Stuff to Do With Too Much Beef

Rowan stopped eating beef. It's a mammal. That's fine with me, she's old enough to decide what she wants to eat (as long she decides to eat real food, not just sugar from the bowl or whatever) but it means it's that much harder to get through a big old hunk of beef. 

Our quarter-steer is more than half gone. What's left is mostly hamburger - in two pound packages - and roasts. The roasts are immense! About five pounds each. Next time I'm going to have to ask them to make them smaller, or cut them all into steaks or even stew meat. There's just no way two adults and two tiny, finicky children can eat five pounds of beef before it goes bad.

This last roast I defrosted was labeled "London Broil." If you buy that in the supermarket, it looks like a big, two or two and a half inch thick steak. It's recommended on the package that you "broil and slice thinly on the diagonal." Well, this roast was much too thick for that. If I'd tried to broil it, the outside would have been charred to ash while the inside was still raw. So I decided to thaw it and cut it into steaks before cooking. 

Meal number 1:  I put seasoned tenderizer on the steaks (I don't usually use this, but I find that the grass fed beef is tougher than regular beef, and london broil is a tough-ish cut.) and pan fried them with poblano peppers and onions for fajitas. Although I fried less than half the steaks, there was enough leftover for

Meal number 2: A fat steak sandwich in Homero's lunch. 

Meal number 3: The rest of the steaks, now deeply tenderized from a night in the fridge, were cubed and sauteed with tons of garlic and a teaspoon or so of cumin seed, and more onions. Then I tore up and shook the seeds out of eight or ten dried chiles, some of them guajillos and some of them anchos, I think. I tossed them in the pot along with a can of whole peeled tomatoes (squished by hand as they went in), salt, and.. that's all. Put the lid on and let it simmer for a couple of hours. Then - and this is probably some kind of cheating - I fished out all the chiles and put them in the blender. I scraped the resulting paste into a sieve and pushed it through, back into the pot, with the side of a spoon. 

That was one fine bowl of red, friends. Only one problem. There's a lot of it left.