This week I was both excited and apprehensive about the menu in the book. The main course is beef stew. I do love a good beef stew and I can’t remember the last time I made a batch for myself. So that was exciting. On the other hand the side dish/salad this week is made from lime Jello, the one and only flavor of Jello that I really dislike. I had promised myself that personal preferences were not going to dictate my doing this project and in reality there are very few foods I really don’t like. So I went ahead and made the lime Jello salad and it wasn’t as bad as I feared it would be.
So let’s talk about the menu then I have a few things to say about each item on the menu. The main dish this week was a pot of beef stew with dumplings. The side a lime jello and pineapple salad. And for dessert tapioca pudding with ginger cookies.
So the beef stew, I was really excited about this because it has been a long while since I have made myself beef stew. And topped with dumplings made it even more fun. I did cut back on the salt this week by a bit and it was a bit saltier than I would have normally made but much better than some of the dishes in this project have been. The thing that surprised me about the stew recipe was the lack of any kind of thickening agent to make the broth more like a gravy. This stayed as just a broth instead of the rich slightly thickened gravy like consistency I normally make. It was very good it just lacked that thicker texture that I was looking for. Also the recipe called for a pinch of ground allspice, which I am pretty sure I have never added and I want to experiment with a bit more in the future. I think it gave a really nice flavor to the stew and I will definitely be playing with allspice in other beef recipes in the future.
The dumplings directed me to use some Bisquick mix and they of course turned out wonderfully. There was a period of several years when my kids were young that I made dumplings a lot. They all loved them and they are so easy and make for a much more filling meal with little work.
Next was the Jello salad. If you are of a certain age you probably remember when green (lime) Jello was used all the time. And mixing in crushed pineapple was something that was done at a lot of “fancier” meals like for holidays or company. That being said my mom usually used lemon Jello instead of the lime most of the time. I was very worried about this part of the menu since lime Jello is about the only flavor I don’t like. But at the beginning of this project I said I was not going to let any of my personal preferences dictate changes to the menu. So I made the salad as the recipe was written. The only change I made was to make just one serving instead of the 2 the recipe dictated. It was actually better than I remembered it and it did make a nice accompaniment to the stew. It was definitely like stepping back in time a bit.
For dessert the book’s menu called for Tapioca Cream (pudding) which they directed the reader to make from a box of tapioca pudding mix. They did top it with some fruit juice which I skipped because I forgot to put it on my grocery list. Again a dish I haven’t made in many years. When she was growing up my daughter loved tapioca pudding.
Along with the pudding the menu called for ginger cookies to be made from a box of Betty Crocker Gingerbread Mix. My grocery store didn’t have any type o gingerbread mix on the shelves and since I have a batch of Christmas cookies that I just made a couple of days ago I decided to just have a couple of those in place of the gingerbread ones.
So overall this was a really fun menu with a wonderful main dish that I am very glad I made. The dumplings were a fun addition and reminded me how much I enjoy making them. I need to make them a lot more often this winter.
So up next week in the book is a menu based on baked beans and I am looking forward to seeing how they turn out.
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