Question that I may not want answered...

... is it ok to lie to a customer after you catch them lying to you?

What to do with a leftover prime rib dinner

Pookums was craving steak Sunday night and I was tired and cranky, which is why we ended up at Texas Roadhouse for a last minute dinner. Normally, when  we order a dinner where there is a choice of the size of meat, we always take the largest so we have leftovers. This time it was half of my prime rib.

 

So what do you do with leftover prime rib? Monday Night Beef Pot Pie! 

You can fill it with almost anything that's hiding in your veggie crisper in the fridge. My options were potatoes, carrots, peas, and green onions.  In fact, this is a good time to use up anything that's getting old, but not yet to the composting stage.  My green onions needed to be used first, so that was why I chose them instead of yellow onions.

I chopped up the meat, onions, and carrots.  If you prefer larger chunks of carrots, you can cook them with the potatoes instead of sauteing them with the meat. Throw them all into the skillet and saute. The meat had a good amount of fat, I didn't need much oil.

 The potatoes were diced and cooked in beef broth.  Actually, it was chicken broth with some beef bullion (forgot to stock up on beef broth again).

When the meat, carrots, and onions were cooked, I started adding flour and stirring it in until the meat and veggies looked dry - less than a 1/3 cup flour.  I let this cook a little longer and then strained the broth from the potatoes into the skillet while stirring.  This thickened up the gravy nicely, but I still had to add a bit of corn starch to get it where I wanted it.  Added the potatoes and it was ready to dump in a 8x8 baking dish.

This was why I didn't have a pie crust to put on top of the pot pie.  My grandmother just called them pie scraps and I looooooooove them... and make them anytime I have a pie crust sitting around.... just like today before deciding to make pot pie.  It was worth it too.

So, instead of pie crust, I took 2 cups bisquick, cut in 2 tbsp butter, and added just enough milk to make it stick together.  Kneaded it about 6 or 7 times and then rolled it out and plopped it on top of the filling.  Brushed with butter and baked for 30 minutes.  If I had wanted a pretty golden-brown crust, I would have brushed egg on it instead, but I like the butter flavor.

This was after our first trip to the beef pot pie, there was enough for seconds and then dinner tonight with a small salad.

October's Cakes

This is the post that originally pushed me away from Vox and back to Blogger.  If you can read this - it means it worked.

The beginning of October started with a cake for a 9th wedding anniversary.  Our friend's wedding cake was a giant white Lego brick from which they saved one of the six pegs on top for their anniversary.  Unfortunately, that was lost in a move, and so she wanted a copy of it to give to her husband.  The funny thing was that he was kinda disappointed because he wanted to do the same thing to celebrate their 10th anniversary next year, and she beat him to it.

There were also the annual Halloween cupcakes for work.  The wolfman cupcakes were a repeat from last year.  Two people asked me if they were Chewbacca, and someone else was calling them the "angry cupcakes".  I need to add wolf ears or something next year.

The mummies were also repeats from last year, but they're easy to make and I'll keep using them. The spiders were a last minute decision that I wasn't thrilled with. I did find the cutest skull design, but was missing one ingredient, so they will have to wait until next year. 

The eyeball cupcakes were new and fairly popular, but I won't use the same gummy eyeballs next year. They were almost impossible to remove from the container without mangling, they were expensive, and they didn't taste very good.

The final set of cakes for October was a wedding and groom's cake.  I was stressing all month over these because they needed to be transported 79 miles to Waco, and the last time I had to transport a wedding cake (also my first wedding cake) it was a complete disaster.

On this wedding cake, you can see where the long and bumpy travel time to the wedding was a little hard on the tiers, but at least they made it in one piece.  I keep saying that I won't do another wedding cake and end up doing it anyway, but I can promise that this is the final time I transport a cake that kind of distance for anyone else.

The groom wanted a cake with the Apple logo on it.  I think that's taking company pride just a bit too far, but we know way too many insane Apple people in Austin.