When it comes to the challenges of putting on a Sabbath Feast each Saturday night, the biggest help I have found is to keep the menu simple. Once I find something that is easy, stress-less, and delicious, I serve it up regularly, and so far no one has complained. I love cooking things that the men in particular love because they are so expressive about their joy when they fill their plates. My seven-year-old grandson is just like the rest of them. When he arrives, he always comes barreling into the kitchen, gives me a hug, and then starts reconnoitering the kitchen to see what’s coming. It blesses me no end!
So here is my latest easy-peasy roast-in-a-crock-pot-with-loads-of-gravy recipe that I brought back from Bekah’s kitchen. I think I will call it Oxford Roast with Gravy.
Rub down a roast (nothing too specific here…this week I bought two chuck roasts to fit in my big crock pot) with salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Brown it up in some hot olive oil on the stove. Remove to the crockpot. Using the leftover oil in the pan, stir up some sliced onions and garlic until tender. Put them on top of the roast.
Then combine one can of cream of mushroom soup, 1/4 cup red wine, 2 T. worchestershire sauce, 3/4 c. hot water, 1 T. beef bouillon granules. Pour that over the roast, shut the lid and let it cook 8 hours on low.
When you take it out, you will have loads of gravy material. Strain out the onions and thicken it with some flour and water and you will have a jug full of delicious gravy to send around with the potatoes.
This recipe was born of an accidental mix up of a legendary family recipe (I mixed it up because it was my husband’s family and I did not know better), but the mix up was so delightful that we have never done it right since! Here is the basic concept – chicken soup (with or without noodles), served right on top of a pile of smashed potatoes. Besides being delicious (first you’re just eating soup, then it gradually starts turning into more of a potato soup, then you are eating potatoes with a fabulous chicken gravy… you get the point), it is also exceedingly practical. This makes it possible to have chicken soup as a man’s man meal. Unless I am greatly mistaken about the nature of hearty foods for serious eaters, I don’t think that chicken soup was formerly allowed into that category! Anyway, this is a simple and successful way to feed people. It is pretty too, and with a baguette and maybe salad on the side, it makes for great comfort- company food.  Try this out, and I’ll bet you that the children eat more than you knew they could! Continue reading ‘Chicken Soup for Hungry People’
…sometimes you want to make brownies! I haven’t shared a recipe in a while, and so when a friend asked for a copy of this one, I realized that if I was typing it up, I may as well share it with you! This is one of those very low key recipes that is actually pretty handy for entertaining because they manage to look maybe a tiny bit more fun than a usual pan of brownies. My personal favorite Continue reading ‘But when you’re up on your luck…’
My sister and I have always had a theory that every man has an ideal cookie (or maybe just every man in our family). Ben’s favorite cookies are oat free, very blonde, and tall. Bekah’s cookies never ever run into each other on the baking sheet, preserving a barely baked likeness to the dough balls that went into the oven.
My Uncle Gordon adores the kind of cookies that can’t be stopped from running into each other – the kind that leave greasy rings on a napkin. He even goes so far as to call other people’s cookies demeaning names, like “cakeys.” Continue reading ‘Luke’s Cookies’
I know, it does seem a little MacGyvor of me to recommend that you bake bread using your food processor. I am not kidding though, it is the best bread you will ever make at home. Continue reading ‘This is not a joke’
My life has been peppered with bad sugar cookie experiences. I love a good sugar cookie, but they seem like a holiday kind of cookie, so it took me many years of unsatisfactory holiday baking to come across my favorite sugar cookie. Usually it seems that they either break easily, puff too much to decorate well, run straight out of the shapes you cut and bake into one big blob-tag cookie party, or just don’t taste good.
This recipe is a combined two Christmas effort. Last Christmas I made cookies out of Gourmet magazine and hated the cookie, but loved the frosting. I saved the frosting recipe until this Christmas I combined it with a modified cookie from Country Living. Now I am happy. So happy that I make sugar cookies for all holidays now. For Valentine’s Day we made a batch of these and splatter painted them with neon pink and white frosting (we called them eighties revival cookies), and for Christmas I make half the dough red, and decorate them with a little more care. So… the moral of the story is that armed with a great recipe and a decent arsenal of paste food coloring you can achieve almost anything you set your mind to. Continue reading ‘Sugar cookie-o-rama’
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