Easy Swiss Steak

I took some time off from this blog over the holidays.  I didn't necessarily plan to do so, but I got really busy both because of the holidays in general and because I was trying to get the reading of the primary sources for my dissertation done before I left for the ASCH conference this past week.  I'm committing myself to this blog for the next year more than I have in the past, but I think in general I need to cut back on my posting.  I'm currently at a crucial point in my academic career: my funding for next year is contingent on my finishing my dissertation proposal by March or April of this year.  In a way, I may end up relying even more on the crock pot to make dinners for myself and my husband during this time, especially with some of the quick and easy recipes, because my time is so valuable.  But I'm planning to try to update only every other week, aiming for a Friday or Saturday update each time.  So you can come back in two weeks for a new update.

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My sister came to visit us this weekend, so I decided to make a crock pot dish.  She also has a crock pot at home, but I'm not sure how much she uses it.  Because she often works for such long hours, I think she'd really benefit from the one I have with a timer, so she can make a dish in the morning and not worry about getting home at a specific time to switch it to warm.  I decided what to make this week based on what was on sale at my local grocery store.  I saw that boneless top round steaks were on sale, so I looked through my various crock pot cookbooks to find something to do with it.  The best thing I found was several versions of "Swiss steak" in different cookbooks.  There is one in the Gourmet Slow Cooker Cookbook and one in the Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook, but the one I decided to use is in 101 Things to Do with a Slow Cooker because it was the easiest and simplest recipe and thus the best one for a grad student with limited time.

The only drawback with this is that it takes a long time to cook, so even though I went to bed kind of late because I was doing work, I had to get up by 8:00 a.m. to prepare the crock pot so it would be ready at dinner time.  The good thing about this, though, is that it is really easy to prepare and there is no chopping of vegetables that you need to do ahead of time.  You simply grease the slow cooker (I use cooking spray because that's the quickest way to do it) then throw in baby carrots.  Sorry about none of the pictures lining up with the paragraphs that talk about them.  I ended up with more pictures I wanted to include than I had paragraphs.

Then, you put the steak in.  I cut off the fat that was on the edge because, as I'm sure I've said before, the fat on meats doesn't really cook off in the slow cooker like it does on the stove or in the oven so you really want to trim as much of it off as possible.  I cut the steak into six pieces to make the dish six servings.

Then, you mix the sauce to pour over the steak.  Again, this is very easy.  You throw in one envelope of dry onion soup mix, one can of tomato sauce, and some water.  Because my husband likes things spicy (in fact, he says that he finds most of my crock pot dishes too bland, though just wait until you hear about the Indian dish I made that was too spicy for him!), I added some crushed red pepper to the sauce.  I would highly recommend the addition of the crushed red pepper.  It doesn't make it spicy, but it definitely keeps it from being too bland.  After mixing it all together, you just pour it over everything, then turn the crock pot on to cook on low for 8 to 10 hours.

This is what the dish looked like before I turned it on.

And this is what it looked like when it was finished cooking.

As you can see from the above picture, the steak cooks down a little bit in the crock pot so depending on how much you want to eat, you may want to go with the four servings instead of the three.  The cool thing about the 101 Things to Do with a Slow Cooker cookbook is that each recipe gives serving suggestions.  The "Easy Swiss Steak" says that you should serve it "over plain or garlic mashed potatoes" and "with a side of cucumber and onion marinated in vinegar."  So, to go with this dish, I made garlic mashed potatoes via the Joy of Cooking, and adapted the marinated cucumber salad recipe from the same recipe.  My marinated cucumber-onion side dish recipe is at the end of this post.  This was really tasty.  Both my sister and husband thought so.  We served it with a salad as well and my sister and I felt full with the serving in the picture plus a salad.  My husband, of course, went back for seconds on the meat and potatoes.

Overall, I'd recommend this dish for the grad student based on the number of calories and the cost per serving.  The Swiss steak alone is 311 calories per serving if you cut it into six pieces like I did, or 466 calories per serving if you cut it into four pieces.  The caveat with this calculation, however, is that the websites I use to count calories only have the steak listed by weight as cooked, but I only know what the weight is before cooking, so the actual calorie counts might be a bit lower.  For six servings, if you have to buy all the ingredients, it would be $1.92 per serving as I made it.  If you don't add the crushed red pepper, it'd be $1.55 per serving, but the crushed red pepper is a spice that we normally have on hand so I didn't need to purchase that and I actually already had the dry onion soup mix because I had used it in a prior crock pot recipe so I only paid $1.38 per serving!

However, the overall calories and cost go up if you make the marinated cucumber-onion side dish and garlic mashed potatoes to go with it.  For four servings you'd end up with 720 calories and for six servings you'd end up with 565 if you use the standard 2/3 cup serving of mashed potatoes.  If you serve yourself a smaller serving of mashed potatoes, say 1/2 cup, you'd end up with a more manageable 665 calories for four servings and 510 calories for six servings.  If you want more calories, you could be healthy and add a salad to it like we did (with balsamic vinaigrette dressing, a mixed green salad is between 100-150 calories, depending, of course, on what you put in the salad).

The total cost for this meal is a bit high if you don't already have the spices, butter, garlic, milk, etc. on hand as staples.  It would be $6.70 per serving for four servings or $5.74 per serving for six servings.  I have most of those staples on hand, however, so I only paid about $2.85 per serving for the six servings I made so it is a totally reasonable for the grad student, both in terms of calories and cost.  If you're on your own, you could basically feed your dinners for the whole week for less than $20.00!  Of course, since my husband always has seconds and I also fed my sister, the $20.00 will really only last 2 days for us.  Still: it's an easy, yummy, inexpensive dish that is perfect for the grad student lifestyle and budget.

Marinated Cucumber-Onion Side Dish
1 large cucumber, peeled and cut into thin half-slices
1 large white onion, sliced into strips
1 cup white wine vinegar
8 tsp sugar
1 tsp dried dill, or to taste
1 tsp ground black pepper, or to taste

Place the cucumber and onion in a large bowl with a cover.  In a separate small bowl, mix together the vinegar, sugar, dill and black pepper until the sugar is dissolved.  Pour the mixture over the cucumber and onion and mix everything around.  Place the cover on the bowl and refrigerate for at least one hour.  I suggest shaking the covered bowl around every once in a while before you serve it to make sure that the vinegar mix is coating the cucumber and onion evenly. Makes about 8 servings.

Hawaiian Chicken

I got this recipe from a fellow blogger and wanted to try it immediately because it is so simple and she said it was so good.  After making it, I'll say that I definitely agree and it is also a perfect recipe for the grad student because it is extremely easy, both in terms of time and budget!  I'll include the recipe at the end of this post, in case anyone else wants to try it out.

First, you put some chicken breasts into the crock pot.  My blogger friend used four chicken breasts, but I used six, mostly because the larger packages of chicken breasts were the ones that were on sale when I went to the store.

The next step was my adaptation of the recipe she gave me.  I added onion and green pepper that I had cut into chunks.  She had mentioned that she wanted to try adding onion next time, but I decided, after googling various Hawaiian chicken recipes and finally finding a Hawaiian vegetables recipe, that I'd try it with both onion and green pepper.

Then you add BBQ sauce and canned pineapples with juice.  She said that you should use 1/3 of the bottle, but since I had added more chicken and the vegetables, I decided to dump the whole bottle in.  She also said to use half of the juice from the can of pineapples but, again, since I had added more to the recipe, I just used all.  Then I cooked it on low for 8 hours, since most of my chicken recipes in the crock pot recommend cooking on low for 6 to 8 hours, but you could also do it on high for 3 to 4 hours.

This is what it looked like when it was done cooking.

After cooking, take you shred the chicken in the crock pot, then serve it over rice.  We actually had some leftover steamed rice from getting Chinese takeout over the weekend, so we used that, but I'd normally make some brown rice to go with it.

In terms of calories, this is an amazing dish.  I originally calculated estimating six servings (because we put in six chicken breasts) which comes out to 325 calories per serving, plus about 160 calories for a 1/2 cup of brown rice, for a total of 485 calories.  But, we actually got about 8 servings out of this dish, making it 244 calories per serving, for a total of 404 calories with the rice.  I served it with a nice salad to round out the meal.  In terms of cost, this is beyond amazing.  I actually already had an onion from my organic produce delivery and some BBQ sauce that I purchased when it was on sale, so it only came out to $1.07 per serving!  Even if you have to purchase everything, it would probably only be around $1.35 per serving (as long as you make sure to buy whichever type of BBQ sauce is on sale!).  Overall, it's a really cheap recipe which is good for my stipend, and it was really easy to make, which was really good for last week when, as I mentioned in my last post, I basically had a deadline every single day Monday through Thursday.  It's nice to not have to take much time to put dinner together one day, and then to have it available to eat as leftovers for the rest of the week when you don't want to take too much time out of studying to cook.

The full recipe:

Hawaiian Chicken with Vegetables

4-6 chicken breasts

1 onion, cut into chunks

1 large green pepper, cut into chunks

1 bottle of BBQ sauce

1 large can of pineapple chunks in juice

Place the chicken breasts in the bottom of the slow cooker.  Add the onion and green pepper chunks on top.  Pour over it 1 bottle of BBQ sauce and the can of pineapple with juice.  You may choose to use only half of the juice if you want a thicker sauce.  Cover, and cook on LOW for 6-8 hours or HIGH for 3-4 hours.  After cooking, shred the chicken into pieces in the slow cooker and mix together with the other ingredients.  Serve over rice.

Apple Cranberry Bread

Last week was really hectic for me.  It was one of those end of the semester weeks where you have something that you have to do every day.  I had a conference paper due to the respondent on Monday, a draft of my dissertation prospectus due to my seminar on Tuesday, an Italian translation exam on Wednesday, and was presenting/getting feedback on my prospectus on Thursday.  Needless to say, I didn't have any time to update before that and after that I crashed for a couple days and more or less did nothing.  I'll try to make up having missed last week with an extra post this week.

Friday, December 2 was my department's Advent celebration, so I decided (like I did last year and the year before) to make a dessert in the crock pot.  Because I've been trying to be healthier recently, instead of making cookies or cake like I had before, I decided to try out the Apple Cranberry Bread from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker cookbook.  Of course, the other reason I decided to make this was that the fresh cranberries were on sale when I went grocery shopping the week before, so I looked for something to do with them.

Now, the thing about these recipes that you bake in the slow cooker is that you're not really saving time because you have to do the same exact amount of work as you would baking something in the oven.  I still find it really cool, however, that you can bake in the slow cooker and the longer cooking time could still be useful if there's other things that you have to do OR you have to go out of the house and so can't leave the oven on OR if you're cooking other things and need to keep your oven free.

Before preparing the ingredients, you're going to want to do two things.  First, grease a baking dish that fits into your slow cooker, then put a large pot of water on the stove to boil.  Both of these things will be used later.  Then you mix the dry ingredients together: flour, flax seeds, baking powder, salt, and ground cinnamon.  Separately you beat together the wet ingredients, one of which, as you can see in the image above (on the right), is orange juice.  You don't have to use fresh orange juice, of course, but because the recipe also calls for orange zest and says that the amount you need is the juice of 1 large navel orange AND because my parents got me the juicer attachment for my KitchenAid for my birthday this year, I squeezed the juice fresh.

Anyway, you beat together all the wet ingredients, which include sugar, olive oil, egg, and the orange zest/juice.  Then you add the dry ingredients and stir in the apple and cranberries.  Now, I took the bowl off the mixer and "folded" in the apple and cranberries but I'd actually recommend doing it with the mixer if you can--the dough is really hard to manipulate by hand.

After everything is mixed together, you pour the mix into the greased pan and place it in the slow cooker.  Then take the water off the stove, which should be boiling by now, and pour it into your slow cooker around the pan until the water comes 1 inch up the side of the baking pan.  The bread takes about 4 hours to cook, though test it with a toothpick in the center to be sure.  I'm also a bit paranoid about the baked goods in the crock pot because the moisture of the crock pot makes the dish seem uncooked.  I actually checked it after 4 hours, then left it on to cook a little longer while I got ready for the Advent celebration.

So this is what it looked like when it was done.

The cook thing about this bread is, as the cookbook says, it can be "a great snack, a nutritious desert and can even be eaten for breakfast."  I cut it into 12 pieces and put it on a paper plate to bring to the Advent celebration--unfortunately because I was trying to get everything done and get out the door in the end, I forgot to take a picture of the final presentation.  My husband and I took a taste before we went out the door, however, and it was AMAZING.  As my husband said, "$#%^&%* bomb."

Now, the cookbook says that this dish serves 8, but clearly it matters how you cut it.  Since I cut it into 12 pieces, the calories come out to be about 205, but if you cut it into bigger pieces, obviously it would be more calories.  The really cool thing about this recipe, however, is that making this bread cost me all of $4.99 to make (so, all of $0.42 per serving)!  The only things I purchased were the fresh cranberries and whole wheat flour.  If you bake regularly, you'll probably have most of the ingredients on hand and so will only need to purchase, maybe, the flax seeds, cranberries, and an orange.  I already had the orange, via my organic produce delivery that I get each week, and the flax seeds because my mom got me to start putting some on my cereal.  Technically the recipe calls for half all-purpose flour and half whole wheat flour, but I'm sure if you didn't want to spend the money to get whole wheat flower and only had all-purpose flour (or vice versa) it'd be fine.  Anyway, to sum up: this was really good, I highly recommend it, and I'd make it again with the leftover cranberries if I didn't have some plans for chutney, which can also be made in the crock pot.

Honey-Mustard Pork

Be warned: this is a long post.  It's almost two posts in one, so I'd recommend taking some time to read it when you want to procrastinate.

It's been a long time since I updated, but I'm finally back and will be trying my best to update once a week from now on.  I took my exams on the very last day of October and am very happy that I can move on to my dissertation research... you know, the stuff I came here to study in the first place!  After that, we were in California for a wedding and then I presented at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in San Francisco, so was at the conference for a few days.  It was great to see some old friends from undergrad there (shout out to Steve and Andy!).  Then came, Thanksgiving--thanks so much to our friends Bodhi and Sophia for hosting us for the holiday!  Sophia made a perfect turkey (in the oven, not in a crock pot) and the meal was amazing.  To sum up, I've been very busy since I last posted!

You may also notice that I took some time to make some changes to the format of the blog--changed around the main picture that I use and the style.  Let me know what you think of the new look in the comments!  I also want to point out a couple of the new features of the blog:

1. On the right side of the web page, under my "Why Slow Cooking in Graduate School?" section, you'll find a "Follow by Email" box in which I assume you can put your email address to get updates every time I update the blog.  I honestly have no idea if it works, so if someone wants to try it out and let me know, that would be really awesome.
2. Underneath that, you'll find some new links.  The first one is to my Big Blog of Crock store, a store I created on Amazon to bring together in one place all of the books and slow cookers that I recommend on this blog to make it easier for readers to find them.  The second is to the Gourmet PhD blog of one of my close friends who is also trying to cook and eat well while doing her PhD.  As she explains in her "Who's Who" section, we "have been making mischief since we first met, many moons ago, as wayward Catholic school teachers. In the intervening years, we both became graduate students and would-be food bloggers, so it’s no surprise we’re still close friends."  The final link (unless I add more later) is to the Nutrition Action Health Letter, put out by the Center for Science in the Public Interest.  My mother gets me and my siblings a subscription to this every year and they give you information about the latest studies on food and nutrition and make recommendations about how to eat healthier.  My favorite part, however, is the three recipes that are included in each issue.  In fact, the Chicken Tagine that I posted about in October 2010 was from one issue.
3. Finally, underneath that you'll see the top five, all time, most popular posts of my blog.  If you have a favorite post that's not appearing on the list... uh... I guess you need to click on it more.

So, those are the new features of the blog.  Check them out and let me know what you think in the comments.

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So, on to my actual post.  Since I've been away from blogging for so long, but have still been cooking with my crock pot, I have a huge backlog of posts to make.  Some are from so long ago that I've almost completely forgotten about how it went, which is unfortunate.  So, for today's post, I'll bring you the recipe that I made today: "Honey-Mustard Pork".  This is from a book that we just recently got as a gift from a friend, 101 More Things to Do With a Slow Cooker.  He also gave us 101 Things to Do With a Slow Cooker, but I just haven't used that yet.  (The author, Stephanie Ashcraft, has a whole series of the 101 Things to Do books.)

I was drawn to this particular recipe for two reasons: first, boneless pork chops were on sale at my local grocery store and, second, this recipe couldn't be any easier.  There's no chopping and the absolute minimum of prep work.  (Though I will note that this is not a complete meal by itself, so you'll have to add something to what you make in the crock pot.)  You start by greasing your crock pot.  I used some cooking spray that I have on hand to do that quickly, but obviously whatever way you normally grease things for cooking is what you should do here.  Then you dip the pork chops in flour and place them in the greased crock pot before sprinkling them with black pepper.

In a separate bowl you make the sauce that these are going to cook in.  The only ingredients are condensed chicken with rice soup, water, and mustard.  You mix these together and them pour them over the crock pot.

This is what it looked like before I turned it on.

Quick sidebar: Toward the end of September we received a wedding gift from one of my husband's rock climbing friends and his wife, the slow cooker with a timer that I've wanted for a long time!  It is awesome and has truly revolutionized how I use the slow cooker.  No longer do I have to select the day that I cook on based on when I can be home to turn the crock pot to warm!  I can make a recipe that only needs to cook for 6 hours on days when I go to the gym in the morning and am at school until the late afternoon!

If you follow the link above you'll see that this model also has a probe so you can set the slow cooker by time or by the final cooking temperature that you want the food to end up at!  Obviously, the latter setting is especially good for roasts, which I haven't made recently, but of course I'll share how it goes when I do make one!

Anyway, this is what it looked like after it cooked on low for 8 hours.

When the pork chops are done cooking, you take them out, leaving the liquid behind.  Taking them out can be difficult because the meat after slow cooking is so tender that it just falls apart.  The cookbook says then to puree the liquid in a blender to make gravy, but I used the immersion blender to get it done with less mess and fewer dishes (and with the amount of dishes this entire meal made, my husband--who washed them tonight--is probably very happy that I didn't also use the blender).  You serve the pork chop with some gravy on top.

Now, since the book recommends that you serve this dish with mashed potatoes, I decided to make mashed sweet potatoes and steamed broccoli to go with it.  And, of course, a salad--my mother should be proud how I add a salad to every single meal I post about.  Overall, this dinner was good.  Nothing super special that I would rave about, but a good, solid, and really easy meal to make.  The only complaint I have is that there is nothing in the dish that makes it "honey-mustard."  As the recipe is written, there is too little mustard to make a difference and, weirdly, the recipe doesn't specify that you have to use honey mustard, so there is nothing to make it "honey."  I used Dijon mustard because that is what we already had.  My recommendation?  If you want to make pork chops this way, add more mustard, maybe 1-2 tbsp... at least.  The gravy was good and all, but I think it would be better if it had more "kick" to it from the mustard.

Now, in this recipe makes it a little difficult to calculate the calories because the amount of flour the recipe calls for is more than gets added to the actual dish and you definitely don't use all of the gravy just putting it on top of the pork chops!  The number of servings in this dish also depends on the number of pork chops used.  The recipe actually calls for 4-5 pork chops, but I used 6 because the larger packs were the ones on sale.  So, as I made the recipe, if you go by the measurements in the cookbook, you get just over 190 calories per serving.  In actuality, I'd estimate the calories per serving (for the pork chops with gravy only) at about 175 calories.  In fact, the pork chop with the mashed sweet potatoes and broccoli is probably only about 335 calories.  Really small if you're watching your weight because you spend more time in the library than you do at the gym!  (And guys, you can be like my husband and have an extra pork chop and still only be at about 510 calories.)  Budget-wise, you can't beat this.  What's awesome about this recipe is that so many of the ingredients are things that many people will have on hand as staples: flour, pepper, and mustard.  The only two items I had to purchase were the pork chops and the condensed chicken with rice soup, a total of $6.00 for $1.00 per serving.  Of course, you do have to buy the side dishes, but the broccoli was only $1.99 and sweet potatoes at my store are about $0.99 each for the big ones (I actually had them already because we got them in the organic produce delivery we get each week, but if you had to get them, that'd be how much they are).  Overall, not bad and you'll get at least 2-3 meals out of this if you're married or cooking/eating with a roommate and a whole week's worth if you're on your own!  Though if you were going to eat these pork chops for a whole week, I'd recommend switching up your side dishes to make it interesting.  What sides would you put with honey-mustard pork chops?

Comprehensive Exam Time

Unfortunately, I'm in the midst of studying for exams, so my blogging has to take a back burner to exam prep.  See you all again post-exams in November!