Leftovers and homemade frozen burritos

One of our family's favorite go-to lunches are frozen burritos. During our unprocessed October, we had to give them up; their ingredient list reads like this:
WATER, WHEAT FLOUR (ENRICHED WITH NIACIN, REDUCED IRON, THIAMIN MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN, FOLIC ACID), BEEF, BEANS, VEGETABLE OIL (SOYBEAN, SUNFLOWER, CANOLA AND/OR CORN OIL), CONTAINS 2% OR LESS TEXTURED VEGETABLE PROTEIN (SOY FLOUR, CARAMEL COLOR), ISOLATED PEA PRODUCT, SALT, RICE FLOUR, YEAST, CELLULOSE GUM, GUAR GUM, WHEAT, SODIUM BICARBONATE, WHEAT STARCH, FOOD STARCH, DOUGH CONDITIONERS (SODIUM METABISULFITE, SODIUM STEAROYL LACTYLATE, L-CYSTEINE, MONO AND DIGLYCERIDES, DICALCIUM PHOSPHATE), MICROCRYSTALLINE CELLULOSE, SILICON DIOXIDE (TO PREVENT CAKING), CHILI PEPPER, YEAST EXTRACT, MALTODEXTRIN, FLAVORS, SPICES, SOY SAUCE (SOYBEANS), AUTOLYZED YEAST EXTRACT, LACTIC ACID, NATURAL FLAVOR, CALCIUM LACTATE. ALLERGENS: WHEAT, SOY.

Yikes!


At the beginning of October Unprocessed, I saw this blog post on Good Cheap Eats about making your own homemade frozen burritos. I finally tried them at the end of the month (the process, not the actual recipe), and we were big fans. I heated up a little olive oil and sauteed some onion. Then I added a bit of spice (cumin, salt, pepper), a defrosted jar of chicken meat from the freezer, and a defrosted jar of black beans from the freezer. I cooked it until everything was warm, dolloped the filling on large flour tortillas, added some cheese (cheddar for the kids and me, pepperjack for the hubby) and wrapped them up. Onto a tray, into the freezer, into a baggie. The next weekend, we threw them into the microwave, just like our old processed kind, and they were soooo much better. Best part about it - it's such an easy process, you can adapt it to such a wide variety of fillings…spicy salsa for the hubby, nothing added for the kiddos….


Well, last night, as I looked into the fridge, there were way too many leftovers...especially considering that we only need lunches for a few days this week...and that there's a fairly big holiday coming up that's going to make quite a bit of leftovers on its own. :)

I'd tried two new recipes from this month's Cooking Light over the past couple days: Slow-cooker Cuban pork shoulder with beans and rice and Chicken and mushroom empanadas. The pork shoulder was ah-maze-ing! We loved it, and it made an absolute ton. The empanadas were good (I hear)...hubby liked them, but they were too spicy for the rest of us. Thus, a lot of leftovers.

So then I thought, why not turn the leftovers into more frozen burritos?! And now we have a freezer full of easy, healthy, and delicious weekend lunches. :)

Meat pies with whole wheat pie crust

Do you read Terry Pratchett? We love his Discworld series. We try to get one or two of his novels on audiobooks for our summer travels each year...we just love his dry sense of humor and all of the off-beat culture references.

Anyway, one of his characters is a fairly unsavory fellow, and he pops up selling yucky meat pies in many of the books. Every time I make these pasties, my hubby calls them Dibbler's meat pies. These, of course, are way better. :)

As promised, I took our leftover potroast, and used it to make these pasties. (Hubby was thrilled to discover that after taking out the three cups needed for the pasties, there was still a lunch of meat leftover for him.)

This is a Cook's Country recipe. It was published with their Joe Booker stew as a way to use up leftover stew. When I made the recipe several years ago, we thought the stew was okay, but the pasties were divine. Since then, I've made them with all sorts of similar left overs: stew, pot roast, brisket, etc. They're always amazing.

One of the biggest changes I've made since we began our unprocessed journey is my attempt to eliminate white flour. So, knowing these pasties were on the menu, I went in search of whole wheat pie crust recipes. There weren't that many out there. I found two from Bob's Red Mill, and eventually settled on this one. The other one was 100% whole wheat, and I just wasn't sure I was brave enough to try 100% my first time out.

I had also read recently that you can substitute coconut oil (which is used a lot in unprocessed baking) in place of shortening in pastry recipes. I never buy shortening and usually just replace it with butter, but I have a big tub of coconut oil, and so I was happy to try it.

The crust was easy to work with and absolutely delicious - flaky, buttery, a tiny bit sweet. You would never know that it had coconut oil in it, or that it was made with over 50% whole wheat flour.

Anyway, dinner was amazing. Hubby said he would be willing to eat it every night of the week. Here's what I did:

Whole wheat pasties
pasties adapted from Cook's Country, pie crust adapted from Bob's Red Mill

for the pasties
3 T unsalted butter
1 onion, diced
1/2 pound ground meat (we usually use pork, but only had turkey this time)
1 tsp dried thyme
1/4 tsp ground allspice
3 cups leftover pot roast or stew (meat, veggies, broth)

for the crust
1 c (4.5 oz) all-purpose flour
1 1/2 c (6.75 oz) whole wheat pastry flour
1 T sugar
1 tsp salt
7 T solid coconut oil
12 T unsalted butter
8 T ice water

1. Melt the butter in a large skillet. Add the onion and saute for a few minutes until softened. Add the meat and spices and cook until the meat is no longer pink, about 8 minutes. Add the leftover pot roast or stew and cook until the liquid has evaporated, 5 - 10 minutes. Put the mixture in a medium bowl, mash it up, and set it aside to cool.

2. For the crust, put the flours, sugar, and salt into the bowl of a food processor. Pulse a few times until mixed. Add the coconut oil and pulse a few times. Then add the unsalted butter and pulse about 8 times, until the mix is coarse, but you can still see chunks of butter. Dump the mix into a medium sized bowl.

3. Add the ice water, 2 tablespoons at a time, and press the dough together with a rubber spatula until the dough starts to hold together. You still want to have sandy parts falling off. Divide the dough into two equal portions, each on a piece of plastic wrap. Use the plastic wrap to fold the dough over on itself several times until it holds together. Then wrap each piece up and put it in the fridge to chill.

4. When ready to make the pasties, preheat the oven to 450, and put a silpat or a piece of parchment on a baking sheet.

5. Roll out the dough and cut it into pieces twice as big as you want your pasties to be. I make different sizes: big ones for the hubby, medium ones for me, and little ones for my little ones. :) Put a large scoop of filling in the middle of the dough (again, the size of the scoop will depend on the size of the crust -- experiment). Then paint the edges of the dough with water, fold the dough over, and use the tines of a fork to crimp the edges. Cut a few vent holes on the top of each.

6. Bake the pasties for 25 minutes. (You can also freeze the pasties on a tray before baking; wrap them in foil, and when you're ready to bake them, just take them out and throw them on a baking sheet. You may need to increase the baking time slightly.)

Enjoy!

We have meat!

I've mentioned a few times in my unprocessed posts that one of our biggest challenges in our unprocessed journey has been meat. We are big meat eaters...hubby grew up in a Western Kansas meat-and-potatoes family, and while I wasn't always a big meat-eater, I have become more so in the past few years. (Starting when I was pregnant with my little guy and developed an absolute obsession with hamburgers...something I'd never really been fond of. Must've been low in iron, or something. Anyway, the obsession lasted throughout pregnancy, and never really went away.)

So while I liked the idea of eating less meat, and eating more lean meat, and eating only free-range grass-fed organic meat...I couldn't really figure out how to manage it. For one, good meat is just so expensive. For another, I didn't really know where to find it. We'd pick up some whenever we went to the farmers market, but we don't go there every week. And our grocery stores don't have the best selection.


In our first attempt at going unprocessed last April, I didn't meet our meat goal at all. This past October, we did better. I was able to find some organic free-range chickens at a couple of stores, and we hit the farmers market a couple of times. We still defaulted to grocery store meat sometimes, though.

Well, how excited was I when I was contacted about getting a meat share from a local farm?! One of my mom's good friends was planning to split a share of meat with another coworker; when that coworker backed out, they were looking for someone to share with, and she asked my mom, "Would Abby be interested?" She sure would!

We got our meat a couple of weeks ago. It took some rearranging in the freezer, but we were able to clear a shelf for our bounty: 13 pounds of ground beef, two roasts, six steaks, and one rack of ribs.


I defrosted the first roast this week and made my favorite pot roast recipe.

I was a little nervous when after the two and a half hour cooking time, the meat was not fall-apart-tender. With the grocery store roasts, you usually just have to touch it with a fork and it falls to pieces. With this roast, I still needed to work to separate it into servings.

I needn't have worried. I don't normally think of myself as having that discerning of a palate, but I just could. not. believe. the. difference. The meat was so incredibly tender...almost buttery...with the most delicious flavor. It was like a completely different food from the grocery store roasts. The little ones gobbled up their servings and asked for seconds: "Veggies, too?" "NO! Just meat!" I admit that the hubby and I had seconds, too. :)

The leftovers are reserved for tomorrow night's dinner: pasties, and we are so looking forward to it. We'll be using our first package of the ground beef for dinner this week, so I'll report back on that.

If you live in the area, I strongly recommend checking out Rising Moon Farms. I have eye-witness reports that they have very happy cows, and we can attest as to the quality of their meat!

Wordless Wednesday: Farmers Market Fabulous

Farmers market fresh-picked corn, the first local blueberries of the season, grilled fresh zucchini and peppers, and local free-range farm fresh burgers

The meat experiment

When we committed to our month of eating unprocessed foods, one of our goals was to reduce our meat consumption, find a local source for meat, switch to grass-fed/free-range, try the farmer's market. I think it was the goal we were least successful with. Mostly because, while committed to making healthy choices, eating unprocessed foods, doing what's best for our health and the health of the planet, I'm also a cheapskate. I've always been. My desires to be earth-friendly are always in conflict with my desire to save money.

Organic produce (especially when using the dirty dozen lists, so not needing to buy absolutely everything organic) isn't that much more expensive. But meat is so expensive, and we eat so much of it. My hubby grew up in a meat-and-potatoes family, and while he's gotten good at appreciating the occasional vegetarian meal, he generally doesn't consider a meal a meal unless there's meat. And our family is full of big eaters, and we like to host dinners, and that adds up to a lot of meat and a lot of money.

But after we returned from our trip out west, I was grocery shopping and (as I always do) debating my meat choices, and I saw this package of organic, grass-fed, free range hamburger. "Oh, why not?" I decided. And then next to it, I saw our normal package of grocery store brand hamburger. Hm...how about an experiment?


I brought them both home. I decided to doctor them as little as possible, so that the flavor of the meat could shine through: about 3/4 teaspoon of freshly ground salt and pepper for each pound of meat.

Grocery store = left, Free range = right

I mixed them lightly and then carefully weighed out 3.25 ounce portions and gently formed them into burgers.

Grocery store = left, Free range = right

Hubby cooked them for the same amount of time. I made our usual buns, but mini versions so we could each try both of the mini burgers.

We tried to explain the differences to the kids, introducing the concept of feed lots and free range cows, talking about the different foods they were fed, and whether or not they're given medicines. Over the course of the conversation, they became Happy Cows and Grocery Store Cows.

Grocery store = left, Free range = right

The verdict? There was a definite difference. The free range meat smelled fresher, tasted meatier and more flavorful, the texture was less chewy/less processed. The free range meat was definitely better. I'm fairly certain that if you gave me a burger at a barbecue, I would not be able to tell you if it was from a grocery store cow or a free range cow. But it's true that in addition to being better for the environment, more humane, and unprocessed, this meat is also yummier.

Grocery store = left, Free range = right

What does that mean for us? I'm not sure, but it was an interesting and fun experiment and will surely inform our future meat choices. In fact, last week at the farmer's market, we made contact with a local butcher and purchased some of his hamburger and bacon; it was fun to talk meat with the supplier, and I'm sure we'll continue this experiment.