Name: Leftovers: Cheesy Corned Beef Hash
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 20 min
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients: 1 tablespoon butter, bacon fat, or olive/canola oil (I used bacon fat); 1 medium onion, chopped; 5 medium red potatoes, baked and cut into 1/2 inch cubes (or use leftovers from slow cooker corned beef and cabbage); 2 cups finely shredded cabbage or leftovers from from the slow cooker corned beef and cabbage (I used Fresh Express angel hair cole slaw); 2 cups leftover corned beef - cut into 1/2 inch cubes; salt and pepper; 4 ounces shredded cheddar cheese; 4 fried or poached eggs (optional)

Cheesy Corned Beef Hash (Leftovers)

March 18, 2015

There is no better way to use up your St. Patrick’s Day corned beef than cheesy corned beef hash. Top it with a fried egg for breakfast, lunch, or dinner!

Who’s tired of me talking about corned beef (raises own hand)? Sorry. You can’t make corned beef without making corned beef hash, and aside from Reubens, I can’t think of any better way to use up St. Patrick’s Day leftovers than corned beef hash (well, these boxties were pretty good). There’s nothing better than the kind of leftovers that only get better the longer they sit in the fridge, and corned beef fits the bill.

I’m a big fan of making hashes of all sorts for dinner…leftover ham and sweet potatoes? Let’s make a hash out of it. Leftover roast beef and carrots? Um, hello, hash? Heck, even chicken and broccoli mix pretty fantastically into a hash. The truth is, if you cook up a little onion, some vegetables, and some meat in a pan and throw a runny egg on top, you really can’t go wrong.

I don’t always put cheese in my hash, but when I asked Philip if he thought I should put some cheese in this corned beef hash, he pointed out that cheese is never a bad thing. Well, rarely, anyway…I suppose there are some things you should probably leave cheese out of. But it was definitely a good idea here, especially with some rye toast. And you guys, we used up every single bit of our leftover corned beef, which is always a good thing. This meal came together in less than 30 minutes, not counting the time it took for the potatoes to cook in the microwave (you could definitely use the leftovers from the slow cooker corned beef and cabbage, but ours had been sitting the fridge for a few days and I hate the way potatoes taste after days in the refrigerator. By the way, if you hate cabbage, like I know a lot of people do, feel free to leave it out.

Do you like to use your leftovers to make hash? What are your favorite ingredients to use? If you have corned beef, do me a favor and make this cheesy corned beef hash!

Yield: 4 servings

Leftovers: Cheesy Corned Beef Hash

10 minPrep Time:

20 minCook Time:

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Ingredients

1 tablespoon butter, bacon fat, or olive/canola oil (I used bacon fat)
1 medium onion, chopped
5 medium red potatoes, baked and cut into 1/2 inch cubes (or use leftovers from slow cooker corned beef and cabbage)
2 cups finely shredded cabbage or leftovers from from the slow cooker corned beef and cabbage (I used Fresh Express angel hair cole slaw)
2 cups leftover corned beef - cut into 1/2 inch cubes
salt and pepper
4 ounces shredded cheddar cheese
4 fried or poached eggs (optional)

Instructions

Preheat the butter, bacon fat, or oil over medium heat in a 12-inch skillet. Add the onion and cook until translucent. Add the potatoes and corned beef and stir to combine. Press the hash with a spatula and allow to cook for 3-4 minutes, until browned.
Carefully turn the hash over and press down again. Continue cooking and pressing until mostly browned, then stir in the cabbage and cook until softened. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Top the hash with the cheese and allow to cook for a minute or two so the cheese begins to melt. Divide among 4 plates and top each plate with a fried or poached egg, if desired. Serve immediately.

https://chattavore.com/leftovers-cheesy-corned-beef-hash/

Click here to print the recipe for cheesy corned beef hash!

Easy Beef with Broccoli

March 4, 2015

Beef with broccoli is a recipe that my grandmother used to make. I’m sure it’s far from traditional, but it’s easy & delicious, and that’s all that matters!

Beef with broccoli is another dish that I remember from my childhood, something that my grandmother made fairly regularly. My friends thought that my family was a little odd considering the things that we ate, at least at my grandparents’ house (though, as I mentioned, I didn’t eat Chinese food until I was an adult so I didn’t actually eat this when she made it). I was pretty much the only kid at my rural elementary school who had Chinese food on my dinner table. Some of my friends even thought it bizarre that I ate asparagus on a regular basis.

I’ve mentioned before that my grandfather was in the Air Force, so of course the family did lots of traveling and lived in exotic places. No doubt my grandmother picked up a love of exotic foods and she decided to recreate them at home. Dishes like beef with broccoli and chop suey were regulars on the dinner table, and I remember stories about my dad and his sisters being a little self-conscious about her packing the leftovers in their lunch when their classmates were no doubt toting peanut butter on Wonder Bread.

The funny thing is that, as I peruse her recipe books, I find that most of these “exotic” recipes are newspaper or magazine clippings, usually ads published by food companies like La Choy. So the recipes really aren’t exotic at all…they’re just Americanized versions of exotic recipes. But that’s okay, because the only thing that matters is that the food is delicious.

This beef with broccoli, which I adapted a little bit from the recipe that my grandmother clipped from a newspaper recipe section many, many years ago, requires a little bit of prep beforehand. Stir-fries cook quickly so it’s important to have all of the ingredients ready before you start cooking…but once you get that done, you just fry it all up and don’t look back. Skirt steak or flank steak are perfect for this recipe, and freezing the meat for about 45 minutes will make it much easier to slice super-thinly.

This beef with broccoli is a quick and delicious meal-I doubled the recipe so we had lots of leftovers for lunch!

By the way, as I was cooking this meal, I couldn’t stop singing this song:

Yield: 4 servings

Beef with Broccoli

1 hr, 30 Prep Time:

15 minCook Time:

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Ingredients

1 pound boneless beef, trimmed of fat (flank steak or skirt steak are preferred)
1/3 cup low-sodium chicken broth
3 tablespoon soy sauce
3 tablespoons dry sherry
1 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger or 1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 cup vegetable or canola oil
1 clove garlic, minced
3/4 pound broccoli, florets cut apart, stems quartered and cut into small pieces
1 red, yellow, or orange pepper, seeded and cut into 1-inch pieces
8 ounces sliced water chestnuts, drained
1 cup grape tomatoes, halved

Instructions

Place the beef onto a baking sheet and place in the freezer for 45 minutes. Remove from the freezer and slice the beef as thinly as possible against the grain. Place into a large bowl.
Stir together the chicken broth, soy sauce, sherry, cornstarch, and ginger until the cornstarch is dissolved. Pour 1/4 cup of the sauce over the beef and toss to coat. Let stand for 30 minutes.
Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil in a large skillet or wok over medium-high heat. Remove the beef from the marinade and cook until no longer pink. Remove from the skillet and set aside. Wipe out the skillet.
Heat the remaining 2 tablespoons of oil over medium-high in the skillet. Add the garlic and sauté for about 30 seconds. Add the broccoli, water chestnuts, and the peppers and sauté until crisp-tender, stirring constantly. Add the remaining sauce and cook until thickened. Add the beef and the tomatoes and cook until heated through. Serve with rice or chow mein noodles.

Notes

Prep time includes inactive prep time to freeze and marinate the meat.

https://chattavore.com/beef-with-broccoli/

Click here to print the recipe for beef with broccoli!

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Pasta with Beans and Swiss Chard

March 2, 2015

One-pot pasta with beans and Swiss chard is a one-pot take on the Italian classic, pasta with beans & greens. It’s warm, soothing, and surprisingly simple.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosure statement.

Pasta with beans and Swiss chard is the Cook’s Illustrated version of pasta with beans and greens, which is apparently a pretty ubiquitous Italian dish, though I’d never heard of it until recently. Apparently, it’s usually a sausage-laden affair, but I’m not really a fan of Italian sausage. Their version, though, with pancetta and Swiss chard, sounded pretty intriguing, so I decided that I’d have to try it out.

We’ve had quite a bit of cold weather and some snow, which is pretty rare for our area. You guys, I am not built for the cold. Now, if you are from the North, don’t go yapping at me about how it’s not really all that cold here. I am completely aware of that. I have lived in Tennessee for all of my thirty-six years, though, and temperatures in the twenties and below are enough to send me over the edge. Ever winter I complain incessantly about the cold, and every winter I pledge to never, ever complain when the summer heat causes the mercury to surge toward 100 degrees. And I never, ever do. I. Love. Summer.

Still, cold weather has its advantages. Few and far between they are, but such is life and we do need seasons . A few summers ago we had an extremely mild winter and our indoor cat somehow got fleas because apparently fleas kind of got out of control (but good grief, how did they get in my house????). And we spent two weeks living in hell. So I’ll deal with the winter. But besides controlling the flea population, another advantage that I have to admit to is that winter food wins.

I mean, there are the obvious holiday foods. Christmas food (prime rib! all the snacks ever! an excuse to bake with abandon!) is reason enough to love winter…but then there’s soup, which admittedly I eat year round, but in the winter you need soup. Braises with rich meats that are perfect served over creamy mashed potatoes and pasta dishes thick with tomato sauce and cheese just bring a certain level of comfort on those days that you just don’t want to step outside. And then there are one-pot meals, which is what I decided that this dish needed to be.

The original recipe from Cook’s Illustrated required the pasta to be cooked separately from the other components. I started thinking about this one-pot macaroni and cheese, where the pasta is boiled in the milk, which thickens up perfectly from the starch released into the liquid. Hmmmm…could I do this with the dish. Why yes, yes I could. The starch of the beans (especially since you don’t drain the beans) combined with the starch of the pasta thickens the liquid to make a rich sauce, to coat the hearty crunch of the chard stems and the tender bite of the chard leaves, the savory pancetta….it all works so perfectly together. And you only have a knife, a cutting board, a pot, and a spoon to wash.

So you should make this pasta with beans and Swiss chard…and make it snappy. Spring is just around the corner.

What dishes do you like to make to warm you in the winter?

Mary

Yield: 4-6 servings

Pasta with Beans and Swiss Chard

This recipe is adapted from Cook's Illustrated.

20 minPrep Time:

30 minCook Time:

50 minTotal Time:

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Ingredients

2 tablespoons vegetable or canola oil
3 ounces pancetta, diced
1 onion, finely chopped
10 ounces Swiss chard-stems finely diced, leaves coarsely chopped
2 teaspoons fresh rosemary, minced
1 garlic clove, minced to a paste
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 15-ounce can cannellini beans, with their liquid
1 15-ounce can pinto beans, with their liquid
3 cups low-sodium chicken broth
8 ounces (2 1/2 cups) fusilli or rotini
salt
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
Parmesan cheese, for serving

Instructions

Heat the oil in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat until smoking. Add the pancetta and cook until it begins to brown. Add the onion the chard stems and cook until they begin to soften. Add one teaspoon of the rosemary, the garlic, and the red pepper flakes and cook for about 30 seconds.
Add the beans with their liquid and the chicken stock and bring to a boil. Stir in the pasta and cook until most of the liquid has been absorbed. Stir in the chard leaves and cook for another 2-3 minutes, until the pasta is al dente and the chard leaves are tender.
Remove the pot from the heat. Add the remaining rosemary and the vinegar. Season to taste with salt. Serve with grated Parmesan cheese for topping.

https://chattavore.com/pasta-with-beans-and-swiss-chard/

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Waffle Casserole with Sausage

February 25, 2015

Sausage and waffle casserole is everything you might imagine – waffles, sausage, eggs, cheese, and maple syrup. And amazing.

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Sausage and waffle casserole sounds like the stuff of dreams, at least to me. I mean, who doesn’t love a breakfast casserole? Whether it’s traditional, like my grandmother’s egg soufflé or a twist on a much more time consuming dish like French toast casserole, breakfast casseroles give the cook the freedom to spend time with their family or their houseguests while breakfast (or dinner, if you want to get really wacky) cooks.

When I first saw a recipe for a casserole made with sausage, waffles, eggs, cheese, and maple syrup in The Cook’s Country Cookbook, I knew they were on to something. I made the casserole, following their advice to use six Eggo waffles, stacking the waffles, whole, into the baking dish, and using maple sausage, which the recipe called for. Oh, and 1 1/4 cups of milk to six eggs.

All of the above turned out to be a mistake. We decided to make the waffles from scratch, but if you don’t want to put that much time and effort into it, go by weight (or at least estimate the weight by the amount in the box). There just wasn’t enough waffle in my casserole to soak up all that liquid from the eggs, the milk, and the syrup. But whoa, that’s a lot of milk…so I decided to scale that back too. And maple sausage…doesn’t taste that great. The maple syrup that I whisked into the eggs added enough maple flavor that I decided skip any artificial flavoring. Just go with regular sausage.

Second time around with this sausage and waffle casserole was much better. We put it together on Friday night, pulled it out of the refrigerator when we got out of bed on Saturday, and watched television while it baked. Is that the perfect weekend breakfast or what?

So if you need something to serve at your next brunch or family holiday breakfast, or really whenever, give this sausage and waffle casserole a go!

Mary

Yield: 4-6 servings

Sausage and Waffle Casserole

40 minPrep Time:

2 hrCook Time:

2 hr, 40 Total Time:

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Ingredients

1 1/2 pounds waffles (I used homemade); torn into 1-2 inch pieces (if using frozen waffles, thaw first)
1 pound breakfast sausage
unsalted butter for buttering the pan
6 ounces (1 1/2 cups or 3/4 of an 8-ounce package) cheddar cheese, shredded
6 large eggs
1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup maple syrup (NOT pancake syrup!!!)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. Spread the waffle pieces onto a baking sheet. Bake for 30-60 minutes, until dried out but not browned. While the waffles are toasting, brown the sausage and drain away any excess fat.
Increase oven temperature to 325 degrees. Butter an 8×8 inch pan. Place the waffle pieces into the pan. Spread the browned sausage over the top of the waffles then follow with the cheese.
In a medium bowl, whisk together the eggs, milk, maple syrup, salt, and pepper. Pour over the casserole. Cover with foil. Place a small plate on top of the casserole and weight with a heavy can. Let sit for 25 minutes. Alternately, you can make the casserole the night before and leave it in the refrigerator overnight, in which case you do not need to weight it. If you do this, take it out of the refrigerator 25 minute before you plan to cook it.
Remove the foil from the top of the pan. Bake for 45-50 minutes. Turn the oven to broil until the top of the cheese has browned. Remove from the oven and let stand for five minutes before serving.

Notes

Cook time includes time to toast the waffles.

https://chattavore.com/sausage-and-waffle-casserole/

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Easy Spaghetti and Meatballs

February 21, 2015

This easy spaghetti and meatballs tastes like traditional spaghetti and meatballs but it’s easy enough to make on a weeknight!
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So, I don’t want anyone getting mad or jumping on me because this recipe for easy spaghetti and meatballs doesn’t resemble that of your Italian grandmother or the little mom & pop Italian restaurant with the red checkered tablecloth in your hometown or the upscale-ish Italian joint you like to frequent. I have a few factors working against me: (a) I am not Italian; (b) no one in my family made spaghetti and meatballs when I was growing up, at least not that I recall. In fact, my most vivid spaghetti and meatballs memory were made by Chef Boyardee; and (c) I don’t have a favorite restaurant version either.

I get it, I get it. People are passionate about the foods that they grew up eating and they want to have them just as they remember. Perhaps it is best to say that these spaghetti and meatballs are best for those of you who, like me, have no preconceived notion of what spaghetti and meatballs ought to be. If you’re looking for meatballs that are the size of baseballs so that everyone only needs one, or Sunday tomato gravy simmered for long hours on the stovetop and stirred by a sweet old lady with a cute apron, you are looking in the wrong place, though I do have some cute aprons that I frequently forget to wear, resulting in lots of laundry nightmares usually consisting of oil stains (however, I found a great trick for getting rid of them recently!).

I’ve mentioned here a time or twenty that my original obsession with cooking came from watching episodes of Nigella Bites on the now defunct Style Network. My first attempts at making spaghetti and meatballs were from a Nigella recipe, though I can’t remember if it was from her show or from her book How to Eat, which I read from cover to cover like a novel obsessively. While it was delicious, I recall that the meatballs, which were just dropped raw in the simmering sauce, seemed to be lacking something, and eventually I just stopped making it.

I recently developed a craving for spaghetti and meatballs, so I turned to one of my standbys-my America’s Test Kitchen TV Show Cookbook. Between Alton Brown’s Good Eats Collection, Smitten Kitchen (and The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook), I know I can always find at the very least a good starting place for a recipe I’m working on. Often, as with this recipe, I make a change or two and I’m good to go. With this one, the only change that I made was to sub crushed crackers for the bread in the original recipe, because I always feel like soaked bread is too squishy and visible.

So…if you’re looking for spaghetti and meatballs that live up to some romantic childhood memory that you have, this may not be the place to look. I cannot vouch for any sort of authenticity in this recipe, but what I can vouch for is perfectly browned meatballs in a simple but flavorful sauce. The meatballs are small so they cook through quickly and look at how many meatballs you get in your bowl! The sauce is just a few ingredients. This recipe doesn’t require hours over the stove…

…in fact, it’s simple and quick enough that if you have an hour to put into dinner you can put these easy spaghetti and meatballs on the table on a weeknight.

And if you are lucky enough to have leftovers, you can make meatball subs with them-and why wouldn’t you??????

Mary

Yield: 4-6 servings

Spaghetti and Meatballs

This recipe is adapted from the America's Test Kitchen Complete TV Show Cookbook.

20 minPrep Time:

40 minCook Time:

1 hrTotal Time:

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Ingredients

For the meatballs

2 ounces saltine crackers (about 15)
1/2 cup buttermilk
3/4 pound ground beef, 85% lean
1/4 pound ground pork
1/4 cup parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons parsley
1 egg yolk
1 garlic clove, minced
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
vegetable or canola oil

For the sauce

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 garlic clove, minced
28 ounce can crushed tomatoes
1/4 cup chopped basil
salt & pepper

To serve

12-16 ounces spaghetti
grated parmesan

Instructions

Crush the crackers and place in a large bowl. Stir in the buttermilk and let the crumb mixture sit for about ten minutes. Add the remaining ingredients (except the oil) and use your hands to mix. You want to just combine the ingredients but not overmix.
Fill a large skillet (I used a 12-inch skillet) about 1/4 inch deep with oil. Heat over medium high heat. Roll the meat into 1 1/2 inch balls (I use a 1 1/2 inch scoop for this). I got 29 meatballs. Place half of the meatballs into the oil and cook, turning, until brown on all sides, about 6-8 minutes. Remove to a paper towel lined plate and repeat with remaining meatballs.
While you make the sauce, cook the pasta according to package directions.
Drain the oil from the pan. Set the pan back over medium heat and add the garlic. Cook just until fragrant-this will happen very quickly. Add the tomatoes and cook until thickened, about ten minutes. Add the basil and salt and pepper to taste. Add all of the meatballs into the sauce and cook, turning occasionally, for about five minutes.
Drain the pasta. Stir in a small amount of the sauce to coat the noodles then divide among the bowls. Top with meatballs, more sauce, and grated cheese.

https://chattavore.com/easy-spaghetti-and-meatballs/

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