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The Allred Home - One new wife figuring out homemaking

Recipes, Sunday

March 15, 2009

Slow-cooked Roast

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Sundays can feel very long sometimes.  Our church’s services last three hours each Sunday.  We try to eat lunch right before but we just cannot help being hungry when we get home.  Jacob has always been quite impatient for food, and this is exacerbated on Sundays.   So, our favorite meals on the wonderful Sabbath day are meals that are ready when we get home.  Right now for us that means crock pot meals.  Our two favorites currently are from his mother’s kitchen, chili and pot roast.  I’ve always made pot roast in the oven but Jacob and I have perfected the art (or are at least headed there) of slow-cooked chuck roast.

Ingredients:

  • 1 to 3 lbs chuck roast
  • 3-5 red potatoes chopped to large bite sizes
  • 3-5 carrots chopped to about same size
  • 1 onion microwaved for 5-6 minutes (not burning or melting)
  • 1 can of cream of mushroom soup

High for 6 hours or Low for 11-12

We put it on High from about 10 or 11 until 4:30-5.  There is plenty of room for timing with a slow cooker; we usually can just put it on our plates when we get home.  Please be sure to check the temperature with a meat thermometer before chowing down, just in case.

To prepare the pot, we place the meat in first, and place the potatoes and carrots on opposite sides of the roast, while the onion is microwaving.  Then top the meat with the onions and soup.

This past time we dressed up the meal with gravy.  I took the juices from the pot, the moisture released from the roast and the soup that was free and not coating the meat or vegetables, and put them in a warmed frying pan.  I whisked the juices as I added flour, giving the flour enough time to cook a bit and thicken the gravy.  Amazing topping.  This meal is also served great on top of rice, and as usual, this helps it go further.

Food Storage, Miscellaneous Thoughts

March 14, 2009

Sam’s Club Membership

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Jacob has always been set on getting a membership to one of the nearby HUGE stores.  I really feel they have no other name, they are huge, everything they sell is huge, you get the picture.  So early in our marriage, before school started, I went shopping, price shopping.  I walked all over both Sam’s and CostCo, we have both in the same main shopping area 30 minutes away, and wrote down the prices of the things we could possibly want. This is a very important part, you cannot forget to do this at the store you normally shop at as well, which for our non-fresh food happens to be walmart.

After price comparing, and having a bad experience at Costco, we bought our Sam’s club membership.  Online we saw they had a wonderful reward for students wanting a membership: $15 gift card.  Sweet.  That made the price the same for a CostCo or Sam’s membership and I feel more comfortable at Sam’s, and they sell cheap gas there for Jacob.  But when we bought the membership the lady claimed they just stopped doing the student membership.  We bought it anyway, but Jacob complained to corporate because their website was then wrong.  And they said just go back in and we will fix it.  We got our gift card from Sam’s for being a student, and they had another, newer offer and gave us the money for both of them.  Therefore, we only had to save about $10 this year to pay for the extra membership expense.

We really love our membership.  Jacob stops there on the way home from work for gas.  I love buying my meat, cheese, milk, and cereal there.  Those are our best finds.

We eat a lot of meat for two people so this was an important thing to look at, Sams for some reason has the most reasonable meat.  Ground Lean Beef (90/10), which is the kind we perfer, is found there cheaper than the Walmart 85/15.  And as we have found out on another trip we can get about-to-expire meat even cheaper at Sam’s too.

Dairy is something else we fly through.  We eat cold cereal nearly every morning for breakfast, sometimes I switch it up for Jacob and make him eggs.  We discovered the name brand milk (2% is around $2.30) for a whole dollar cheaper than the Walmart brand, and sometimes milk is found closer to four dollars! We also lover our cheddar.  They sell the big 2 lb blocks for a fraction of the unit price found elsewhere.  And with cheddar you can make it last longer in the freezer, if you don’t think you can use the entire block soon.

Cereal can be up to 10 cents less per oz.  One draw back is you have to buy two bags at once of any given cereal.  But we go through cereal so fast we do not mind.  Frosted Mini Wheats, Life, and Honey Nut Cheerios are some of our favorites.  And you just rotate which one you use, unless it is life which both bags get used before a different kind is opened!

We manage to find other ways to save money, buying a huge 25 lbs bag of flour for the price of only two 5 lbs bags.  Or buying spaghetti sauce in three packs to save a few cents per unit as well as stock up on some food storage.

A few words of warning that we have run into:

  • Check the use by date, always! Can you really eat 12 packages of saltines in 2 months?  Some items have great dates, but it really depends on your situation and affinity for the product.
  • Some things are not a deal.  This is especially true if you are an avid coupon clipper.  Fruit in winter is not very cheap at Sam’s and can usually be found cheaper elsewhere.  In general, check your prices on a regular basis, or at least a seasonal basis.
  • Here today, gone tomorrow.  Do not depend on what the store will have in stock.  Each Sam’s get different deals and they all have rotating inventory.  And every time I’ve been in there I’ve heard at least 2 people say to their spouse/shopping buddy, “They move stuff around every time I come here, I can never find anything.”  I haven’t personally had that problem, but apparently others have.

Maybe a membership could be right for you, it truely depends on your circumstances, it might make more sense if you have 4 kids than if it is just the two of you.  But I love not having to go meat shopping every week, because we keep a month’s supply in the freezer.  It is definitely worth a look.

Recipes

March 13, 2009

Best Brownies

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On my first finale of my first Dessert Week I will now share my first photo on this blog.  One year ago today, Jacob and I celebrated his birthday.  I drove down 1 hour away from where I lived, to where he lived at the time and made him a heart shaped brownie and a picnic dinner.  We then went to a local park and celebrated by making sandwiches and watching the sun set over the water. It was a wonderful day!

Jacob's Birthday

Ingredients:

  • 1/2 C oil or melted butter
  • 1 C sugar
  • 1 t Vanilla
  • 2 eggs
  • 1/2 C all-purpose flour
  • 1/3 C baking cocoa
  • 1/4 t baking powder
  • 1/4 t salt

Beat those wet ingredients until thoroughly mixed.  Add the dry ingredients. Do not over mix this batter or they won’t be soft brownies but tough ones, one tip that helps is whisk the dry ingredients together before adding them.  Place the batter in a 9×9 pan.

Bake at 350 F for 20 to 25 minutes or until brownies pull away from the pan around the edges but is still moist.  The ever-useful toothpick tip will not work here, at least if you have yummy, gooey brownies.

Recipes

March 12, 2009

Peanut Butter Blossoms

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I wish I could say that for this Dessert Week that I made each day’s dessert for my loving, deserving husband, but alas, he only get’s the one posted tomorrow for his birthday (I’ll make a note for his next birthday).  However, we made these wonderful, scrumptious cookies for our very first 6 month anniversary (of dating).  It was a lot of fun, but also a lot of work.  We ended up with a huge 6-kiss cookie out of pure weariness.  This is one of the classic Christmas cookies from my childhood, and is a lot of fun with a group! (Be sure to buy extra kisses for snacking, they disappear like crazy!)

Ingredients:

  • 1/2 C shortening or margarine
  • 1/2 C peanut butter
  • 1/2 C white granulated sugar
  • 1/2 C brown sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1 t vanilla
  • 1 3/4 C flour
  • 1 t baking soda
  • 1/2 t salt
  • 2 T milk
  • Hershey’s Kisses!

Cream the first ingredients, then beat in other wet ingredients. Sift dry ingredients and gradually add, try not to over mix. And finally finish off the recipe with the milk.

Roll the dough into balls. Keep them small, maybe 1″ diameter spheres.  Then toss the ball into a bowl of white sugar and coat it gently.

Bake a sheet of these in a375 F oven until the tops are slightly cracked, this takes about 5 minutes. Be unwrapping the kisses now, if you haven’t already. Pull out the batch and squish down each ball into a cookie with a kiss in the middle.  Put the cookie sheet back in for a minute and a half more. My recipe card also states that a double batch of this yummy cookie makes over 100 cookies!  Plenty for you, the family, the guests, and Santa.

These cookies are yummy to eat right out of the oven (or rather, right off the cooling rack) because the chocolate is still gooey.  But chocolate is good in any form so letting them cool and waiting until after dinner is also a good choice.  One piece of advice I have is that if you are going to take these somewhere, say a potluck or a Christmas party, I would press the kisses flat while they are cooling.  This trick facilitates stacking and compact storage in a single container of a good amount of cookies and the least likelihood of a cookie loosing its chocolate friend.

I apologize for the Christmas theme in March, I’m already getting sad knowing that the holiday is so far away.  But these cookies are just so associated with the holiday for me I almost cannot think of them in a better situation (although I’m sure there are plenty of other great celebrations to use this yummy cookie for!).

Recipes

March 11, 2009

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

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Here is another one for Dessert Week!  I love oatmeal raisin cookies.  Maybe it is because I, in a way, trick myself into the idea that I am eating a “healthy” food, I mean it has raisins and oatmeal just like a good granola does, right, right?  And Jacob really enjoyed how these turned out, not an undercooked softness or a gingersnap breaking cookie, but a cookie with a crunchy oatmeal with still-soft raisins, perfect!

Ingredients

  • 1 cup (1/2 pound or 2 sticks)  butter, softened
  • 1 cup brown sugar, packed
  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
  • 1 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 2 large eggs, well beaten
  • 1 Tbsp vanilla
  • 3 cups rolled oats (not instant)
  • 1 1/2 cups raisins

Bake at 350 F for 10-12 minutes.  A while in the freezer with some extra baking soda gives the cookies a bit more shape, but more flour might also help the problem.  (I put the balls out on a metal pan right after I put the stoneware cookie sheet in the oven. Then just filled the partially cooled stoneware with some more chilled cookies for the next batch.  Some more time in the freezer might have been good, but I don’t need to save some for more batches, this is a small enough batch on its own.)

Elise, the blogger who shared this recipe, reminds us: do not overbake these cookies. The edges should be brown, but the rest of the cookie should be very light in color.

The nutmeg was a bit strong.  I’m learning that although I enjoy nutmeg, it can really take over your tastebuds if its ratio is too high in a recipe, I’ll cut it in half the next time I bake these wonderfully scrumptious cookies.

I found this recipe at Simple Recipes.  But I found another one as well, and would love to make this cookie with an applesauce base by David Lebovitz.

Recipes

March 10, 2009

Crazy Cake

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In continuation of Dessert Week for my husband, I submit an old family favorite.  My mother told me my father’s mother (born in 1910) had used this recipe because in the Great Depression eggs were hard to come by.  The name is from the fact that making a cake without eggs is just “crazy.”  The suggestion of any other kind of cake was futile around my birthday, so I guess you could say I was crazy about it, ;)

Ingredients:

  • 2 C sugar
  • 3 C all-purpose flour
  • 6 T cocoa
  • 1 t salt
  • 2 t baking soda
  • 2 t vanilla
  • 2 T vinegar
  • 10 T melted butter
  • 2 C cold water

I feel like these instructions are quite wanting without pictures but I will try to explain the amazing fun this cake can be.

Place all the first five ingredients in a 9×13 baking dish (I love that this can be so easily halved and put into a 9×9!), and mix well with a fork.  This should result in a consistently speckeled powder.  Next, carve a smilie face into the powder, two eyes and a smiling mouth.  One eye is for the vanilla, the other for the vinegar and the smile is about to be a yellow, buttery smile in need of a good brushing.  Enjoy your cute creation.

Now enjoy the destruction with the addition of the 2 cups of cold water and fluff with your fork.  Make sure all the powder has been mixed in well, as a youngster I would usually miss the corners and there would be quite a bit of unedible dry flour down there when the cake was sliced.

Now put in the oven for 30-40 minutes at 350 F.  Use a toothpick to check if it is done.  Stab the middle of your cake, when it comes out clean your cake is ready.  But be sure to be gentle when pulling it out and pushing it in while checking, this cake has a tendency to drop in the middle.

Top with your favorite fudge or chocolate icing, or with my mother’s favorite: confectioner’s sugar (a good substitute for my icing-hating hubby), and voila! An eggless chocolate cake that will not last long in almost any home.

Recipes

March 9, 2009

Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies

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Welcome to Dessert Week!  In celebration of my husband’s birthday this Friday I will be sharing some of his (and my) favorite recipes all week long.

I’ll start off with one we made for the first time last night.  I got the recipe out of the 1981 Deseret Recipes.  I really like this book because it gives me simple ideas, not all the convoluted 25-ingredient recipes of other books.  This is mainly a food-storage and simple vegetables kind of book.  I made the peanut butter oatmeal cookies. The following is the recipe cut into thirds (it originally made “9 dozen” cookies, we are only 2 people, have mercy!)

Ingredients:

  • 1 stick of softened margarine or 1/2 C soft shortening
  • 1/3 C granulated white sugar
  • 1/2 C brown sugar, packed
  • 1 egg
  • 1/2 C peanut butter
  • 1 C all-purpose flour (actually 1 1/6, so a heaping cup?)
  • 2/3 t baking soda (again, eyeball more than a half teaspoon)
  • 1/4 t salt
  • 2/3 C oatmeal, uncooked

Beat first set of ingredients until smooth, then beat in the egg and peanut butter one at a time.  Now add the flour and its buddies.  And finally add the oatmeal.

Bake at 350 F for 12 to 15 minutes.

I loved plopping these cookies, the batter was held together nicely by the peanut butter.  However, this also resulted in a sort of dry cookie, but we both concluded they were perfect with a glass of milk!  Jacob had the same luck when he scraped them off, nice and clean.  Maybe I need to add more flour to my other cookie recipes, since they are always so flat and sticky.  Jacob agrees we should make them again, so one more recipe on the favorites list.

Recipes

March 8, 2009

(Slightly) Wheat Pancakes

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Jacob tried very hard to surprise me on Valentine’s day morning with hash browns in bed.  He failed miserably and I ended up with cereal, but I gave credit for the effort!  That afternoon, he actually searched for a recipe and we had hash browns with cheese and ham for our dinner.  They were amazing, but we were still hungry.  So I made us some pancake batter; I altered it by adding a bit of wheat flour.  They turned out really good.  Jacob is a very good flipper, he even made pancakes in the shape of our initials, he is such a pro!

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1/4 cup wheat
  • 3 tablespoons sugar
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup milk
  • 2 large eggs, separated (whites whipped)
  • 3 tablespoons butter, melted

We used a non-stick frying pan over medium heat.  We used a large pan so we could fit 2 at a time, obviously a griddle would work well also, but we aren’t so lucky to have one.  We waited for bubbles to flip (sometimes I need to peak to check if it is brown), then it won’t even take half that time for the other side.

I love eating breakfast foods, all the time.  And hash browns and pancakes are my favorite!  I would like to add sausages or bacon to our normal repertoire of meat.  And bacon is such a good flavoring for so many dishes!

House Chores

March 7, 2009

Share-a-sock Drawer

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Jacob is an amazing husband.  I realized the other day while vacuuming before mopping up the kitchen that it was the first time I had actually used the vacuum, we’ve had it for months (and used it! With my hair this is quite unavoidable).  Another chore that Jacob is better than me at is laundry.  Well, maybe that is too harsh, but he has some Monk-like tendencies and I really don’t care if I wear a wrinkled t-shirt every single day.  But he needs to look nice for work so it makes sense as well.  He is qutie on top of things like dryer sheets and hanging up shirts right when the dryer is finished.  But I’m learning so he can be happy if I do the laundry.

But we like to fold together.  Neither of us is really into folding the others clothes or putting them away.  We have both done it for the other and will continue to but it really is easier to just grab your own and do it since there is only the two of us.

Our one roadblock, however, has been socks.  First you have to pick them out of all clingy fabrics, you know they get stuck inside your shirts too, then you have to match them and finally split them into his and hers piles.  This seemed too much for us and since we wear almost identical socks anyway, and when he was out he would grab a pair of mine anyway…, we decided to consolidate our collection.  Obviously this means he will have to avoid the pink edged ones in the morning, and I his black dress socks but these are minor obsticals when set beside our beautiful new sock drawer.  Thats right, in the apartment where we had to use every bit of closet space (which is a lot) we made some room for an entire draw of socks.

My socks used to be in my underware drawer and his with some of his folded up shirts.  But at Lowe’s we found a sweet little sweater caddy to hang in the closet.  He has filled it with his t-shirts.  (I have a similar object in our front closet for all my athletic clothing, I obviously have too many clothes for my own good but since I’m a paid athelete I kind of refer to it as my uniform.)  Anyway, the t-shirts moved out and my socks moved in and now we are blissfully happy sharing a sock drawer.  Obviously, this isn’t for everyone.  If we had to organize the sock drawer this might be, again, more hassel.  But since we share so much it works out for us.

Food Storage, Recipes

March 6, 2009

Slow-Cooker Chili

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Once when I asked Jacob for a meal idea he immediately wanted chili, like his mom makes.  He got her recipe; I believe there is a lot of experimenting still to be done but here is her original suggestion:

Ingredients:

  • 1 can of kidney beans (15.5 oz)
  • 1 can of chili beans (15.5 oz)
  • 1 large can of crushed tomatoes (28 oz)
  • chili powder (sprinkle some in)
  • 1 can diced tomatoes (12 oz)
  • 1 onion
  • 1 lb-ish Hamburger, cooked

Those were our instructions.  Throw it all in, let it go all day.  The end.

Well O.K., I like the idea but I’ve run with it a bit.  I like the amount of tomatoes but we wanted less liquid, and more beans.  In my most recent episode of chili, I actually soaked some dry black beans (1 lb) over night and threw them in as well.  I’m very new to this bean thing, so I didn’t realize I also needed to cook the beans, they were a bit hard but the chili is still fine to eat.  We made the mistake of trying to fix the liquid and bean issues at the same time, which resulted in a very thick chili, not a problem per se but I will leave in all the juices the next time I add beans (but not the bean’s cooking water).

I like to cook the onion with the meat before throwing it in.  This could loose some of the flavor to the chili because some flavor is lost in the juices/fats removed, but if I have to cook the meat, I might as well throw in the onion.  That is just a personal preference.

I think in my next iteration I would like to maybe add more vegetables like celery, if I have any at the time.  I would also like to normalize my addition of chili powder, Jacob says it never has enough so I will start with 1 Tablespoon, and work from there.

In general we really love this recipe for a start, I love that I don’t have to add water or a ton of seasonings.  And Jacob only had to buy 8 cans of kidney beans to get sent a free stuffed bean, yay for food storage and free toys.  Seriously, I do love that all these ingredients are storable, so as long as we have power, or a fire we can made some chili with all our canned beans and tomatoes.

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