed hair, stiffly starched dresses and aprons, standing so tall in the spotless kitchen, holding a pie in one hand and hubby's pipe in the other. Not all the pictures are pleasant, though. Some of the older cookbooks have the most atrocious food pictures I've ever seen! But they still catch my eye and cause me to giggle and sometimes gasp.

I love to find the books in good condition but even the ones with breaking spines and ragged binding call for me to take them home and add them to the ones that already populate my bookshelves. And that's exactly what I did over the weekend when I went to an estate sale right down the road from me. There weren't many books and precious few cookbooks but I got the three that I wanted.

Here are two pictures of the first one, Treasures For The Home, by Mary O. Fleming, copyright 1952. This book has some yellowing but is in pretty good shape. Even the tabs marking the dividers between sections are in good shape.





I love this second picture. It's for the chapter about personal loveliness. Charm is discussed as are things like having a pleasant personality and being easy to talk to. My oldest sister actually attended "Charm School" in Dallas back in the late 60s or very early 70s. Apparently, charm schools are still around but judging by the people I see most of the time, they have very low attendance rates. ;)

Sometimes when I look through my cookbooks I get a feeling of nostalgia that takes me back to my childhood. Of course, once I'm there I think about the foods and treats of that time and occasionally even long for some of them. I've never bought anything from this company but I really get a kick out of perusing the candy and hard to find grocery items at Hometown Favorites.

Okay, so that's my dip into the days of yore..it's time for me to get back to my house cleaning.

A cheese cracker by any other name..

will still taste as great! That's what I say about these wonderful and easy to make treats that the More-With-Less Cookbook calls "Cheese Sticks".

I first made these back in the mid-80s and they quickly became a favorite in our house. My sons really liked the flavor and I liked the fact that they're economical, wholesome, and so easy to make that I can make a double or triple batch in less than 30 minutes from start to finish.

I don't worry about how they look because no one here cares what they look like and they don't last long enough to even think about it. But you can make them look as pretty and neat as you want by using cookie cutters, cutting straight lines, poking the holes in an even pattern, cutting each square in half diagonally to form triangles, etc. I just roll the dough out, poke it, cut it with a sharp knife, plop it on the baking sheet and bake it.

So here's the recipe for Cheese Sticks from the More-With-Less Cookbook.

Combine:
1 cup grated sharp cheddar cheese (I use 1 1/2 to 2 cups)
1/2 tsp salt and dash pepper
1 1/4 cup flour (whole wheat works well)

Cut in with pastry blender:
1/3 cup butter (margarine works, too)

Sprinkle with:
3 Tbsp milk (water works as does chicken broth)

Toss with fork. Form into ball. Preheat oven to 375.



Turn dough onto floured surface and roll out 1/8 inch thick. Sprinkle liberally with sesame seeds (I don't use the seeds) and run rolling pin over dough. Prick dough all over with a fork.



Cut into 1x2 sticks or 2 inch squares and then into triangles. Place on ungreased cookie sheet and bake 10 minutes or until golden.





I usually add a little garlic powder and some crushed red pepper to the mix and have made this with oregano, rosemary, basil and other spices. Also, if you roll the dough out thicker and shorten the baking time just a tad you have some very tasty mini-bread sticks!

This is a keeper of a recipe. Try it and let me know how your horde likes it.