Cabin - Food and Cooking Part 2

In the last post I was blogging about some of my cooking strategies for the cabin.  It is not much of a vacation if you spend a lot of it in the kitchen.  I try to cook once and use leftovers to make other meals.  The previous blog post was about using smoked chicken.  In between those chicken recipes I served other meals so it would not seem like we were eating so much chicken.  I was also blogging about how to scale up the menus in case we had guests for dinner or were invited to a pot luck.  Today I am blogging about the meals served in between the chicken meals.

A day or so after I smoked the chicken, we cooked a London Broil (a.k.a. flank steak) on the grill. It was covered with a dry rub for beef before grilling.   I bring a large London Broil, much larger than we can eat.  Usually two or three slices each is enough.  If we are inviting people for dinner, there is always plenty left over.  Along with the steak we generally have some bread that was cooked on the grill before the steak was cooked.  I also serve a salad called Mississippi Cornbread Salad.  Altogether, it makes an attractive, delicious meal.  There will be plenty of leftovers from the steak and salad to use for future meals.

We actually cook the bread on the grill.  A few years ago, making pizza on the grill became popular.  We had to try it, and it does work.  That was the impetus for us to experiment with making bread on the grill.  My husband really enjoys making and cooking the bread.  He uses a basic Italian bread recipe.  After the bread has risen according to directions, he flattens the loaf out to a half-inch (12.7 mm) thick round disk.  We found that cooking the bread on a tray that is used to grill vegetables works better than just cooking it on the grill itself.  The bread browns more uniformly.  Once the bread is browned on one side, he flips it over and browns the other.  He checks the temperature of the bread with an instant read thermometer to make sure it is completely cooked through. The bread is done when the temperature is between 200 and 210 degrees Fahrenheit (93.33 to 98.88 Celsius).   It has a smokey flavor to it.  Usually, we have half the loaf for dinner and use the rest for sandwiches the next day.

There are plenty of recipes online for the salad under its title name and also under the search words Cornbread Salad or Southern Cornbread Salad.  It is somewhat of a regional food.  I use a recipe I found in a magazine a few years ago, more or less.  I add or subtract ingredients, depending on what I have on hand.  It is also a stacked salad, so if placed in a clear bowl, it can be very attractive if you are looking for a fancy looking food to take to a potluck.  I have posted a link to a recipe that is pretty much identical to the one I use here:  http://www.midwestliving.com/recipe/mississippi-corn-bread-salad/

The Mississippi Cornbread Salad is great if you are feeding a crowd.  However, I find that the recipe goes a long way on its own.  I usually only make half a recipe, and we can eat it as a salad for four days sometimes as a side for dinner, sometimes for lunch.  The cornbread salad is actually a full meal in itself.  I am actually thinking about scaling down to making a quarter recipe when it is just the two of us.  If I were going to downsize to a quarter recipe, I might save half the corn and pinto beans and put it in the pot of chili too.  The more vegetables the merrier. 

If I am only using half the cornbread that has to be cooked for the salad, I save the rest and serve it on a different night with some chili.  If chili is not on the menu for the next day, I will wrap the cornbread and put it in the freezer and thaw it when I plan to use it.  I always like to find ways I can cook once and have something at dinners two or three times.  If I were going to downsize to a quarter recipe of the cornbread salad, I might save some of the corn and pinto beans and put it in the pot of chili too.  The more vegetables the merrier.

The rest of the flank steak gets the leftover treatment as well.  A fairly large London Broil might actually give us another night of steak dinner if we were eating by ourselves.  After that second dinner, the leftovers can be thinly sliced and served on a flour burrito wrapper with some fried onions and peppers to make steak fahitas.  The cornbread salad is a great side dish for this recipe also.   So once again, a little cooking has gone a long way.

I did not take photos of the meals while they were cooking this last trip.  I am sure that I have posted photos of the steak and bread cooking in other blog posts, but I am unable to find the pictures in my computer.  I could spend hours going through the thumbnail pictures trying to find them.  I have looked, but at the moment they are not coming into view.  I am sorry that I don't have photos today.

So to wrap this up, a little menu planning can help you spend more of your vacation time on vacation rather than being chief cook and bottle washer.  Using leftovers in creative ways can make it seem as if you have had many different types of meals rather than eating the same thing over and over.  Another benefit of cooking in this manner also helps keep the cost of food from going over budget.  All in all, it is a win all the way around.

Next blog post is going to be about the craft project that I have been working on for quite some time.  It will be a project that I haven't shown before. It has taken a lot of time to get it to a point where I have had something to show for my work.  Sometimes the prep work for a project is much more work than I anticipated.