Sunday, May 05, 2019

Save 3/4 on Beef Meals The Easy Way

Have you noticed the price of beef lately?

What a silly question.

If you eat (or want to eat) beef then of course you have, but while chicken is much cheaper and pork is often on sale at $1/pound around here in Central PA, they just don't have the satisfying great taste of real beef.

But even most of the beef I buy turns out to have little of the flavor I remember from my youth, and also from my own ranch raised beef of the last decade, so it isn't just the fog of nostalgia.

Beef, like tomatoes, is becoming less flavorful and more expensive every day.

However there is an alternative and I bet your guests and family will never know the difference if you follow my recipe.

WARNING: remember some guests may have religious or medical objections to eating pork so use common sense applying this technique.

Take a pork loin which is a boneless cut some fat often on sale for $1 or $1.50 per pound and that's pure protein minus the fat, no bones or injected liquid which is mainly a trick of the markets to sell you water at beef prices.

(I do this myself, but I don't pay beef prices for the juices I inject in roasts.)

You may wish to do a bit of experimenting and one special ingredient which is easy to find on Amazon and not particularly expensive - more about that below.

You can do this many ways so this is less a recipe than a concept which you can adapt to your tastes and your meal plans.

What I do is this: I cut the loin into one inch medallions and remove most of the fat since I don't want it to taste like pork - nothing wrong with the taste of pork, but if you want to substitute it for $5/pound beef you don't want much flavor from the $1/pound pork.

I then bread and fry the medallions to get some flavors into the otherwise nearly tasteless meat. The breading is important because it will hold a lot of the flavor you add later, much more than unbreaded meat.

Then I mix up some very strong beef broth and marinate the cooked medallions in that for at least overnight.

Then, depending on whether I am making steaks or cutting it up for any dish with noodles or rice into bite sized pieces, I cook the medallions until very tender in the special beef broth.

You can then serve them whole or cut into small pieces for a dish incorporating anything you like such as sour cream for Stroganoff or just mix a good gravy using the the marinade.

The trick to all this is the marinade and it is easy to make but you can't use what they call beef broth in cans, nor can you use bullion cubes. Neither has much flavor and include a lot of artificial ingredients which I always avoid.

I make both beef gravy, the marinade, and also the injectible liquid I use to add flavor to beef roasts or large cust of pork from a restaurant staple which you don't find in most grocery stores.

There are a lot of such restaurant tricks which you won't know about unless you have worked in a good kitchen.

The special ingredient here is a kind of demi-glace, a rich concentrated beef stock made by boiling down standard beef stock until extremely concentrated.

At less than $1/ounce this isn't really expensive since one ounce can make enough gravy for a family of four big eaters.

For the "fake" beef you want to make this very strong but an ounce should be enough to make a cup of marinade which will later be diluted about 2:1 and mixed with flour or some starch to make a great gravy.

Find a link to the Original Beef Base at the bottom of this page.

Don't substitute the products actually marked "demi-glace" or "au jous" concentrates, stick with the Minor's original Beef Base for this use and for an excellent beef gravy.

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Great Cell Phone Service for less than $11/month? YES!

Are you one of those who think it is incredible that people are now paying more than one hundred dollars a month to talk constantly to others?

Personally I don't feel important enough that I have to be constantly talking to others but obviously some people are since I see them talking on the way into a store, in the store, on the way out, and even in the car as they drive away they had a cell phone glued to a hand and ear.

So why not spend the same amount of time on the phone and spend hundreds less?

And how about Judge Judy? A third of her cases seem to involve idiots who put someone on their cell plan or co-sign for them, then end up owing hundreds or even thousands of dollars on their bills.

If your friend or relative, or even 20-year-old can get a bank card they can have their own cell service account even without a credit check.

OK, no one who is addicted to their phone is going to unplug, if they were I wouldn't see people walking into walls or driving erratically all the time because they are on the phone, but this isn't about that, this is about that twelve hundred dollars every year you spend on that cell phone.

Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to pay only $200/year for unlimited cell service?

Did you know that whether you have an old flip phone or the latest smartphone you can get 500 minutes of air time, and send five hundred text messages for only 500mb 4G Ten dollars a month?

Actually, with tax, it is closer to $10.11 per month.

If you need more, for $20/month you can get unlimited talk, unlimited text, and a gob of internet time.

That's not some cut-rate service either, it is just the same cell service you get now and you can also get plans which have many more hours of talk time for a bit more, but the basic charge is only ten dollars a month.

I know, I have it and it is fine.

Go to Red Pocket to learn more, according to some quick research, this seems to be a subsidiary of Verizon, not a nocturnal aviation company (fly by night).

Friday, September 30, 2016

Critical Medical News: Beware of Russian based supplement scam about inte...

Critical Medical News: Beware of Russian based supplement scam about inte...: The scan purports to show a CNN interview with the famous S. Hawking and is being used by other supplement scams with slightly different w...

Friday, July 01, 2016

NEW address frugalseniorliving.blogspot.com

Couldn't port the files so go to frugalseniorliving.blogspot.com for newer posts

Wednesday, June 01, 2016

Technology is more than just that damn blinking time on your VCR.


A lot has been happening in my life so we had to let this blog rest but it seems like a good time to restart it.

One thing is that both of my service dogs passed.
CSC_0434.JPG

The problem with Great Danes and other large breeds is that they have short lives - as you can see mine were as tall as our full grown miniature horses.

My new service dogs in training are a mixed breed you can see in my other blog Puppybyday
I am working on my next Amazon Kindle book, "Zen and the Art of Graceful Aging" and this blog will have some excerpts.

If you love animals you might want to check out our story of an animal sanctuary we had for a decade, Sheep in the Rafters. Free if you have Amazon Prime which I'll discuss in the next posting.

I also publish a highly selective medical blog with only the most critical medical news.

A recent story tells of a new discovery which makes it much easier to tell if a person in a coma might wake up.

There are many bargains on the Web from reconditioned computers to exotic spices which you can't find except by searching diligently in big cities.

You can get not only free long distance phone service to most countries, but even free videocalls to your friends and relatives. My Beth does this all the time to attend her relative's distant events such as Thanksgiving and birthdays - I talk with my editor in Australia all the time face to face - for free.

Want to share some news with relatives or fellow hobbyists, dog lovers, horse lovers, cat lovers, knitters? Also free.

And lots, lots more.

First we will be looking at companies which offer free shipping even of food in small quantities or which will deliver a grocery order to your car.

The free shipping is great because shopping can be difficult for many and it saves the gasoline needed to drive there. Sure free bus service even here in Punxsutawney (Groundhog Day if the name seems familiar) makes it free to go to a store but how many bags of groceries and pet food can you carry?

Did you realize Walmart offers free shipping for tens of thousands of items if your order is over $50?

Amazon charges about $100 per year for Prime but for that you get free 2 day shipping on about a hundred thousand items and much more such as free movies, TV shows, music, and more.


That's just a teaser and I'll go into the details in the next posting.

Tuesday, November 06, 2012

United We Stand; Divided, We Fall. What ...

United We Stand; Divided, We Fall.
 What the greedy bastards in Congress have ALL forgotten,
or, worse yet, just ignore for their selfish benefit - no matter WHO is at 1600 congress is supposed to serve THE PEOPLE! It was the USSR where the people were supposed to serve the State!
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Sunday, October 14, 2012

Perihelion, the free "new" PULP Sfi-Fi e-...

Perihelion, the free "new" PULP Sfi-Fi e-zine has now launched.

Check out the fantastic cover! Capt. Sexxina Lazerlite negotiates a close escape from the clutches of the alien swarm. Cover by Jason Yungbluth.

http://www.perihelionsf.com/
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