In the past year or two, our family has been eating less meat. This is due to our increased awareness of meat quality and harvesting practices, the cost of high-quality meats, and the raising of our daughter as a vegetarian (for now). But my wife and I enjoy beef, chicken, fish, pork, and so the recent roast beef was a welcome change to our diet. On day two it was a nice encore. Day three found us struggling to imagine what to do with it. Last night my wife made a stir fry with roast beef and zucchini, thus killing two birds with one stone, or rather whittling down one large hunk of meat and helping cull our population-boom zucchini crop. Now it’s Day Four of the Roast Beef Epic and I’m feeling heavy in spirit and bowel. Please, please learn from my mistake on this: if there are only two meat-eaters in a family, don’t make a four-pound roast beef just for the two of you. Maybe if I were a sweaty stevedore with a walrus moustaches and a gut like an exercise ball I could’ve finished off the roast beef by now. If you don’t believe me, check out the two pictures below. The first shows the roast beef on Monday morning, after one meal. The second is an artistic representation of how it looks today, since I couldn’t take a picture because my hands are too greasy from beef fat and my metabolism has been slowed by digestion to the point where I’m too tired to lift up a camera. Uncle!
Before
After
Writer, architect, father, husband.
just one word… soup
or… freezer
You can make soup and THEN freeze it. I suggest lots of red wine, po-ta-toes, and herbs. Other ideas:
Slice thin and make jerky (over-season, cook on low low heat for a day or two)
Slice thin and stir-fry (scallions, peanut sauce, watercress, rice noodles)
Slice thin and salt-cure. You now have bresaola!
Chop and make with chili. Then freeze.
Pizza topping.
Spiral slice and plait into a meat whip
Seems that all of these involve slicing it thin and then preserving it somehow. Of course, you could also drag it on a rope behind your car and draw all the cats out of town.
@ Seth. Love the meat whip idea. I’m still laughing.
I like the soup idea. I also toyed with the idea of making beef chili, but does it freeze well? Since I still have a few hundred ziploc bags of dirt/bean soup in the freezer, I’m reluctant to use up more space with possibly freezer-burnt chili. Since I’m almost done with the beef now, I may just slog through and finish it. Or bury it in the crawlspace to attract CHUDs.
That roast beef pizza last night=awesome.