Category: Gluten free

Blue Steaks

Whoever first had the idea of combining blue cheese with chopped beef must be memorialized in a museum of culinary arts somewhere. If not, he or she should be. The combination is wonderful. I first had this steak at a small supper club near Eagle River, Wisconsin in the summer of 1961. I made my first blue steaks about three weeks later when I went home to visit my family.

The steaks were not a great success. My father, though born and raised in Wisconsin, didn’t like cheese, my mother thought that all hamburger should be fried until it withered in defeat and back then my sisters didn’t like anything I cooked. But if I do say so myself those blue steaks were almost as good as the one I had at the supper club, so I kept making them.

There are many recipes for hamburgers garnished with a blue cheese sauce and a few with blue cheese fillings that include ingredients such as garlic, onion, sour cream and various spices. I have eaten such, and they are often quite tasty, but in this instance I think that simpler is better. I like to make these large enough to serve as a steak, six to eight ounces. Could we call them diet blue burgers?

INGREDIENTS

Extra lean ground beef
Blue or gorgonzola cheese
Steak seasoning

PROCEDURE

Size the steaks according to appetite. For each steak, make two thin patties of meat. Put a layer of blue cheese in the center of one patty, top with the other patty, seal the edges well and sprinkle lightly with steak seasoning or salt and pepper. Grill over charcoal to the desired doneness; for medium to medium well, grill three to four minutes on one side, turn over and grill another three to four minutes. Serve with a garden salad, baked potato, and fresh green peas for an elegant, inexpensive dinner.

NOTE

Let diners add more seasoning or steak sauce if they wish. One nice thing about this steak is that you can vary the amount of cheese to suit individual tastes. For an eight ounce steak, I use about two tablespoons.

When it is cold and nasty outside, I fry these delicacies in a hot cast iron skillet coated lightly with cooking spray. They still taste pretty good.

Mom’s Boiled Dinner

Winter in our home meant soup at least a couple of times a week when I was growing up. One of our favorites was boiled dinner.   While many boiled dinner recipes call for serving the meat and vegetables on a platter and saving the broth to make a soup later, our boiled dinner was the soup.

My mother’s recipe for boiled dinner started with a meaty ham bone or a large smoked pork hock.  Usually she used the bone from a picnic ham, since she liked the economy of buying a picnic ham, roasting it for dinner and having leftover ham to slice for breakfast and sandwiches.   She usually saved the skin from the ham and put it into the soup pot along with the bone to enrich the broth.

After breakfast she would put the ham bone in the pot, cover it with water and bring it to boiling, then move it off to the back corner of the stove to simmer until she had time to add the vegetables later in the day.

My sister Patsy theorizes that the reason mom’s boiled dinner always tasted so good was the long slow simmering it received on the back of the wood stove in winter.  And when supper time arrived, there was fresh bread with sliced ham or summer sausage for sandwiches.

Like most soup recipes, boiled dinner can be made with many variations, but here is a good way to start.

INGREDIENTS:

A meaty ham bone or smoked pork hock
3 or 4 quarts water
3 stalks celery
3 carrots
1 medium onion (2 – 3 inches in diameter)
3 medium potatoes
1 small cabbage (4 – 5 inches in diameter) or half of a larger cabbage
Salt and pepper to taste

PROCEDURE:

Put the ham bone or hock in a soup pot or Dutch oven and cover it with water.   Bring it to the boil, turn down the heat and simmer for at least 2 hours.   Clean and chop the celery, carrots and onion into half inch pieces.   Peel the potatoes and cut into inch cubes. Add these vegetables and simmer for an hour.   Taste the broth and adjust the seasoning.

Remove the ham bone from the pot.   Let it cool until it is easy to cut off the meat and return the meat to the pot.   Wash the cabbage, removing any damaged outer leaves, and cut it into eighths.   Add the cabbage to the pot about 20 minutes before serving and simmer until tender but not mushy.

Wonderful with a green salad and fresh bread for sandwiches.

NOTES:   You can replace the ham bone or hock with 2 cups chopped ham and three bouillon cubes.   I use two chicken cubes and one beef cube when I do this and add three or four whole cloves.   You can also use two smoked turkey drumsticks.