Excellent post. One of the best I’ve read for a while.
Simmer it the crock pot and add 2 packets of mushroom gravy mix. simmer all day. When close 1 hour out from eating time, add carrots, celery, onions, whatever. then make a pan of muffins to go as a side dish. (Cooks up in the mircowave in about 8 minutes)
I have found that Knorr’s onion gravy/soup mix can make any not-so-good cut of meat taste good. Even Atalpoe! :eek:
simmer all day.
What you will wind up with is a tender, but dry, stringy and fibrous mass.
The problem is actually the structure of the beef back there. I can take anything, braise it long enough, and make it tender enough to eat. You can even make it taste reasonably good, but it still has texture and mouth feel problems, IMO. Not to mention that it lacks that “beefy” flavor. Salty, acidic marinades (like Sauerbraten), partially denature the proteins, allowing the brining liquid to penetrate, while breaking the proteins down, without destroying their integrity, (unlike meat tenderizer, which will just make things mushy and should never be bought).
I mean, if you or somebody else likes it, go for it! But Chuck is about the same price and tastes sooooooooo much better.
Eye of round makes pretty good Roast Beef sandwiches if cooked medium rare and sliced ULTRA thin (like, thinner than most of us have the desire to take care of). It makes great pho as well, but again, you’re slicing it so thinly that connective tissue and protein structure don’t matter as much - and it’s surrounded by a highly flavored broth.
Yeah, I favor really thinly sliced lunchmeats. We actually bought a slicer to try to make slicing leftover roasts and hams for lunches more easy, but it produced either thick slabs or thin scraps; never did manage to make it produce good thin slices.
Anyone have any experience with home slicers that actually worked?
You need a small restaurant quality model FD. That’s going to run you a couple hundred or so. My guess is you picked up a plastic housed model…the restaurant one will probably be stainless.
Hello Pilot/ My reccomendations
As men get older their Testosterone levels start to drop and then our metabolisms start to slow down and we gain weight. With foods that we eat we must be able to regulate our diet in a way that is pro-active to our body as it fluctuates,now i am 33,so i am not yet having to deal with the drop in testosterone levels(actually weight lifting helps to create more testosterone in your body and therefore will speed up that metabolism).
My recommendations for diet are lean meats(preferably fish and fowl) and vegetables(as much as you can stand,either steamed or raw) and brown rice(NOT WHITE) drinking tea is good but a healthy supply of water is even better. I drink green tea and it has made all the difference with keeping my body clean and in flush. Reverse osmosis and filtered water is good as well and you can go to your local walmart actually and get gallons of the stuff for only a quarter(that way you are not drinking water that has crud in it)
Fruits in the morning coupled with whole wheat bread and REAL butter and a couple of hard boiled eggs are a great breakfast.
The main thing that you havce to really watch out for is consuming refined sugar,it is like a legal form of heroin and i get trapped in it as well,but i can regulate that to where it doesnt affect me too much.
I think the main challenge with diets is that people do not stick with them and they will always falter and start eating candy and such.
Foods rich in omega 3 and 6 fatty acids are essential,you can either get this is salmon or you can get a supplement in flax seed oil,and also i would recommend a b-complex multi vitamin. and GINSENG,i cant stress that enough,a little ginseng in your water or in the little vials you get at the oriental markets work great for us men who are getting up there in age.
Peace and i hope this all helps,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,TWS
Thanks, MP. It was a couple years ago, so I don’t really remember how much plastic was involved. Any suggestions on brand?
I think the main challenge with diets is that people do not stick with them and they will always falter and start eating candy and such.
No, the problem with diets is the idea of “diet” in any connotation other than “The general category of things I consume.”
Thanks, MP. It was a couple years ago, so I don’t really remember how much plastic was involved. Any suggestions on brand?
They don’t run cheap. You may be able to find something comparable and cheaper than the link below. I seem to recall the edgecraft is tops.
i’ve recently bought tri tip steaks, they’re small (4oz avg) well marbled and tastier than chuck cuts.
they fry into beef bacon well, and absorb things underneath better than standing blade roast/steak.
if you like to age meat this ages very slowly and can be weeks gone and still be mild enough to deep marinade and cook well.
percentage of mass in up-take is pretty high in my system. little if any goes to waste. muscle bulking occurs quikly with this cut.
well I will probably get a few people to disagree with me on this, but I actually eat pretty healthy myself. Never eat fast food, unless its my only option (mostly on long road trips will i eat the wendys or hardees or whatever).
Now, I do not eat meat really either, red meat that is. I am not 100% vegetarian, but my meat intake is not that much. I mostly eat turkey, pork (white pork or ham), chicken, or fish. I mostly eat fish if I am going to eat meat.
Now, one thing I like to cook a lot is stews and soups. This is because it takes little preperation time (like ten to 15 mins) and the rest of the time is spent simmering your soup. I use beans instead of meat (mostly red lentils, but sometimes other beans).
Here is some things you should know when making soups and stews though.
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Use pure water. Tap water has minerals and stuff in it that takes away from your nutritional value you should be getting.
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If you are going to use beans that need to be soaked, use pure water, and then use the water you used to soak them to cook.
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Most things lose most of their nutiritional value when cooked, thats why stews and soups are so good, they keep most of the nutritional value in the broth itself.
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Beans are a good source of protein but are also a complex carbohydrate, so they fill you up faster than meat, and provide similiar nutrition value. They are also a good source of vitamin K. Soluble fiber absorbs cholesterol. Insoluble fiber moves fat and digested meat out of the intestines. Beans reduce the amount of insulin released, so the body stores less fat. Also, beans have no cholesterol in them. THey also contain: calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus and potassium. Beans also contain boron, copper, iodine, manganese, and zinc. Beans are naturally low in sodium and are high in potassium.
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Do not use lemon, lemon juice, or chilly sauce in your soups and stews while cooking them. Acidic material takes away from the nutritional value. If you are going to use that stuff, add it seperately in your bowl and do not cook with it. (i don’t always follow this concept, I like spicy food a lot!)
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Beans have both INSOLUBLE and SOLUBLE FIBERS. The soluble fiber absorbs cholesterol, triglycerides (oat bran does not) and toxins. Insoluble fiber moves fat blobs and digested meat through the intestines. Fibers also reduce APPENDICITIS, CONSTIPATION, DIVERTICULITIS, DIVERTICULOSIS, AND HEMORRHOIDS.
However, do not get the canned beans they are jam packed with sodium and preservatives. I am a big fan of beans as you can see. They are easy to cook and soft beans (like lentils) really don’t need to be soaked before cooking with them. If you need to soak beans you can always do it the night before. The prep time for cooking stews and soups is not that much like I said earlier.
You can also add in, red meat, fish, poultry, and pork to your soups and stews. If you use lean meat in them you will retain most of the nutritional value as keeping it in the broth of the soup/stew. I have made all kinds of stews and soups over the years from scratch. Its not hard, its easy to get creative, and if you are not good at cooking, soups and stews are really hard to mess up.
Here goes a basic recipe i use from time to time.
1 minced onion
2 cloves of garlic (minced)
2 tblspn of curry powder
1 lb of lintel beans
2 cups each of chopped: potatoes, carrots, brocoli, squash, celery and zuccini
4 tomatoes (blended or processed in a food processor)
4 cups of water - purified (add or subtract depending on how thick you want it)
optional:
Jalepenos
chilies
cayene pepper
(spices in general)
Chopped ginger
cumin
To change things up I constantly change the amount of spice, and the spice in my soups/stews. I have also made great seafood stews/soups. If you know what you are doing the prep time is never over 10 to 15 minutes. The rest of the time is spent cooking.
Also, if you do not wish to soak your beans you can use a pressure cooker, however I have never used a pressure cooker so I can’t comment on them.
In a cooking pot cook the onions and garlic with a little bit of peanut oil or a bit of water. Once they start to brown a bit then add in the tomatoes and water, let simmer for a minute. Then add the rest and the desired spices. Let it come to a boil and then reduce heat and let it simmer for like 30 min half covered on the stove.
This will feed several people as I have made it for myself and my roomates before in the past.
I won’t argue with you. Many people who have IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) have difficulty with red meat, pork, and wheat glutin. I have heard that the ability to tolerate and fully digest red meat may be tied in with blood type. type A+ tend to have alkaline blood and need an extra boost from acidic foods such as tomato to digest it all. I am not entierly sure of this, but I do have type A+ and have always had problems with red meat. I’d rather eat peanut butter, fish, and chicken, as well as an asortment of veggies that are high in protien like garden peas (4-6 grams in each cup, not bad!).
eat grape nuts all day everyday and you will be healthy…thats my suggestion.
I tried to eat my wife’s cooking, but my stomach couldn’t handle it for long :eek:
I lost a little weight by running to the john. 
- Use pure water. Tap water has minerals and stuff in it that takes away from your nutritional value you should be getting.
This simply isn’t true. Minerals in your water has next to no impact on the nutritional value of your food. Now, having bad water might be an issue in its own right, but it’s not a nutritional thing.
- If you are going to use beans that need to be soaked, use pure water, and then use the water you used to soak them to cook.
See above. Additionally, throwing out the water does little to the nutritional value of the bean.
- Most things lose most of their nutiritional value when cooked, thats why stews and soups are so good, they keep most of the nutritional value in the broth itself.
This is absolutely untrue for a variety of reasons. For instance, if you use meat in your soup, the protein doesn’t leach out into the stock - it’s still back in the meat. Further, what you are talking about is nutrients leaching out into the water. This only happens with water soluble nutrients. Additionally, the cell membranes mitigate this greatly. If you use a roasting, sauteing or other non-moist heat technique, you will not experience leaching at all.
Finally, cooking actually improves the nutritional value of most foods. The raw food diet fad is a myth of crap. Nutrients become, more, not less available when you cook the food - while SOME nutrients do break down, cooking makes more of those nutrients accessable to your body by making the food easier to digest. This is precisely why we cook foods.
- Beans are a good source of protein but are also a complex carbohydrate, so they fill you up faster than meat, and provide similiar nutrition value.
Beans do not have a similar nutrition profile to meat. Meat tends to be high in B vitamins and red meat is especially high in iron. This is in addition to all the minerals it contains. Further, meat is a complete protein while beans are absolutely not. I love beans, and they are great nutritionally, but it is not similar at all.
- Do not use lemon, lemon juice, or chilly sauce in your soups and stews while cooking them. Acidic material takes away from the nutritional value. If you are going to use that stuff, add it seperately in your bowl and do not cook with it. (i don’t always follow this concept, I like spicy food a lot!)
This is absolutely not true. Acidifying the cooking liquid will not detract from the nutritional value appreciably. The pH necessary to damage the nutrients would render the food item in question unpalatable. These are fairly stable compounds for the most part and hardly require special treatment - if you can boil it without problems (and you can), a tiny shift in pH isn’t going to be an issue (and it doesn’t.)
I’ll try not to derail the thread too long, but:
MP–thanks for the using chuck as a cut for a roast idea. My wife used to make a bad roast, and it would drive her crazy. When I read what you wrote, I asked her what cut she used. Surprise, surprise, it was rump. We went out and got a chuck roast a few days ago, and she did her same recipe with the different cut of meat. It was awesome! Just thinking about it makes me salivate…
MP-
When you cook vegetables, they lose some nutritional value. Meat is a different story, and yes beans are not a sufficient replacement to the protiens and vitamins that meat gives you. That is why if you cook vegetables its best to steam them. If you saute them in a wok or frying pan they can lose some nutritional value.
http://waltonfeed.com/self/beans2.html
Above is a link to some of the information I posted. As far as tap water goes, it has traces of chlorine and other minerals that may take away from some nutritional value. Of course it may or may not make a huge difference, but from what I have read it does. Of course a lot of it applies to water soulable vitamins like you mentioned before.
So…
I decided to research it a bit, and I found out that a lot of what I had mentioned was actually a bit out dated. I read some more recent studies on food and cooking them, and it does state that what I was talking about is true to a sense when it comes to vegetables, (which is what i was referring to). That steaming vegetables will retain some of those water soulable vitamins. It seems that cooking foods (as long as cooked properly) do not really lose nutritional value. However when researching this I did find something interesting about cooking in microwaves.
http://www.relfe.com/microwave.html
So, it seems for the most part MP was right, and what I posted seems to be a bit outdated research. However, every article I did reach that was recent says you must cook the food right. There are right and wrong ways to cook food.
I guess you do learn something new every day…
Gangster, you are correct that this does tend to happen with veggies more so than anything else, and it really is a boiling problem…
But try roasting some zucchini sometime!!!, MMMMMMMM
BTW I just reread my post, and it seems a touch aggressive. My apologies!
Hey reggie, glad to hear it! The fat in chuck really makes a difference.
Rump roast is better in a crock pot, I hate to say. As to the veggie thing, another good way to propare them without loosing nutition is to steam them. I usually do them in a special Tuperware microwave steaming pan. It only cost me $15 and I use it daily. Also, it only takes 5 minutes, fresh or frozen.
On another note entirly… Has anyone out there tried that Koshi GoLean cerial? I have been thinking about trying it since I eat alot of cerial and it looks like an easy way to add more protein into my diet.