Quick Tip Tuesday: A Cure for Over-cooked Meat

Being huge Iron Chef fans in our house we took our horribly, no good, very bad beef from our New Year's Eve dinner that went awry and used it as an opportunity to try something new.  Have you ever seen beef get re-hydrated on any of those cooking shows?  It's really pretty cool, and also pretty easy.  It's also your only chance to salvage meat that has just been smoked to a crisp...okay, not your only chance, I've also heard you can make it into a stroganoff but that was not a part of our plan. 

When we refused to throw out our terrible dinner from the night before we thought that we could fix it like they always seem to do with weird secret ingredients on Chopped or Iron Chef.  It already stunk, so we couldn't really do any more damage.  My memories of those episodes were spotty so I tried to find it online first,  but when google wasn't answering our questions, I just tried what I thought would help and it ended up being much better than we thought.  My husband was sad that I didn't try to make more but the rest of the left overs were too hard to cut and I don't think they would have turned out as well. 

You can salvage a piece of dry beef just by throwing it into the oven for a few minutes.  If meat is left over and been refrigerated it's easier to slice.  Slice it thin and add it to a casserole dish with beef broth, cover it with tin foil and heat on a low setting about 300ish until it's warmed up.  I added in garlic and onion seasoning because I wanted to see if I could help the flavor of our mess, and would have loved to have used a beef and onion broth to make an au jus, but we didn't have any so I used what we had on hand and it turned out pretty tasty, if I do say so myself.  It's not going to be the juiciest thing you've ever eaten but it will certainly work in a pinch.

Here is a link to the only site I could find that talked about fixing this meat dilemma, they also shared a few other good ideas that might help you the next time you are wondering what to do with that kitchen nightmare you've just created.