Archive for April, 2009

Beef Vegetable Soup

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

With KLT living most of the time in Nashville cooking has just about come to a halt around here.  Why cook for just me?  Who wants to eat left overs for weeks on end?  This has really lead me to research cooking for the purpose of preserving.  Most importantly freezing.  This has been a great adventure and at least I make an excuse to cook which is something I love and most importantly I actually eat.  So Beef Veggie Soup sounded like a good idea to work in before the weather breaks and it becomes too warm for soup. 

I started with a large arm roast, yes it was some Charlie.
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Season with salt and pepper (or steak seasoning) and brown on both sides using an oven safe pan. 

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Add you basic vegetables used for making stock  Onion, garlic, carrots, celery, and seasonings (bay leaves, more salt and pepper, tyme you pick the mix) and water.  Place lid on and put in oven (350 degrees) until meat is tender, depending on size an hour.  This one was probably in the oven 2 – 2.5 hours.  WARNING:  Your house will smell totally awesome and cause hunger.  ;)

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Strain out veggies and unfortunately discard (feeding them to the dogs is an option) reserve the stock this is the base of your soup. Place meat on plate and cool. Once cool shred the meat or cut into chucks as you prefer. In our soup it’s shredded. Now to make the soup. Here is where your imagination can run wild adding your vegetables. I had an entire bag of frozen mixed veggies that needed a use otherwise I would be cutting veggies at this point. But add what you like. I added extra corn and green beans because those are my favorites. You can also cube potatoes and even add a few tomatoes. Today it’s just the mix, a potato or two and the beef. Noodles of your choice would also be a great option, even barley is nice. Bring your broth/stock to a boil and add veggies, noodles, potatoes and cook until tender. Add your shredded beef and serve.

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To store for use later after the soup is cool, I waited until the next day. Place in vacuum seal bags, seal and freeze flat. To serve thaw (place in a bowl of hot water until breakable) and place in pot on med – low heat until warm.

Product Review – SanDisk 8gb SD cards – OH HELL YEAH!

Monday, April 6th, 2009

I am pretty sure that there are a couple of companies out there that just know how to pull my credit card out of my pocket and get me to hit check out.  SanDisk knows the way to this girls hear OMG buy 3 SD cards, free shipping and mail in rebate.  Earlier in 2008 SanDisk ran a sale on 4 gb cards, I bought 3 and got a $75 rebate.  So honestly I am pretty set on SD cards I have 3-4gb cards, a 2 gb and 2- 1 gb cards.  Wonder what happened when right before Christmas I got an email alerting me about a 3 card deal on 8 gb cards?  Well of course I bought 3 SD cards for me and 3 CF cards for KLT.  I had no issue with the first rebate and it’s not been long enough to worry about the additional rebates.  :)   So I say if you run across an opportunity like this DOOOOO EEEEET!

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 I want to tell you what I think about my SanDisk cards. OMG !!!  378 raw plus jpgs on one card and I have 3 of them.  That is ~1100 pictures with out ever dumping a card.  Don’t forget I get 1 jpg and 1 raw so really that’s 2200, If I only shot RAW it would be more like ~1400.  The only downside is that this ruins all of KLT’s plans to throw the pictures across our own little network and duplicate them on the spot the next time I did a wedding.  ;)

The little pouch that comes with each card is nice, I like to toss it in my purse so I can work on photos at work.  My earlier purchase also gave me 3 USB SD card readers so that is incredibly awesome.  I am fully equipped with enough SD space to actually keep pictures on them as a back up until all files are copied from the laptop to the media server.  :)

I am currently using one fo the cards in my purse lappy for extra storage.  You can believe that when they offer the next size for this good of a deal I will be buying them!!