Are you trying to stretch your food dollar yet finding yourself forking over six bucks for a meal in fast food joints? Do you walk into a supermarket and pass up the fresh produce and meat in favor of some pricey frozen entrée because making stuff from scratch seems like too much work and time? Do your eyes glaze over when pretentious foodies like myself rhapsodize about shallots, which are like unbelievably expensive tiny onions? Do you have a pot, a stick to stir it with and a hungry dog to eat what you’ve burnt?
Interested in a simple one-pot recipe for dinner that is filling, tasty and inexpensive? If you answered yes to any of these, please follow me below the orange torsade crostillante.
I'll admit to being a foodie Kossack. I love chatting about stuff like the difference between amaranth and emmer, or why fresh tarragon is essential to a decent Bernaise. But some recent commentary in diaries on food with respect to public assistance have called folks such as myself out as 'food elitists'.
So I’m putting down the organic leeks and plugrum to get back to basics. I'd like to offer my modest cooking know-how in the service of serving up cheap and healthy meals. That is without resorting to opening a line of credit at Whole Paycheck or idling up to the drive through window at Jack in the Box.
Today’s recipe is basic meat and potatoes. Real stick to your ribs, filling, crowd pleasing stuff. I know this is going to irk my vegetarian friends, and I apologize to them. I won’t get into the cons of eating meat, there's terrific info on that topic here. But we're going for economy, so the good (for your budget) and bad (for the planet) news is that in this country a cheap cut of meat means big bang for the buck protein-wise. This is something accessible and easy for a novice to pull off. If you can make ramen, you can make this.
I dubbed this recipe ‘Unheralded Actor Stew’ in honor of a theatre troupe that showed up at my place many years ago unexpected and hungry. I only had one flank steak in the fridge for the lot. So this is what I made for them, with inspiration from Fannie Farmer’s ‘students’ stew’. It’s a depression era dish for today’s recessionary times, nothing witty or modern about it. But enough chat, let’s cook.
Unheralded Actor Stew
What you’ll need:
A pound of round steak. Or a pound of any kind of cheap steak, you cheapskate. Slice steak against the grain into half-inch strips or one inch pieces.
Five slices of bacon cut into one inch pieces. Use the cheapest bacon- it's for flavor, not appearance. (Fannie used fatback or salt pork.)
Four large carrots. Cut thin, crosswise.
Six to eight potatoes. Peeled and sliced just under a quarter inch
Two medium onions, sliced thin
Three quarters cup of water
Some flour, salt and pepper
(optional) Parsley
How you’ll make it:
In a four quart cooking pot or large deep skillet, arrange the bacon in a bottom layer. Dust with flour and add the steak in a layer on top of that. Dust that with flour, salt and pepper. Add a layer of onions, a layer of potato slices, then carrots, another layer of onions, potatoes and carrots. Sprinkle more salt and pepper on top.
Put the pot on the stove over medium high heat and let the bacon sizzle there for about four minutes. Now add the cup of water, cover with a lid (or foil) and reduce heat to under medium. Let simmer for about forty minutes. Check the top layer of potatoes for tenderness as cooking time will vary depending on shape of the pot. (If it needs more cooking time, add a bit more water so the bottom doesn’t dry out and burn.)
You could mix this up and serve it in a bowl, but I like to scoop it out like a lasagna to showcase the layers and then ladle the gravy on top. And for the highfalutin, a sprinkle of chopped parsley.
Serves four ravenous drama students.
This complete meal takes an hour to make, or you can do the prep in advance and set the pot in the fridge to cook later. But the beauty of this one-pot dish is that it is very forgiving and suited to the newbie. You can overcook it and not ruin it. You can alter the ratio of root veggies to onion depending on what you prefer. The water, bacon and flour combine into a tasty gravy. Like thicker gravy? Use less water, a bit more flour. Leftovers are great on the reheat, so avoid the vending machines and microwave a container at work the next day for lunch. If you’ve got company or want multiple meals, this recipe scales up easily, X4 can fit in a stock pot. When I was pinching my pennies I made this with whole strips of bacon that I then reserved to fry up for the next day’s breakfast.
With a loaf of bread, this stew provides a filling dinner for less than two dollars per person. (The price of a Jumbo Jack, which is fat pill or the poorest quality pulverized cow parts between two pieces of, well, cake) As opposed to a chi-chi steak dinner, this dish provides a healthier portion of lean meat for a meal, which should be about four ounces or the amount of a deck of cards.
Add an inexpensive bottle of cheap red wine and a simple green salad and you’re dining, not just eating. For the well-heeled foodies in the house, this dish can be jazzed up by adding parsip, celery, fresh mushroom, herbs de Provence and a splash of white wine and some stock instead of water.
You could even use shallots.