I found a large chunk of beef in my dad’s freezer, unlabeled. The following is what I did with it, and this will work with most large cuts of meat—the shoulder, butt, or belly of the cow or lamb…you know the fucking mystery cut.
This kind of thing is good for a slow cooker for like 6 hours. But since my dad doesn’t have a slow cooker the oven it is!
Set the oven to 2500F.
Put the mystery meat in a cast iron pot with veggies you need to use up. DO NOT cut the fat off or you will have dry meat. Take your wilted parsley, dry carrots, and the onion and garlic that’s about to grow. Add a can or three of tomatoes, diced, sauce, whatever. Add salt and spices as you like. The first time I did cumin, paprika and turmeric. See the picture on Instagram. Next time I did Ras El Hanout and Harissa and thyme. It was a little spicy but will turn in to shredded taco meat nicely.
Cover and put all that in the oven and leave it be. For 5-6 hours. After 5-6 hours take the beef out (put it in a bowl) and remove any big chunks of fat. Shred the meat. How do you shred meat? You take two forks and use them like excavators and rip the meat apart like a strip mine.
In other/unrelated news, I think I’m letting the kids watch too many constructions shows. One thing I never expected pre-child was to learn about trucks and other big vehicles. I worry about how much brain space I’m using up remembering the difference between excavators and backhoes and such.
If you have an immersion blender use that in the pot of veggies. If not, scoop it into a blender (make sure your blender can handle hot stuff). Once you have the veggies blended into a sauce, pour it over the shredded beef and mix.
Serve on top of rice or orzo or other pasta; a good crusty bread would also work.
Here’s how it went down for me. Since I was dealing with the mystery cut I wasn’t sure how long it would take to cook it so it would shred. I’m looking for the fat chunks melt off in the time I’m cooking it. If all that works, I’m sure my kids will protest anyway and say they don’t like it, but then probably eat it up.
I let mine go for 6 hours today (maybe I forgot about the time…maybe I didn’t) and now the kids are hungry. I made rice (following the directions on the box/bag), but I fucking burned it because the kids are always a distraction. So I made orzo. (That’s why it’s in the serve-over recommendations, in case you were wondering “why orzo?”.) The water was ready already because, thank goodness, my husband thought to boil water for mac and cheese in case the kids didn’t like beef today. Now they have buttery orzo instead.
But I’m going to call tonight a win. Two of the three kids ate it up, and the other gave me fucking lines about how not everyone likes everything. And then he went to bed hungry but happy to cuddle with me.
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