Hamburger Curry Or Pakistani Kima, from the More with Less Cookbook
Pakistani Kima serves five or six people. The recipe calls for sauteing onion and garlic in butter or margarine, and then adding the ground meat. But I prefer:
Dice one cup of onion, mince one clove of garlic, add to saucepan and saute with 1 pound of ground meat.
The recipe calls for ground beef. You could use ground turkey, ground beef heart, chili meat, ground pork, or any finely diced meat- even chicken. We have venison (free), and some ground lamb in our freezer so that's what we did- only because venison and our lamb are not very fatty, I add a couple tablespoons of fat. You can use any oil or fat, but I like to save the fat from other cooking so it's free, and we have the choice of bacon grease or lamb fat in our freezer (we bought the lamb from a friend and asked her if we could have lamb fat from the trimmings, and she gave it to us).
Drain if necessary, then stir in:
1 Tablespoon of curry powder (we prefer mild, and we either buy it by the pound from the local co-op or we make our own, using spices and herbs from the local co-op)
1 1/2 t. salt
dash pepper
dash each cinnamon, ginger, and tumeric
2 cups diced tomatoes (when we do not have ripe tomatoes from the garden, which taste amazing in this recipe, we use a 16 ounce can of crushed or stewed tomatoes)
2 diced potatoes (you can use frozen potatoes if that is what you have- hash browns, potatoes o'obrien, that sort of thing, but we prefer fresh)
2 cups frozen green vegetables. (The recipe calls for peas or green beans. We use what we have on hand, which is currently a lot of bags of frozen organic mixed vegetables- peas, carrots, and corn, because when it went on sale I bought a case through our co-op)
Cover, simmer 25 minutes, or until potatoes are fork tender, serve over rice. Top with coconut if you like. A side dish of a simple green leaf salad is tasty, and very frugal if you grow your own greens.
To adapt this for a freezer meal- follow directions just up until the potatoes. Set the hamburger mixture aside to cool- preferably put it in a bowl that you set in a larger bowl of icewater to bring the temperature down rapidly.. Blanch your potatoes (dip them in boiling, salted water for a minute or two) so they won't turn brown and nasty and cool them rapidly in ice-water as well, or use frozen grated potatoes that you don't defrost. Then just add the blanched potatoes and still-frozen vegetables to a ziplock bag or freezer container, pour the cooled meat mixture to the bag, label, and freeze. To cook you do not even have to fully defrost- just put the mixture in a pan and cook over low heat until it's hot all the way through, or put it in the crockpot for a couple of hours.
Chow Mein over Rice, also from The More With Less Cookbook
Serves 6-8
Prepare and have ready:
1 pound raw meat cut in thin slices- I like to cut meat while it is still partially frozen so that I can get really thin slices. You could ask your butcher to do it for you. You can use pork, beef, chicken, lamb, even game meats. I also prefer the meat to be lightly marinated in a bit of Asian dressing.
3 cups of celery, sliced diagonally
2 cups of onion, sliced lengthwise
3/4 cup sliced mushrooms (I prefer fresh or frozen, but the recipe says you can used canned)
I think the vegetables are better if you toss them with a mixture of oil and Chinese five spice, but that's just me.
3 cups bean sprouts (we grow ours in a jar on the kitchen counter. Canned bean sprouts make the Chinese kitchen goddess cry.)
Combine in a small bowl:
1 T. fresh ginger, chopped OR 1/4 t. powdered ginger
1 Tablespoon sugar or honey
3 Tablespoons cornstarch
5 Tablespoons soy sauce (we like Bragg's Amino Acids
) 3/4 cup of soup stock, broth, or reconstituted bouillion
Heat 1 T. oil in large skillet. Add meat and stir fry just until done. Remove the meat from the pan and set it aside. Add another T. oil and quickly stir fry each vegetable separately, just until it's shiny, the color is bright, and it's still crisp-tender, remove to bowl with the cooked meat. It's important to fry them separately, especially the mushrooms and bean sprouts, because they have different cooking times and you don't want your mushrooms and sprouts to be cooked to a limp and lifeless death.
When you reach the point where you add the bean sprouts, add the meat mixture and other vegetables back to the skillet and pour in the sauce, stirring over medium heat just until the sauce thickens and clears.
Serve over rice.
To adapt this to a freezer meal: slice your meat ahead of time and freeze in a container with a small bit of Asian dressing or rice vinegar and oil. Combine the sauce ingredients, put them in a small bag or other container and store with the meat. You *could* also substitute a bag of frozen stir fry vegetables for the diced and sliced vegetables and home-grown bean sprouts, and just put a rubber band around the three freezer components- stir fry veggies, meat, and sauce mixture- but this convenience would increase the cost of the meal considerably.
On cooking day, just set out the ingredients and cook as directed- if the meat is sliced thinly enough you don't even have to give it much time to defrost.
To Cook Rice:
This is how I cooked rice for years and years, and then somebody gave me a rice cooker
.=)Combine in a heavy saucepan 1 1/2 cups rice
1/2 t. salt
Make sure the rice is level. Carefully pour in just enough water so that when your fingertip is resting on the top of the rice, the water level is about the middle of your first knuckle- this should be approximately one inch.
Bring to a full rolling boil, stir it with a fork or chopsticks, making sure no grains are sticking to the bottom of the pan. Reduce to simmer, cover with a lid that fits well, and cook for 20 minutes more for white rice, 45 minutes for brown. Remove from heat and leave covered until you are ready to serve, then fluff with a fork
The rice should not burn over this way. If your burner is too hot, pull the saucepan partway off the burner for the first five minutes or so of cooking time.
Money saving tips: spices and herbs are one of the high end mark up items at the grocery store. We find them cheapest by the pound at the co-op. We store the bags in our freezer, putting just enough for daily use in spice jars.
You can also find them more cheaply at ethnic grocery stores and increasingly in the ethnic food aisle of the local grocer's.
Sprouts: You can buy a pound of mung beans
for sprouting through Amazon for 8.00 a pound (free shipping with 25.00 or greater order of any combination), or you can get them in the expensive sprouting section of your local natural foods market. I buy ours over with the regular dried legumes either at a grocery store or an Asian market. We also sprout lentils and just use the regular dried lentils from the store, or I buy in bulk from the co-op.This post linked at five dollar Dinners.
Also linked at Pennywise Platter Thursday
For more ideas on cooking from scratch, be sure to check out these four blogs each Thursday- The 15th of April the Four Moms / 35 kids talk about cooking from scratch for our large families- you don't want to miss it!
The Four Moms are:
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