10. Oven Roasted Ox Tails
I would have never heard of ox tail soup if my grandmother hadn’t made the soup. I never heard of it being cooked by anyone else. My husband loved it, but I never bothered to fix ox tail anything for a couple of reasons. First, why should I bother when gramma would do? Second, it just sounds a little on the icky side. And third, as it turned out, ox tails are usually more expensive than I care to pay.
But, years have gone by and gramma isn’t around to cook them anymore. They taste so good that I got over the ‘icky’ part. And I still can’t really afford them, but Jerry loves them, so I fix them occasionally.
Here is the fling it in the pan recipe for ox tails, along with a few variations to the recipe.
First, you need 2 to 4 pounds of ox tails. I had 3 pounds for this pan. They seem to be a little thicker than I usually buy, but that is what was available. Anyway, here is the way I cooked this batch of ox tails.
First I sprayed the skillet with cooking spray. Then I heated it pretty hot and sprinkled my salt, pepper, and garlic powder in the bottom of the pan. Then I browned the ox tails. I took them out of the skillet and sliced an onion in the bottom of the pan. You can do your onions two ways. If you want the onion to pretty much dissolve into the juice that cooks out of the meat, then just leave it in the bottom of the pan, and put your meat back in on top of that. Or, you can brown the onion and take it out of the pan. Put the meat back in and put the onion on top of the meat. It gives the dish a different look when it is done, but it pretty much tastes the same.
Next, I put the lid on the skillet and put the meat in the oven at 275 degrees for about 4 hours. Ox tails take a long time to cook to really tender. I added potatoes, and cooked for another couple of hours. It is basically done long when the potatoes and meat are tender. For this batch, I put a few stalks of celery in right at the start because I happened to have celery in the refrigerator. The celery adds a bit of flavor, but it isn’t necessary for the dish to taste really good. You can add carrots if you like them. Or, you can just cook the ox tails all by themselves without any vegetables. They are good with any side dishes, breads, or salads.
Ox tails make a great soup also. You just put them in water or beef broth or both, and boil them. Add a few potatoes, carrots, green beans, or whatever you like to put in soup. If you haven’t tried them before, I think the oven roasted recipe is the best way to start. That will give you a better idea of exactly how the meat tastes. If you have leftovers, which is very doubtful, then you can make soup out of that.
Remember, any recipe is just one cooks idea of how something can be cooked. They probably cook the same dish about ten different ways. Adjust any recipe to suit yourself and your family.
11. Chicken and Dumplings
start with a big pan
add 1 quart chicken broth
1 ½ quarts water
raw chicken – I used about 8 skinless boneless chicken thighs
salt and pepper to taste
bring to boil, and turn down to simmer for about an hour.
(act like you are slaving in the kitchen for this hour, or get another chore done, or just flop on the couch and take it easy.
In about 45 minutes you can get your apples ready to fry if you are going to make fried apples. (See previous blog post for recipe.) If you are just having chicken and dumplings, give yourself another ten minutes. Turn the heat up on the stove to make the chicken soup boil. Then put two or three cups of Bisquick or self rising flour, or some equivalent in a bowl and add milk to make dough sort of similar to biscuits. If you like dumplings 3 cups is a good amount, and if you REALLY like dumplings it might even take four cups. (Or, if you are trying to make a little soup go a long way, then more dumplings will be a good idea.) Then drop by good sized teaspoons into the boiling chicken soup. When all the dumplings are in the pan, turn down heat and simmer for about ten or twenty more minutes. Be careful or it will scorch and you will have to start all over.
This is a very easy meal.
Here are some variations on the dumplings.
You can use a can or two of chicken if you don’t have raw chicken on hand. This is where your pantry food will come in handy. If you have a rotisserie chicken from the store, eat half for one meal on Monday and use the rest to make dumplings on Wednesday. You do have to be careful to get all the bones before you add the dumplings. Or, just boil the chicken in chicken stock, and call it chicken soup. Fling in an onion and potato or rice or quinoa if you want a thicker soup. (You can also make a chicken pot pie with half a leftover baked chicken. It is really a cheap meal and quite tasty.)
Now, I know that chicken and dumplings is a really old fashioned dish and practically no one ever eats that anymore. However, dumplings do make a tasty and nutritious meal with very little fuss. They were popular years ago for farm families because chicken was much more readily available than any other meat. Another reason is that in the event that an entire chicken was not eaten, they had to do something with the leftovers. They boiled all the leftover chicken ,with the bones and all, to get all the food value. Then they added the dumplings, and ‘poof’. They had another meal. (Think ‘cartilage repair’ or ‘stop arthritis pain) when boiling bones. Here is a link to a good article on boiling bones. http://www.chiropractic-help.com/Chicken-bones.html )
If you use chicken broth and canned chicken, the ingredients to make this meal can be easily stored in a pantry for a long time. This is a good meal to try out on your family now and see how they like it. If it isn’t a winner the first time, then try it with a slight variation and see if they like it.
Making meals out of stored food just requires a little bit of creativity on the part of the cook.
Recently I was making soup out of a left over roast. When we have a roast, I always freeze the leftovers right after the meal to make soup on Friday nights. Anyway, this time I started with a quart of beef broth. I put it in the iron skillet, and then added a can of tomato paste. I heated that, added some basil, and let it simmer a while because the tomato is supposed to get a little more iron out of the skillet that way. I heard, but can’t prove of course, that cast iron cooking is a good way to help avoid anemia. My entire family seems prone to anemia, so I use iron cookware for almost everything. Anyway, it smelled so good that I had myself a cup. It was quite tasty, and would pass for tomato soup for just about anyone who isn’t addicted to soup out of a can. Besides being tasty, it was gluten free, and free of preservatives or flavor enhancers like MSG. A lot of people could make a meal out of something like that, especially if there were a few crackers to go with it. As always beef ‘Better than Bouillon’ is really tasty instead of canned beef stock.
The time to start using food out of your food storage pantry is right now. Of course you need to replace the food you use, but the more you cook with the stored food, the more you know what food to store. If you find you have something stored that no one will eat, what is the point?