Here’s a cute story:

Once upon a time, when my parents were newly married (and I mean “newly” – they probably hadn’t even been married a week yet!) and just home from their honeymoon, my mother wanted to cook my daddy one of his favorite meals for their first married dinner at home- stuffed peppers.  She worked hard in the kitchen and came out with a big platter of beautiful looking stuffed peppers.  As they sat down and started to eat, they both noticed something wasn’t quite right – the peppers were crunchy! It was then my  mother realized she’d neglected to cook the rice before adding it to the filling! She was so embarrassed, but my daddy kept on eating and said he thought they were great anyway – what a great husband!

Here’s another story:

Once upon a time, when Joel and I had just been married and had just gotten home from our honeymoon, I wanted to cook a nice meal for our first married dinner at home. I picked out a nice noodle  casserole recipe and went to work.  As my new husband and I sat down and started eating…lo and behold, the casserole went, crunch! crunch! and immediately I knew I had flubbed up somehow. Just as my mother had done years before when she was a young bride, I had neglected to boil my noodles before putting them in the casserole.  Just like my sweet daddy had done, my hubby kept right on eating and said it was delicious and that he liked it crunchy, while I sat there blushing. Like mother, like daughter, I guess!  Lucky for our husbands, we’ve both grown quite a lot since our first married days!

Believe it or not, when I was a kid, I hated these things.  I hated peppers, I hated onions…I hated most things, it seems like.  I didn’t even try these until I was almost married – my mother coooked them and I finally decided I’d give them a try.  I ended up really liking them and getting the recipe from her.  Finally, last night, I decided to make them myself – I did them exactly how my mother does them and WOW, these are SO much better than I remember!!  They’re hearty and filling and have tons of great flavor! We both ate like pigs and cleaned our plates! Luckily, there’s one left and I get it for dinner tonight since hubby is going to a boys’ night! Yee haw!!

My Mom’s No-Bake Stuffed Peppers

2 medium bell peppers (any color – I used yellow)
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon basil
1-15 ounce can tomato sauce
1 pound lean ground beef
1 small onion, chopped
2 cups rice, cooked
1/2 cup grated cheddar cheese

Cut peppers in half lengthwise. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil, drop the peppers in and boil for 5-6 minutes. In a small bowl, mix tomato sauce, basil and sugar and set aside. Brown meat and onion in a large skillet; drain. Stir in 1/2 the tomato sauce, 1/2 cup of the rice and the salt. Cover and simmer for 5 minutes; stir in cheese. Spoon meat mixture into peppers and place into skillet. Pour remaining tomato sauce around peppers; cover and simmer. Top with additional cheese, if desired. Serve on top of remaining rice.

These really are SO good – do yourself a favor and try them out soon! I promise you’ll love them! Just don’t forget to cook the rice first!   Enjoy!!

These are the steaks I mentioned a couple of days ago (one blog post below) that I made for my hubby last week. I have to say, I was a wee bit (ok more than a wee bit) proud of myself for finally (and successfully!) cooking steaks! I know – what kind of cook doesn’t know how to make a good steak, right? For some reason I had always thought steaks would be too finicky for me to handle – I just knew I’d overcook them or set my kitchen on fire or something else awful. BUT – these were surprisingly super duper easy! Once again, Ina Garten comes to my rescue and makes things that once looked challenging totally approachable for me. Love her! Her recipe is for Filet Minon, but I had some great looking Ribeyes that I wanted to use instead – they worked just fine!

I decided to top the steaks with a mushroom cream sauce – I love mushrooms on my steak, so I thought this sauce would be really good on top – sure enough, it was deeeeelicious! Hubby absolutely loved the whole meal and I was quite surprised at how delicious it turned out (especially since it was so easy!!). Toot, toot tooooot! (That’s me tooting my own horn, if you can’t tell…).

Steakhouse Steaks
-Barefoot Contessa

2 (10-ounce) filet mignon (or in my case, Ribeye steaks)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 tablespoon salt
1 tablespoon coarsely cracked black peppercorns
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature, optional

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
Heat a large, well-seasoned cast iron skillet over high heat until very hot, 5 to 7 minutes.
Brush the steaks with the vegetable oil on each side and season with salt and pepper.
When the skillet is ready, add the steaks and sear them evenly on both sides for about 1 1/2 minutes per side.
Top each steak with a tablespoon of butter, if using, and place the skillet in the oven. Cook the steaks until they reach 120 degrees F for rare or 125 degrees F for medium-rare on an instant-read thermometer. (To test the steaks, insert the thermometer sideways to be sure you’re actually testing the middle of the steak.)
Remove the steaks to a serving platter, cover tightly with aluminum foil and allow to rest at room temperature for 10 minutes. Top with mushroom cream sauce (recipe below) and serve. Enjoy!

Mushroom Cream sauce
-Adapted from Barefoot Contessa

2 pounds baby Portobello mushrooms
1/2 cup good olive oil
1 shallot, chopped
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 cup heavy cream (you could also use half and half)
1 tablespoon dry red wine

Brush the caps of each mushroom with a clean sponge. Remove and discard the stems. Slice the small mushrooms thickly and cut the large ones in a large dice.
Heat the olive oil in a large Dutch oven or saucepan. Add the shallots and cook over low heat for 5 minutes, or until the shallots are translucent. Add the butter, mushrooms, salt, and pepper and cook over medium heat for 8 minutes, until they are tender and begin to release their juices, stirring often. Stir in the Worcestershire sauce, red wine and cream and cook for 2 more minutes. Serve warm over steaks.

This turned out to be one of the best meals I’ve made in a long time – hubby kept going on and on about how good it all tasted. I always feel so good when I put a good dinner on the table for my hard-working hubby – especially when he really loves it! I know this recipe will be in my recipe box from now on…it’s definitely a keeper!

OH! – and, be on the lookout….something new and exciting is in the works here at Sing For Your Supper!! I can’t wait!……………

It’s pretty darn hot outside today (I think 102 is the high…) and normally on days like this, I’d be posting something cold and refreshing…like lemonade or ice cream. But I’m not. I’m posting Nana’s meatloaf. Why? Because it’s been one heck of a week and I needed something comforting. It doesn’t get much more comforting than Nana’s meatloaf. For years that was the only meatloaf I would eat as a kid. So, naturally, that’s the only recipe I use when I make meatloaf now. Only thing is, it definitely tastes better eaten at Nana’s table…

And today’s your lucky day, because I’m going to share her recipe with you. You don’t have to make it in this intense heat (I don’t know about you, but it’s pretty hard for me to turn my oven on when it’s the hot summertime)….you can save it for cooler weather or for when you have a week like mine and need something comforting to make you feel better. Either way, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Nana’s Meatloaf

1 pound lean, ground beef
1 egg, beaten
1 15-oz. can diced, stewed tomatoes
1 teaspoon salt
(I like to add lots of pepper to mine, but she doesn’t call for it)
1 small onion, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
1/2 package Saltine Crackers, crushed (probably about 10 crackers or so)
Lawry’s Seasoned Salt to taste
(I also like to add a few dashes of Worchestershire sauce)

Mix everything in a large bowl. Form into two loaves and place on a broiler pan (so all the fat can drip down into the bottom of the pan), cover loosely with foil and bake at 375 degrees for approximately 45 minutes or until brown, taking the foil off halfway through the cooking process (at this point, I like to mix a few tablespoon of ketchup with some brown sugar and Worcestershire sauce and spread on the top of each loaf – this is optional!). Serve and enjoy!

This is how we do pot roast in my family – or as I used to call it when I was little, “roast-pot-beef”. Not sure why, really.  Pot roast is a typical “Sunday Dinner” meal; its just one of those meals that tastes better after church on Sunday – maybe God makes it taste better, I don’t know. In my family, “Sunday Dinner” is sort of a holiday, in that, we all get together, eat until our sides hurt, then sit in the living room and visit; just like Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Easter. When I was a kid, we usually had most of our Sunday Dinners at Nana’s house (don’t get me wrong, my mother hosted her fair share of them too, but it seems like we were at Nana’s more), and Nana would usually ask my sister and me what we wanted her to fix – Lindsay’s answer was pretty much always fried chicken, but mine was always roast-pot-beef; with carrots, potatoes, rolls and some sort of delicious nobody-can-make-it-as-good-as-Nana dessert. Bliss.

I still, to this day, would much rather eat my mother’s or Nana’s pot roast. Mine’s ok, but there’s just something about theirs that makes me eat about three times as much as a dignified lady ought to eat. Hehe…dignified. But, living an hour away from my mother and Nana makes it much more difficult for us all to get together for our Sunday Dinners; and when there’s just no way hubby and I can make the trip, I just make do with my own pot roast. So here it is, for your enjoyment…or not, whatever.

(Hehe – you can see Hubby’s reflection in his fork!)

Easy Pot Roast
I usually start with a nice lean chuck roast or round roast – really, whatever is on sale. Season it with plenty of salt, pepper and a little garlic powder, put it in the crock pot with about 1/2 cup water. If you want it to be ready by lunchtime, put it in the night before and cook it on low until the next day; around 10 or 11am, take the roast out, and add your potatoes and carrots (for the two of us, I use about 2 potatoes and 4 or 5 carrots), then add the meat back on top of the vegetables and continue to cook for another hour or so, until the vegetables are tender.
If you want the roast for dinner instead of lunch, put the roast on in the morning, and cook on low all day – add vegetables in the last hour of cooking.
To make the gravy, take the roast and vegetables out of the crock pot and place on a platter and cover with foil. Dump all of the cooking juices from the crock pot into a shallow pan over medium heat; add a little flour (about 2 tablespoons) mixed in with about 1/3 cup hot water to the pan and whisk constantly to thicken. Add salt and pepper to taste. *If your roast doesn’t give off enough juice, you can always add about half a jar of store-bought beef gravy.

*Note: both my mom and Nana cook their pot roast in the oven instead of the crock pot, but I think the crock pot is easier for some reason. Maybe that’s why mine isn’t as good as theirs…

You know how sometimes you think too hard about something? You’re trying so hard to come up with something new, you forget all about the old standby “somethings”. That’s what happens with me frequently. Now that I’ve sort of gotten past the point where spaghetti or a casserole was my best dish and I know a little more about food and cooking in general, I spend a lot of time trying to think up good ideas for dinners that might be a little more involved than say, spaghetti (not that there’s anything wrong with spaghetti!). So the other day as I was talking on the phone to my mother and thinking aloud about what I was going to cook for dinner, throwing out all kinds of possibilities (and coming up totally empty-handed, I should mention), and she suggested that I make beef tips.  Beef tips?! Tender chunks of roast slow-cooked all day long in a thick, creamy sauce served over white rice….why didn’t I think of that?! Perfect!  And it was, too – I was so glad she suggested this, because it really hit the spot and hubby loved it. When I asked him if he had ever had beef tips, he replied, “Yeah, in those microwave dinners…” Oh dear. So, I was happy to set him straight on what real beef tips were supposed to taste like! I think he was happy I did too!

So, thanks, mommy, for coming to the rescue and saving me from over-thinking my meal!

Easy Beef Tips
-recipe from MY MAMA!

1 lb. chuck roast (or any kind of roast meat you want), cut up into small chunks
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1 small can mushrooms, drained (this isn’t part of the original recipe, but I thought it would be a nice addition)
Approx. 1/2 a can chicken or beef broth (If you’re using homemade, I’d say to use about 1/2 cup)
cooked white rice (however much you like)
salt and pepper to taste

Season the roast with salt and pepper and place in a crock pot with the cream of mushroom soup and chicken broth (sort of mix it all together to get rid of any lumps in the soup). Cook on low heat for 6 – 8 hours. Add the mushrooms when there’s just a little cooking time left. Serve over cooked rice.