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.

It's a New Year! Re-Purposing with Purpose

Happy New Year Folks!  I hope your celebrations were joyful and fun.  With a new year I feel like it's time to clean house and start anew on the home front too.  Do you ever feel that way?  Early Spring Cleaning of sorts?  Just to get our boys Christmas stuff in the house we had to re-organize our second floor (thanks Santa Pops!) and once you get started it's sometimes hard to stop.  As I am rifling through everything and putting stuff in the store, donate, or re-use pile, I thought it would be a great time to share some ideas with you.  I have a few re purposing ideas for the kitchen, home office, and playroom that I plan to talk about this week and would love if you shared your ideas as well. 



Have you ever seen these glass beverage containers?  They are gorgeous and look so pretty sitting out when entertaining, even water and fruit look prettier in a giant glass vase.  Unfortunately for us ours have never seemed to work without leaking.  It starts out as just a little drip of liquid which then turns into a huge mess when you are trying to entertain.  Both of the urns we have were gifts that we love so there was no way that we were willing to toss them. 

When the holidays rolled around and we couldn't find anything significant enough to be the center piece for our kitchen island one of our vases was the perfect fix, which thrilled me to no end and my husband too because he was tired of me making him swap stuff out for me to say "mmm no, too small", or "too big", or "too ugly".  Using the vase in this way was an easy fix, the spout just pops right off.  It's obviously not air tight but that doesn't matter for decorative purposes and because it was so low, you didn't even notice that there was a small hole on the bottom unless you were looking for it.

With a cheerio loving 9 month old on our hands, it's become pretty obvious what our other beverage urn is going to become.  We don't even need to make any modifications to it.  It's air tight with a seal around the top and it's sturdy with a giant opening for pouring stuff in and taking stuff out, perfect for counter top storage and much more attractive than a cheerios box.  And I must say, I am so tired of seeing the Cheerios box on my counter!  This is a great gift, that now that we've figured it out, will keep on giving (us storage options) for years to come.  Hooray!