Meatloaf is one of the classic frugal main dishes of all time.  You take the most inexpensive cuts of meat you can get and then add inexpensive fillers to make it go even further.  In addition, you add finely minced vegetables so your kids won’t notice.  Whoever invented meatloaf was either exceptionally lucky or pure genius.  Below is my latest meatloaf recipe that I baked in a cast iron skillet.  So to answer the question above, I’d say “one”.  But the real question is what pans do you need to make a meatloaf, a roast, cornbread, a cake, fried eggs, bacon, hamburgers, etc…   My answer is “just my one cast iron skillet”.

Super Meaty Meatloaf

• 1lb ground beef
• 1lb ground pork
• 2 eggs
• 1T all purpose seasoning
• 1 onion, finely minced
• 2t thyme, dried
• 1T sage, rubbed
• 1t red chile flakes
• 1T parsley, dried (or 3T fresh, chopped)
• 4T ketchup (or catsup)
• salt and pepper (depending on how much salt is in the all purpose seasoning)

Mix all ingredients well and shape into a cylinder.  Place into a lighly oiled cast iron skillet and put into a 350F oven for 1 hour.  After about 40min coat with the ketchup.

You’ve probably noticed that this meatloaf is pretty much all meat.  I’m still doing the low carb thing and its working (down 15lbs so far!)  so I left out the bread/crackers in this one.  You could add in a few slices of bread torn into pieces with some milk to wet the bread.  Crackers would also work.  I’d probably not use more than a cup of crushed crackers or two cups of bread for this amount of meat.  The thyme and sage in this give a little hint of breakfast sausage flavor.  You could also leave those out and use breakfast sausage instead.

To keep this low carb, another nice addition would be some finely chopped mushrooms.  I’ve done that before and it comes out really great.  Just chop the mushrooms into small bits and then fry to remove most of the moisture.  Then just add them to the meatloaf.  You could also add italian seasoning mix (1T) and parmesan cheese (1/2 to 1 cup) to make the meatloaf taste like a giant meatball.  I could probably come up with an infinite number of possibilities.

I served this meatloaf with a Broccoli gratin, which I guess I should include:

Broccoli Gratin

• 3 cups broccoli, steamed until just tender
• 2T butter
• 1/2 medium onion, finely minced
• 1T whole grain mustard
• 1/2 cup heavy cream
• 1 cup gruyere, or other cheese, grated
• salt and pepper

Saute the onion in butter until soft, about 10min.  Add in the rest of the ingredients, except broccoli, and simmer over low heat until the cheese melts and you have a nice sauce.  Turn off the heat, add the broccoli and toss well.  Put into a baking pan (or another cast iron skillet!) and bake uncovered for about 30min on 350F.  Serve with meatloaf.

One of the reasons this came out so well is that I cooked the short ribs long enough to kill the toughness but short enough to leave a really nice chewy texture.  So instead of the meat falling apart like eating pot roast or beef stew, it was like eating tender steak.  There was enough time for the flavors to come together and make a really nice sauce.

French Braised Short Ribs

• 2lbs short ribs cut into 1/2″ pieces
• 1T oil
• 1/2 of a medium onion, chopped
• 1T tomato paste
• 4 cloves of garlic, minced
• 5 green olives, chopped
• 2t thyme
• 2t beef bouillon (or two cubes)
• 1 cup of water
• 10 mushrooms, sliced thickly
• salt and pepper

Brown the beef in the oil.  Let it get brown!  Add the onion half way through.  Add everything except the mushrooms and turn to low, cover and simmer for about 45 minutes.  Add the mushrooms and cook for another 10 minutes.  Is the sauce is watery when you add the mushrooms, turn up the heat and leave the lid off.

Serve with a starch like mashed potatoes or over some noodles.  I ended up just eating it straight.  YUM!

I don’t know how Italian an Italian beef sandwich really is, but the classic Chicago Italian beef sandwich has paper-thin beef soaking in a thin, heavily seasoned gravy piled HIGH on a crusty-on-the-outside/soft-on-the-inside Italian roll.  The sandwich is then, optionally, piled high with a mix of spicy pickled vegetables in olive oil called giardiniera.

As usual, I really didn’t have the right ingredients for this, which might be a beef rump or cross-rib roast.  I did have a nice, inexpensive chuck roast so decided to make that work.  Let me tell you that it did work!  This is the best creation I’ve made in a while.  I’m also doing this low-carb thing to drop a few pounds (already dropped 12lbs!)  so passed on the roll.  Any kind of roll would do.  I would heat them in the oven for 10 min at about 350F and then slice just before piling with beef.  If you did have a rump or similar roast, I would cook it to rare, slice thin and then simmer in the sauce for about 15min.

Italian Beef

• 1 chuck roast
• 2t garlic powder
• 2t onion powder
• 1/2t thyme
• 1T oregano
• 1t red chile flakes (optional)
• 1T salt
• 1t black pepper
• 2 cups (or 1 can) beef broth
• 8 cloves of garlic minced (yes, eight!)
• 2T Worstershire sauce
• 1t tabasco or other hot sauce (optional)
• Crusty rolls

Mix up the spices and sprinkle 1/3 on the roast.  Set aside 1/3 for the giardiniera.  Brown the roast on both sides well in a dutch oven or similar pot over medium heat.  Add the rest of the ingredients (except the rolls, duh!)  and simmer for 1 1/2 to 2 hours on low heat, covered.  You want to roast easily slicable but not so tender that it falls apart.  You’ll need to check it periodically to make sure it doesn’t get too tender.  I think mine cooked in about 1 3/4 hours.  When it’s tender enough, take the roast out and let the sauce keep simmering to reduce a bit.  The sauce will be more like an au jus than a gravy.  Slice the roast as thin as you can and put it back in the sauce and turn off the heat.  Time to make the giardiniera.

Quick Giardiniera

• 1/4 of a small onion, sliced thinly
• 3T olive oil
• 10 sport peppers or hot pickled peppers, chopped coarsely
• 10 small pimento-stuffed olives,. chopped coarsley
• 1T vinegar
• 1/3 of the spice mixture above (hope you didn’t forget!)

Saute the onion in olive oil over low heat until just wilted.  Add the rest of the ingredients and turn off the heat.  Let cool and transfer to a bowl.

To assemble a sandwich, pile the beef on a hot, crusty roll and top with the giardiniera.  I put the beef into a bowl, added some sauce and topped with the giardiniera.

I’m not going to try to get into all the details of why they’re so good for you, but here are a few of the good things packed into these tiny seeds:

• Copper, which support antiinflammatory and antioxidant enzyme systems to reduce pain and swelling and prevent cancer
• Magnesium, which supports cardiovascular and circulatory systems to reduce asthma symptoms and lower blood pressure
• Calcium and zinc, which supports bone strength and prevents colon cancer
• Phytosterols, which lower cholesterol and blood pressure

Check out this page and this page for more detailed information.

So it’s not like you can just have a big bowl of sesame seeds for dinner.  My two favorite ways to sneak in some sesame seeds are hummus and this Korean BBQ recipe:

Korean BBQ

Almost any kind of meat (or tofu) will do in this recipe.  My favorites are beef short ribs, chicken thighs, tri tip, pork loin and firm tofu.  Make the marinade as much as a week in advance and marinade the meet for at least and hour and as long as 24 hours.  The most important part of this recipe is the toasted and then crushed sesame seeds.  Don’t skip that part!

• Meat
• 1/4 cup sesame seeds
• 4-8 garlic cloves, finely chopped
• 4 green onions, finely chopped
• 2T ginger, finely chopped
• 1 cup soy sauce
• 1/2 cup oil
• 2T agave or sugar

Toast sesame seeds in a dry skillet over medium heat until they turn a light brown and are fragrant.  Put them in a blender or food processor and pulse until mostly crushed.  Smell that flavor!!!  Combine the rest of the ingredients and either keep in the fridge until ready to use or pour on your meat to marinade.  Wait as long as you can stand it and then fire up the grill and cook over high heat to get a good char.  Cook until finished and serve with kimchi and rice or whatever else your family likes.  Leftovers are possibly even better!

Incredible shrinking curry

• 1T oil
• 1t turmeric
• 1t curry powder
• 1t mustard seeds
• 1/2 onion, chopped finely
• 1 tomato, chopped finely
• 1/2 can coconut milk (about 1 cup)
• 1t chicken bouillon
• 1 cup water
• 1 chicken breast, sliced thinly

Heat the oil in a wok or deep pan over medium heat and add the three spices.  Fry for 1 minute and then add the onion.  Fry another 5 minutes until onion starts to soften.  Add tomato and cook until tomato is soft.  Add coconut milk, bouillon and water and simmer for 5 minutes until smooth and creamy.  Add the chicken and stir until just cooked.  This makes enough for 1 or 2 depending on your appetite.

This recipe is super flexible.  There are a ton of vegetables that could go into this.  It could easily be made all vegetarian or vegan as well by omitting the chicken and bouillon and substituting tofu, tempeh or seitan.  Great vegetable additions would be peas, carrots, potatoes and cauliflower.  A quick and easy thing would be to use frozen or canned vegetables.  If you’re not watching carbs, serve this with basmati rice to stretch it out further.

Khao Soi or Kao Soi (pronounced like cow soy, *I think*) has this strange personality disorder.  It’s a soupy, spicy, curry-like dish with noodles and meat.  Yet, it’s not really a noodle dish, nor a soup, nor a curry.  It is a brilliant blend of flavors and textures commonly served in Northern Thailand and Laos. I had this at a local Thai restaurant last week and am now hooked on this simply yet complex dish.

I did some googling and found quite a few recipes for Khao Soi that were all really similar and very simple.  This made it quite easy to put together my own version.  The key is keeping each part of the equation that makes this so tasty- sweet, sour, salty, spicy and creamy.  The classic recipe is already pretty frugal so it’s easy to make a ton of this on a budget.

Frugal Khao Soi

• 1T oil
• 1T Thai red curry paste (spicy)
• 1t turmeric
• 1 cup (or 1/2 a can) coconut milk (creamy)
• 2T fish sauce (salty)
• 1t chicken bouillon (salty)
• 1 cup water
• 1t sugar (sweet)
• 1 raw chicken breast, sliced thinly
• 2-3 cups Chinese egg noodles, cooked
• 1/2 lime, juiced (sour)
• Fresh cilantro

Heat a wok or other deep pan to medium and add oil, red curry paste and turmeric and stir constantly for a minute or two until the paste has fully mixed with the oil and is getting fragrant.  Add the coconut milk, fish sauce, bouillon, water and sugar.  Simmer for a few minutes until everything is well blended.  Add the chicken and simmer until just cooked.  Put the cooked noodles into two bowls (or one if you’re really hungry).  Pour curry sauce over noodles and add a squeeze of lime and some fresh cilantro.  Add more fish sauce if it’s not salty enough for your taste.

This was delicious but not spicy enough for my tastes.  Next time I’m going to add some hot chile too.  Don’t be scared off by the Thai red curry paste or fish sauce.  Most supermarkets carry both items in the Asian food aisle.  The Thai red curry paste comes in a small jar and lasts a long time.  The fish sauce is in a larger bottle and also lasts a long time.  Both add incredible depth to this dish.  It’s definitely worth getting them.  The Chinese egg noodles are often refrigerated near the tofu but you could also use spaghettini, spaghetti or angel hair pasta.

Real Nova lox involves curing and then cold smoking filets of wild North Atlantic salmon.  It’s a similar process to making bacon, which is also still raw when finished.  This is vastly different from hot smoking methods that simultaneously cook the food, like for smoked sausage and real barbecue.

The following recipe is my frugal version of Nova lox.  Instead of $20/lb, this barely costs more than $5/lb and maybe even cheaper if you find a good deal on salmon.  I’ve had great luck with farm-raised salmon, which is much less expensive than wild salmon.

Frugal Nova Lox

• 2lbs of raw salmon filet, cut into two pieces of the same size and shape
• 1 cup kosher salt (or sea salt, just don’t use table salt)
• 2t liquid smoke (I prefer the mesquite type but hickory would work too)
• 1t black peppercorns, cracked

Mix the salt, liquid smoke and pepper together.  If the salmon still has the skin, cover just the flesh side of both pieces with the salt.  Stack the pieces together with the skin side out.  For skinless salmon, cover both sides with salt.  Wrap tightly in several layers of plastic wrap.  Place into a gallon freezer zip top bag.  Press all the air out by folding the bag around the fish and then seal tightly.  Put into the refrigerator and let sit for 2-4 days.  When ready to eat, remove from the bag and plastic wrap and soak in cold water for 5 minutes to remove the pepper and rinse off some of the salt.  If it still tastes too salty for you, soak it in water for another 5 min.  Slice thinly at an angle to get the largest slices possible.  This should keep in the refrigerator for at least a week, maybe longer.

Any herbs and spices that go well with salmon would be great in this.  Try adding dill or ground coriander to the salt.  You could also try white pepper instead of black.

My favorite way to eat this is to split a freshly baked bagel (I NEVER toast them) and cover with cream cheese.  Then top with thinly sliced red onion and tomato slices.  Place the salmon on top of this and add capers, if you like.  I can hardly think of a better Sunday brunch food.

You can also scramble the salmon into an omelete or use instead of Canadian bacon in Eggs Benedict.  It’s great as an appetizer on top of crackers or toast points.  You can also mix this into cream cheese for an easy bagel spread or use in a dip for crackers or chips.

Enjoy the wonderful flavor and the fact that for 2lbs of fish you just saved about $30!

Oh yeah, my last batch of lox was so delicious that I decided to make homemade bagels to go with it.  Here’s a photo of the bagels just out of the oven.  I’ll post a recipe for these another day.

Fresh from the oven

I just received the Nov 2008 issue of Chile Pepper magazine (yes, I actually do get a magazine called Chile Pepper) and found an article called “Embracing What’s Left” that has recipes for using left overs to make some spicy dishes.  I’ve been getting Chile Pepper magazine for many years and this is the first such article I can remember.

The recipes included are pretty straight forward but have some good ideas for different ways to use up left overs.  Here is a summary of the recipes:

• Hot and Sweet Asian Leftover Salad – A hot, sweet, sour and salty dressing over leftover turkey, chicken or ham with shredded cabbage, glass noodles and vegetables.
• Leftover Stuffing Hash – This is more like a stuffing frittata with onions, bell peppers, leftover turkey and stuffing sauteed and then mixed with eggs and cream and finished under the broiler.
• Wild Rice and Leftover Salad – Wild rice and left over turkey with dried cherries, pecans, chiles and vegetables drizzled with a dressing of cranberry sauce, dijon mustard, champagne vinegar and olive oil.
• Leftover Pot Pie – Just like it sounds using a prepared pie crust.  Personally, I’d make the crust myself.
• Leftover Mish Mosh – Pureed cooked brussels sprouts and root vegetables with an egg as binder started in a skillet and then transferred to the oven.

The specifics of the recipes aren’t that important.  Take the ideas and make your own variations on these using ingredients you already have that you know your family likes.

Canned beans are great because they’re still very inexpensive and can go from unopened can to table in 5 minutes or less.  In my pantry I usually keep plain black and white beans, refried pinto and or black beans and some flavored varieties, like Cuban-style black beans.  One of my favorite things to do with canned beans is to use them as a base for a leftover stew.  Below is a particularly tasty mix I created for a weekend dinner when I didn’t feel like cooking.  This made just one serving.

Brazillian-style black bean and left over stew

• 1/4 lb of left over low fat turkey polish sausage, cut in moon-shaped slices
• 3 large cooked shrimp, cut in half
• 1/4 medium onion
• 1t olive oil
• 1 roma tomato, chopped and drained
• 1/2 can Trader Joes Cuban-style black beans (black beans with onion and peppers)
• 2 cloves of garlic, chopped finely
• 2T parsley, chopped

Fry sausage and onion in olive oil until it is browned.  Add tomato and cook for another 5 min.  Add the black beans and heat through until simmering.  Add the shrimp and parsley to your bowl.  Add the garlic to the beans and cook another 2 minutes.  Add the bean stew to your bowl and mix well.

This recipe is based *VERY* loosely on the Brazillian feijoada stew that has all sorts of meat, sausage and black beans.  If you like the combination of meat and beans, you should definitely look up a recipe for feijoada and give it a try.  I’m sure I’ll post a recipe here soon since it’s one of my favorites.

This formula could work for lots of different left over meats and vegetables.  Take your left overs and add enough beans to make a nice stew and heat it through.  It could be as simple as that.  I like to caramelize some of the meat and vegetables first for added flavor.  I also like to add fresh garlic, onion and herbs to enhance the flavor.  Be creative!

Traditional Greek moussaka is a layered casserole of ground meat, eggplant, tomato, white sauce, and spices. The recipe that follows is far from traditional moussaka, which itself has many variations in Greece, Eastern Europe, Turkey, Egypt and other Mediterranean countries. This recipe came from my attempt to do something healthy and interesting with left over spaghetti sauce and some fresh vegetables from the farmers market. This is a good example of taking an idea from one culture and using ingredients and flavors from another.

Spaghetti sauce moussaka

• 3 cups leftover spaghetti sauce with meat
• 1 big chinese eggplant, sliced into 1/8″ rounds
• 1 medium zucchini, sliced into 1/8″ rounds
• 8 white muchrooms, sliced thinly
• 1 roma tomato, sliced very thinly
• 3T olive oil, divided
• 3 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1/4cup fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped
• Salt and pepper

Put 1T of olive oil into the bottom of a baking dish and smear to cover the bottom.  Layer half of the eggplant and sprinkle with salt and pepper.  Layer half the zucchini and then all the mushrooms.  Layer all of the tomato.  Cover with all of the spaghetti sauce.  Layer the rest of the eggplant and zucchini, adding more salt and pepper.  Mix the garlic, parsley and 2T of olive oil.  Spread on top of the casserole.  Bake uncovered at 350F for about 45 minutes or until the vegetables are soft.  If it starts getting too brown on top, cover with foil until done.

When I came up with this recipe I was going for something that was primarily vegetables.  Obvious additions to this would be a velvety bechamel (white) sauce and bread crumb or cheese topping.  You could also add some sliced potatoes or other vegetables.  Almost anything would be good in there as long as it can be sliced thinly or lays down flat.  You could do a Mexican variation by using leftover taco meat instead of spaghetti sauce and then add jalapenos, beans, and/or pepper jack cheese.  You could finish that off with sour cream or salsa.  YUM!  I think I may try that next time!

Go crazy and let us know what you come up with!