Easy French Dip’s

Sometimes its easy to overthink a meal.  This is one of those dishes that does almost all of the work for you though, don’t worry about thinking too much about this one.  Besides, what beats a sandwich full of delicious roasted meat dipped into the tastiest broth?  Prepare to rage.
Ingredients

1. 1 lb. Beef Roast
2. 6 oz. of Beer(your favorite works)
3. 1 t Pepper
4. 1 t Garlic(granulated or powder)
5. 1 T Worcestershire Sauce
6. 2 C Beef Broth
7. 1 C Water
8. Salt and Pepper
9. Vegetable Oil
10. French Bread or Hot Dog Buns

Quick Directions

1. Salt and pepper beef roast.
2. Heat frying pan with enough oil in it to coat the bottom.
3. Sear all sides of the roast till a nice color is present.
4. Prepare crock pot by mixing all ingredients besides the beef roast and vegetable oil in it.
5. Turn crock pot on high and place roast in.  Let cook 3-4 hours.
6. Check it to see if the roast is tender.  If not, continue to let it cook checking every thirty minutes.
7. Once meat is tender, shred or slice and return to crock pot for another 20-30 minutes.
8. Dish onto bun, scoop some juice into a small cup for dipping.
9. Enjoy!

Detailed Directions

Once you are ready to begin, salt and pepper the roast soon to be made outRAGEous.  Just get a nice even coat all around it, sometimes patting it with your hands doesn’t hurt.  Though you will want to make sure to wash your hands after touching raw meat, don’t need to be spreading around bacteria and whatever else may have been there.

Place it into a frying pan that has been heated up with oil in it.  Not a lot of oil is needed, just enough to cover the bottom will do.  Use medium high or high heat here.  The goal is only to cook the outside of the meat.  This gets a nice caramelized color as well helping to develop a richer flavor.

Once every side has been browned, your ready to place it in your crock pot.  First get all of the ingredients into the crock pot and mixed together.  Once its ready, place the meat in, put the lid on and crank the crock pot up to high.

Let it cook for 3-4 hours.  Once time has slowly passed and your house now smells amazing, check on it.  Simply poke a fork into it and see how tender the meat is.  When its ready it will tell you, or if you aren’t up on reading your meat, just pull it  and see if the meat falls apart.  If it doesn’t, its not ready.  Give it another 30 minutes and repeat the test.



This time I chose to slice my roast into thin slices, but another easy thing to do is to shred it. Take 2 forks, stab them in, and pull them apart. Not hard once you have tried your hand at it a time or two and really doesn’t take that long either.  Once it is to your liking, plop it back in the pot and give it another 20-30 minutes.
Now it is finally complete!  Dance around in a rage to celebrate if you like.  The process was simple and now the best part has assuredly arrived.  When I made this last time, I had hot dog buns and they work just fine, but  French Bread would work great too.  Really any bread of your choice here, as long as you like it who else matters?  Right, so put some meat on the bun, get a little cup and put some of that lovely juice from the crock pot in it and enjoy.  I must admit I am a huge fan of the way the juice soaks into the bread.  Rage on!


Other Thoughts

• The cut of your beef doesn’t matter too much.  Cheaper is usually a bit tougher and will increase the cooking time, but this works just fine in a crock pot.  Slowly, you will get to that tender sweet spot and won’t even notice.  I used a 1 lb. beef chuck roast and it worked great.  If you get a roast with a bone in it, that isn’t a problem at all, just something to remove when you shred your beef up.
• The 1 lb. roast made 4 sandwiches for me.  You can easily make 8 by getting a 2 lb. roast and doubling the rest of the ingredients.
• One final note.  If you want to have dinner waiting for you when your home from work, this can easily be the ticket.  Just simply sear the roast off the night before work, even go as far as having everything in the crock pot and place the insert of the crock pot in the fridge over night.  Before you head to work, place the insides where they go, turn it on low and run off to work.  Come home to a wonderfully flavorful dish that is ready to go in hardly any time.  The longer it cooks, the more tender your meat will be.

Healthy Shrimp Spring Rolls

I’m not really sure if spring roll is the right name for this dish as I used eggroll wraps instead of the standard spring roll wrap.  I prefer to use them though as they are bigger and easier for me to roll up.  Regardless of what you call them, they are tasty and worth the rage!
Ingredients

1. 1 lb. Shrimp, peeled and deveined
2. 2 Garlic Cloves, minced
3. 1 T Ginger, minced
4. 1/2 t Pepper 
5. 1 T Sesame Seeds
6. 4 lb. package of coleslaw mix(the cabbage and carrot mix without any seasonings or dressings)
7. 1 Red Pepper, diced
8. 1 Egg Yolk
9. 1 Package of Egg Roll Wraps
10. Olive Oil
11. Salt to taste

Quick Directions

1. Heat olive oil in wok or frying pan, just enough to get a nice coat on the bottom of the pan.
2. Add shrimp and cook till done, making sure to stir often.
3. Remove shrimp and add oil if needed to get the same coverage as step 1.
4. Add coleslaw mixture, cook for 5-8 minutes.
5. Add red pepper, continue to cook another 3-5 minutes.
6. Add seasonings, cook another 2-4 mins.
7. Return shrimp to pan and toss everything together.
8. Place filling on wraps, brush bottom corner with egg wash, roll up.
9. Steam spring roll for 15-20 minutes.
10. Enjoy

Detailed Directions

There are 2 main parts to this dish, the filling, and the rolling.  I also made a Ginger Apricot Chutney at the same time to use as a sauce to go with the spring rolls.  You can click the link to that recipe if you would like to make it for these but anyways, back to the spring rolls.

Start by heating up your pan on medium high, add a small amount of olive oil, but you don’t need a whole lot, we want these to be healthy!  Once it is heated toss the shrimp in and cook in a rage.  They won’t take very long, about 2-3 mins on each side, they will also turn a nice pink/orange  color to let  you know as well.
A side note on shrimp.  Usually, you can purchase shrimp already deveined and peeled, but that doesn’t mean they are ready to go.  There will be bit of shell on the tail that needs to be pulled off as well as sometimes the legs and some shell will remain on the body of it, I pull all of these things off and rinse in cold water before cooking.  Lastly, you need to check that each vein has been removed, sometimes a little bit of the vein may still be there.  The vein will be on the outside, or the side that isn’t curling in, and can be cut out with a knife.

Once the shrimp is cooked, remove it from the pan, add a small amount of oil if needed and dump the coleslaw mix and red peppers into the pan.  Stir these constantly for 10-15 minutes.  Add the garlic, ginger, sesame seeds, pepper and salt(if you wish to leave the salt out you can).  Cook for a couple of minutes, making sure to fully incorporate your seasonings.  Remove from heat and return the shrimp to the pan, mix well and get ready to roll them up.

Start by laying the wrap out flat on your working surface.  Place about 2 tablespoons of filling on the top center of your wrap.

Dab or brush on some of the egg wash on the bottom corner of the wrap.  It doesn’t take very much, but is an important part of this roll as it will keep it from coming open.

Next roll it up. Start by rolling the top over your filling.  I like to tuck it under the filling once over.  Then keep rolling it another turn, fold the left and right side in, and then roll it all the way closed.  This may take some practice before you get it right, but once you get the hang of it, its pretty easy though time consuming if you ask me.

Once they are all wrapped up and ready to be cooked, it is time to steam them.  If you don’t have a steamer there are several ways to rig one up at home that will work almost as well.  One option is to place a metal colander inside of a large pot, place water in the bottom of the pot and the rolls inside the colander.  Another option would be to make large balls out of aluminum foil and place something like a metal pie plate on top of them.  Whatever you can rig up will work as long as it meets a few requirements, and those are that the items must be safe to use on the stove, the surface your rolls are on is above the water so that only the steam is interacting with your rolls, you can cover it and there is room between your lid and rolls.  Once you have something figured out, get the water to a boil and then reduce to a simmer, add the rolls in and cover.  Cook for 15-20 minutes.  Check every now and then to make sure that your steam hasn’t found a way to escape so that your pot doesn’t go dry.
Once they are done, your spring rolls are ready to be enjoyed.  You can serve them with something like the ginger apricot chutney, create something of your own, or just go with an already known favorite dipping sauce.

Substitutions and Variations

• You can replace the shrimp with another kind of meat or leave it out altogether and just have a veggie spring roll.  Lots of room for personal choice here.
• Follow all of the steps up to the steamer portion and instead fry them.  Cook to a nice golden brown color.  This is actually how I would prefer them but then its not as healthy and thus defeating the goal I set out to meet.
• Another alternative cooking method would be to place them in the oven.  This would work well also, but I don’t know exactly how long they would take as I haven’t tried it.  I would heat the oven to 350 and check every 5 minutes, looking for the wrap to get a nice golden brown color.  Since everything is cooked inside before it was rolled up, it will be done by the time the wrap is.

Rage on!

Ginger Apricot Chutney

Experimenting(or raging around) in the kitchen is a great way to discover new favorite foods.  I was planning to make “healthy” shrimp spring rolls and wanted to have a nice sauce to go with them.  Rather than search the inter webs, I randomly came up with an idea of a ginger apricot sort of sauce.  Then went to the internet to gather some  ideas from recipes others have already written using these two ingredients.  Too make a long story short, this is what I ended up doing.  Rage on.

Ingredients

1. 1 T Olive Oil
2. 1 Garlic Clove, minced
3. 1/2 an Onion, diced
4. 170 g Dried Apricots, diced
5. 1 T Ginger
6. 1 T Cider Vinegar
7. 2 T Brown Sugar
8. 240 mL Orange Juice

Quick Directions

1. Heat oil in a sauce pan, sauté  onions until translucent.
2. Add garlic and cook till fragrant, about 1 min.
3. Add rest of the ingredients except the brown sugar.
4. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer until it begins to thicken up, about 10-15 mins.
5. Add brown sugar, cook another 2-3 mins.
6. Finished!  This can be served warm right away, or cooled down for use cold.

Detailed Directions
As always, make sure you have everything ready to go before you start cooking.  I found this recipe to be simple and it didn’t really require a lot of my attention while it was cooking.  However, you always want to have your mise-en-place(French term for “everything in place” or as I was taught, “mess in place”) ready before you ignite the burners.
Simply start by heating the olive oil in your sauce pan on medium high, add the onions and sauté them until they become a nice translucent color.  Stir constantly so they don’t burn.  Once the nice color has been achieved, add in your garlic and wait for that rage-tastic smell.  Good, now we are getting somewhere.

Everything into the pool, except the brown sugar, that’s our closer today.  Bring it up to a boil and then reduce your heat till you get a nice simmer going.  A simmer is easy to spot, the surface of your liquid will be full of small bubbles instead of the large ones created by a boil.  We want to simmer here as we are now doing a cooking process called reducing.  Simply stated, it’s the part where we cook out the liquid to make the flavors more intense.  During this phase, it can be left mostly alone, but I like to stir often to avoid any ingredients going rogue and sticking to the bottom of the pan.

Once most of the liquid has cooked out, add in the brown sugar and stir.  A bit of liquid left is just fine here, but if you find yourself with too much, just keep letting it simmer until you find the consistency your looking for.  The brown sugar will help it thicken up slightly but it won’t provide miracles.
That is pretty much all there is too it.  Your next step will be to determine if you want to serve it warm or cold.  I tried both and found I preferred it warm.  I served it over the top of shrimp spring rolls, but found it worked well over shredded pork.
Rage on!

Chicken Fried Rice

Fried rice.  Easily the best food to eat.  But what do you do?  Go out and pick it up from a restaurant or trust those shady deliver services?  I prefer to make it myself...much less angry rage and a whole lot of tasty rage.  It's a simple process too, rage on.
Ingredients

1. 2 Chicken Breasts
2. 3 Cups Uncooked Rice
3. 3 Eggs
4. 3 Cloves of Garlic, minced
5. 1 C Carrots, diced
6. 1 C Peas, frozen
7. 4 T Soy Sauce
8. 1/2 T Ground Ginger
9. 1 T Peanut Butter (smooth or crunchy)
10. 1 T Garlic Chili Sauce
11. 1/2 t Salt and Pepper
12. Vegetable Oil

Marinade for Chicken

1. 2 T Vegetable Oil
2. 1 T Soy Sauce
3. 1/2 t Granulated Garlic
4. 1/2 t Ground Ginger
5. 1 t Brown Sugar
6. Pinch of Salt and Pepper

Quick Directions

1. Cut chicken into 1/2 inch or 1 inch cubes, place in container with marinade and make sure all of the chicken is coated nicely.  Cover and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.
2. Heat wok or frying pan to medium high and add chicken.  Cook till chicken has reached an internal temperature of 165.  8-10 minutes roughly.  Remove and set aside.
3. Heat wok or frying pan to medium high or high and coat with oil.  Enough to generously cover pan.  Add rice once the pan is hot and stir constantly.  If rice starts to stick or pan becomes dry, add some more oil.
4. Once rice begins to brown slightly, make a hole in the center and add the eggs.  Scramble them in a rage until nearly done, then mix in with the rice.
5. Add carrots and cook for 3-5 mins, still stirring.
6. Add garlic and let cook for about a minute or until it becomes fragrant.  Add in peas and cook another 2-4 mins.
7. Add in remaining ingredients.  Let it cook for another minute, then taste and adjust seasonings as needed for personal preference.
8. Add the chicken, cook for another 2-4 minutes.
9. Enjoy!

Detailed Directions
Fried rice is best done with rice that has been cooked and left in the refrigerator
overnight.  So it works great when dealing with a lot of left over rice from
another meal.  If you didn't have rice left over from last night's dish and
didn't remember to make it ahead of time, I have found that using instant rice
works great in a pinch.  Using regular rice that hasn't had a chance to cool
down doesn't seem to work as well to me.
Preparing the Chicken

Start by marinating your chicken.  I dice my chicken in 1 inch chunks, but 1/2 inch works great too.  Go with your personal preference here, but try to keep the pieces close to the same size so that they are all finished cooking at the same time.  Whisk together the marinade, toss the chicken in, and let it sit for at least 30 mins covered in your fridge.

While that is doing its work, go ahead and get your carrots and garlic chopped up. Remember, you have to separate these things as they will go into the wok at different times.
By now, I would assume you have the rice that has been refrigerated overnight or else you went with the instant rice method.  Both work well, but you will get a better product if you take the time to cook the rice and let it sit over night in the fridge.  Right, onto the cooking!
Time to Cook!

Fried rice needs constant attention so you want to make sure all of your ingredients are ready to go before you start.  I always put all the ingredients into bowls next to my stove so that it’s a quick grab when the time comes for them to go in.

First take that chicken out and get ready to start the meal off right.  Get your wok (or frying pan if you don’t have a wok) heated up.  I prefer medium high heat, but if you’re using a wok, nothing wrong with going full on high as that is what a wok is designed for.  Once that baby is cooking (well almost, but I meant hot in this instance) toss your chicken in.  Don’t be afraid if a little bit or all of the marinade finds its way into the pan as that is your liquid for this cooking process.
Remember, you can’t cook something without some sort of liquid or fat(butter/oil/other alternatives) there to keep the product from sticking.  Toss and turn the chicken till it reaches an internal temp of 165 and then pull it out and set aside till later.
Now add a liberal amount of oil, enough to coat the pan and a little extra won’t hurt a thing.  Once its heated up (medium high heat or high if you have a wok) toss in your rice.  Make sure to constantly stir the rice and if you notice it sticking, don’t be shy, add in more oil.  The last thing you want is your fried rice to not fry.  I cook the rice till it starts to brown, and you should too.

Once your rice is browning nicely, we can move on to the next step.  First make a nice hole in the middle of the pan.  Here I usually find it necessary to add a bit of oil as it is usually too dry in the middle, but this is a judgment call.  Nice, you have your little well of lovely, add in the eggs (that you have beaten into a consistency you would use for scrambled eggs) and let them cook a bit, then stir a little.  I prefer to just run my spatula through the well and pull the cooked eggs to the side so that the uncooked parts can fill in and get their turn.  It’s pretty simple, just do this for a few till most of the eggs are cooked and then mix it all together.  A little bit of uncooked egg at this point is great because it will coat the rice and make some more tasty product.
Now, we are ready to add in the carrots.  Mix them in and let the whole mess cook for 3-6 mins.  The whole time stirring, remember we don’t want it to stick.  3 minutes for more crunchy carrots (if you like that texture) or 6 for more tender.

Then add your garlic. Stir it in and let it do its thing, about a minute or until it becomes fragrant is enough. Finally, add your peas and give it another 2-4 mins.

It’s time for the reckoning.  Seasoning!  Start by adding in soy sauce, ground ginger, garlic chili sauce, peanut butter, and salt and pepper.  Let it meld together for 1-2 mins.  Now this is where we get real.  Pull out your tasting spoon, dig in, and see what it tastes like.  If you think it needs something, don’t be shy, add it.  But remember, you can’t take away seasoning, so take slow steps when adding more so that you don’t add too much of something.  This is all based on what your taste buds are telling you, nobody will taste things the same and they won’t ever like the same things in the same way.  So cook for you and hope they like it I say, if they don’t rage on them!
Now that we have the seasonings squared away, we can add in the chicken we set aside earlier.  Toss it into the pot and let it get back up to temp.  A few minutes should be plenty of time.  And there you have it, fried rice.

Substitutions and Variations

• There are a lot of ways to make fried rice, so don’t be afraid to experiment.  You may find that you prefer more garlic or less ginger.  It is not an exact science when you get in the kitchen and not everybody has the same taste buds either.  You don’t have to marinate the chicken, instead you could just toss some salt and pepper on it and cook it that way.  Or if you have some leftover chicken from another meal, just dice it up and toss it in.
• Some people prefer to use wok oil or sesame oil, and those are fine options.  I usually don’t keep those in my kitchen but always have vegetable oil.  You may also be allergic to peanuts and if so, leaving the peanut butter out won’t hurt a thing.  If you have peanut oil, you can use that instead of the vegetable oil.  But once again, I don’t usually have that in my kitchen that is why I use the peanut butter to add some of that peanut flavor.
• Meat is another area that can largely affect the kind of rice you make.  you can marinate any meat in the marinade for similar results, or choose to leave meat out altogether.  The same goes with the vegetables you put into it.  I prefer to put in peas and carrots, but once again feel free to add others of your choice.

Rage on!