More notes from a country kitchen - 11/47/11

By News Team
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Fri, Nov 4th, 2011
Posted in Columnists

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WHERE'S THE BEEF?? That's what I tend to hear in October every year! Fall is the month when we buy beef and stock up for the winter and spring. Personally, I could care less about meat but my hubby thinks that beef is just about the only food item worth eating!! So, every October we contact our favorite beef grower, Bill Johnson, and order a quarter of beef. That amount of beef usually gets us through the winter and spring months and sometimes even through summer before we have to start buying over the counter again. We use a lot of chicken too. Grill it in the summer and hotdishes in the winter.

Hamburger is our favorite beef product of all but we usually get all the "other" pieces too. Winter is a good time for pot roast and hamburger/vegetable soup and swiss steak and all those good oven foods! Soup bones are a must for my family! If I don't use them then my sister does. She cooks up the soup bones and then freezes the broth for use later on. I'm not a rib eater so I usually don't get those. But the one thing I get, and I get every package there is, is LIVER!!! That is my absolute favorite meat of all!!! Yes, I know, some of you probably don't like it-but tough! My hubby refuses to be in the house whenever I make it as the smell is just to awful for him - what a baby!!! My personal favorite way of fixing it is to sauté a ton of thinly sliced onions and a full package of thinly sliced fresh mushrooms - yum, yum!! Then, without flouring the liver pieces, I brown them with the onions and mushrooms. Once everything is nice and brown and cooked through, I pour in a big can of tomato sauce and let things simmer for 30 to 45 minutes. Sometimes instead of simmering I put everything in a casserole dish and bake in the oven along with baked potatoes or scalloped potatoes. If I have any green peppers on hand I also slice them in with the onions and mushrooms. I can eat this every night for a week and not get sick of it!!

Some people I know brown their liver with bacon. I have never tried that. Not sure if that gives the liver a porky taste or what. I have even heard of people that pour brown Karo syrup over their liver. Can't imagine what that tastes like either! When we were kids and had liver at home (naturally there weren't too many who would eat it then either) dad would make his "homemade" potato chips. He would start some grease (remember how our folks saved used grease in a can on the back of the stove?) heating it in a big cast iron fry pan. Then he would peel several potatoes and using the old potato peeler, peel layers of the potato into the hot grease. As the potato pieces got brown and crispy, he would remove them and put them on old newspapers to drain. He also sprinkled on some good ole salt too!!! Good thing we didn't know about cholesterol back then! Now, I wonder what I should fix for supper tonight??? How about tuna??!!!

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