Weekend Baking and Improvised Dinner
Whew! As I sit down in front of my screen to write Monday morning’s post, I realize that I did quite a lot of cooking this weekend, for different reasons, and this week I will be sharing with you most of the things I made.
On Friday, I had to improvise supper with frozen leftover brisket.
On Saturday, I baked 4 batches of brownies for a church picnic.
On Saturday, I also tried a simple Italian chicken casserole that turned out pretty yummy.
On Sunday, we made homemade caramel popcorn for a treat.
I’ll start with Friday’s leftover brisket…
I will start by saying that this is in no way a gourmet meal. I don’t even really consider this cooking, but sometimes it comes down to preparing meals like this for your family. It’s still food, tastes good, and fills the belly. Besides, you have to do something with leftovers!
We’d planned on lots-of-toppings baked potatoes, but by midafternoon, I realized I would only be feeding supper to two kids and myself. Two had gone to play at a friend’s house, one was helping with some odd jobs at our church, and to top it off, my husband was working late! Suddenly, all my baked-potato-lovers were gone and I didn’t see the point behind cooking for just three people.
So I yanked a frozen hunk of (pre-cooked) brisket (roast beef or almost any cooked meat would work for this) out of the freezer and put this meal together:
Creamed Brisket over Mashed Potatoes:
1 or more pounds cooked beef or pork roast
1 can cream of chicken soup
3/4 c. water
1 onion, sliced
Mashed Potatoes
I tossed that frozen leftover meat into my crockpot and turned it on high since I didn’t have a lot of spare time to wait for it to thaw out properly. Then I whisked the cream of chicken soup (I’m sure you can figure out that any cream of.. soup would do) with the water and poured it over the meat. After that, I sliced the onion and placed the slices on top of the meat and soup. After an hour or so, I checked the meat, could see that it was mostly thawed, and turned my crockpot down to low.
Next I made a big pot of mashed potatoes - go ahead and use the boxed kind — I do. Making mashed potatoes will someday be the subject of an entirely different post. Then, as everyone trickled back to home base, they all ate as they came in and as they were hungry. It was an on-the-fly solution for one of those busier-than-I-expected-to-be days.
Add comment September 25th, 2006