A challenge we face in my family is trying to feed a family of 5 near adults (if you ask my wife she'll probably tell you I'm one of those not quite adults...) and do it on a fixed budget. To meet this need I sit down with my handy dandy MacBook on the Sunday before payday and make out my grocery list. I get the wife and kids together and we go through what we need and make a list of meals we want to make for the next two weeks. Then the following Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday I make my way to the grocery store(s) and get everything we need for the next two weeks. My goal when writing out our menu is to try and keep each meal at around $10. Trust me, It's hard to feed 5 adults/teenagers a well rounded meal on $10 and keep them happy!
I'm not sure why I just spent all that time explaining my goal of a $10 meal when the recipe I'm about to share with you doubles that goal. Maybe it's because it's so damn good I just wanted to share it with you? Maybe it's because I plan on sharing future recipe's/meals and show how close to the $10 goal I hit. We don't cook red meat very often so going over goal wasn't that disappointing.
Finally, my wife and I both enjoy cooking. We seem to have our strengths and weaknesses in the kitchen and fortunately they play well off of each other. With sites like Pinterest, AllRecipes.com and Campbells.com it's easy to find and try new ideas.
Mississippi Roast - approx. cost is around $20. We have now had this one twice. The first time was sticking strictly to the recipe and not changing anything up. We do that with new ideas to get a feel for how easy it is to make, how well we like it and if it's worthy of repeating. Then we talk over how we would improve it for the next time. Here is the recipe and how we ended up serving it this most recent time.
Ingredients:
Beef Roast, 2-3lbs (your choice of cut, quality, etc... will drive the cost) ~ $10-15
1 packet dry ranch dressing ~ $1
1 packet dry au jus ~ $1
1 stick butter ~ $.25
Pepperoncinis (find it in a jar where you find olives, hot peppers, etc...) ~ $1 (I used about 1/3 jar each time I made this)
2 loaves of bread ~ $2
Mashed Potatoes ~ $3.50
Place the roast in your crock-pot (I have a 5qt). Cover the roast with the ranch dressing, then the au jus (just pour the packets over the meat, you don't have to prepare them). Place the stick of butter on top of the roast. Place individual pepperoncini's on and around the roast. Cover and cook on low for 8 hours.
When the roast is done, it will be fork tender so you can shred or just pull apart and serve. Make sure you include the au jus that is in the crock-pot with the meat to complete the flavor (we just ignore the pepperoncini's, they add a nice flavor but not something we eat otherwise).
For our last meal with this roast we decided to serve it open face over some fresh baked bread (I cheat and make the Rhodes frozen bread loaves) with melted mozzarella cheese and mashed potatoes on the side. I shredded the beef, placed it on top of a slice of the bread, added a slice of cheese, microwaved for about 30 seconds to melt the cheese, poured the au jus over the cheese and meat and served with the mashed potatoes. All I can say is WOW. Two of my kids devoured theirs before my wife and I were able to make it to the table with our plates - it was that good. I don't have my receipt for the groceries to give an exact cost but I would estimate this one at around $20.
If you give it a try, let me know how it goes. You can serve the roast in any fashion.
No comments:
Post a Comment