Britos!

What makes these simple burritos special is how reheatable and portable they are. A friend of ours turned us on to this burrito recipe and we've never made them any other way since.


These burritos are as good reheated as they are fresh from the oven. They're even good cold, and I'm not one to eat cold stuff out of the fridge. There's been many a time, however, that I had to eat a cold one while another heated up, I simply couldn't wait. They're actually GOOD cold! We like to make a bunch of these at a time because they keep so well and, of course, because they're tasty. Problem is... we can never make enough. They're the perfect "after the morning hunt" brunch and/or hangover food. I love them for breakfast and they're one of the few foods I break my wheat rule for.

Ingredients:
3 lbs. ground beef or ground venison
1 and 1/2 cans refried beans or 24 oz. homemade beans, refried. I used homemade beans (you can see them above, first in the Ziplock bag they'd been frozen in and then during the process of "refrying" them) that I weighed before I refried and 24 oz. was the perfect amount. About 1/2 can of refried beans per pound of meat usually works out nicely.
3 serrano peppers, seeded and minced
10 ounces of grated cheddar cheese (optional)
12 large (burrito sized) flour tortillas or burrito sized wraps
1/2 large onion, finely chopped
1 tsp salt
*Seasonings--see second paragraph down

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Almost brown the meat, draining it as you are cooking it. I use a turkey baster to continually drain the meat as it cooks. I don't want it completely browned before I add the next ingredients. But once hamburger meat gets hot enough, done or not, the fat and liquid will separate from the meat and you can drain it just fine before it's completely done. Once meat is drained but not completely browned add the onions and serranos and cook until onions begin to get tender but not until they are opaque. I don't like to brown the meat all the way first becuase I don't like overcooked meat. And if you add the onions and serrano to the raw meat, you'll lose a lot of that flavor when you drain the meat.

*At this point I would normally season the meat with various combinations of oregano, cumin (lots of cumin), salt, and the slightest dash of chili powder but I had some Killer Enchilada Sauce in the fridge and used 1/2 cup of that to season the meat instead. It was great! You could also use a packet of taco seasoning or whatever floats your culinary boat.

Once you have added the seasonings, throw in the beans and cook this all until it's heated through. Taste test it to see if it needs some extra salt or seasoning. Now you are ready to build your Britos! First off, your tortillas need to be plenty warm so they don't tear. I just open the bag they come in and microwave them for 30 seconds, flip them over and warm them for another 20 or 25 seconds and this is usually enough to make them soft enough for burrito building. Don't overload your burrito. Spoon some meat and cheese (if you want) into the center of your tortilla. Fold opposite sides of the tortilla towards each other, one over the other, then fold the ends over and flip the thing on the folded side to hold it closed. If you've overloaded it, you'll know. Don't worry about a tortilla tearing, it won't ruin it, it just won't be quite as pretty. And these aren't all that pretty anyway.


Once you have a pan of burritos ready to go, pop them in the oven, uncovered, for 15 or 20 minutes. The goal here is to get the bottoms crispy. My oven won't brown the top of anything I bake in it so I have to put them under the broiler after the bottoms have gotten nice and toasted. I have no idea how long these take to get crispy on both sides in an oven that cooks evenly. The bottoms of these didn't "look" toasty, but they were hard and crunchy to the touch which was all I needed. The tops need to get golden and crispy. This is the secret to these burritos. The crispy tops and bottoms are what make them so great to stick in a container in the fridge and reheat whenever. It keeps them moist on the inside and holds them together. If they don't get crisp, they're just going to fall apart.

If you are putting them up while they are still warm, then make sure and layer paper towels between them or they'll stick to each other. They'll keep beautifully for several days in a Ziplock bag or a container with a tight fitting lid.

To reheat a burrito (if you are just too good to eat one cold) wrap it in a paper towel and microwave it for about 1 and 1/2 to 2 minutes. To make these look a little more gourmet, serve on a plate (we usually eat them like sandwhiches wrapped in the paper towel we warmed them in) and cover with crema OR sour cream OR a mixture of sour cream an salsa verde OR melt some cheese on top and drizzle with cream OR cover with enchilada sauce and garnish with a bit of cilantro. You can dress 'em up however you like. I like them with a heavy splash of Cholula and a bit of crema.

This burrito recipe makes one dozen burritos and the three serranos just makes them warm, for a nice kick use five.

The cheapest, fastest, and tastiest.... Stir Fry

We had beef and broccoli stir fry today. The brown sauce I use is based on This Recipe. It took me a long time to find a brown sauce I liked. I like this one because it's just the right consistency and doesn't have too much soy. I like PLENTY of stir-fry sauce when I cook because my favorite part of stir-fry is sauce-soaked rice. This sauce recipe is a good base for any kind of Asian cooking you are doing. It can perk up and thicken a soup or be used as a sauce over veggies and rice. It can also be used in your Top Ramen noodles instead of the enclosed seasoning packet. You won't be sorry for throwing out the Ramen seasoning packet and doctoring your own ramen noodles, they can make quite a meal. Wait until you try your Ramen noodles cooked in Your Own Stock instead of plain water!

If you do a lot of stir-fry or Asian style cooking, you can double or triple the sauce recipe and store it in a jar in the fridge (which makes it easy to grab, shake, and pour) for a week or so and use as needed.

Recipe for Stir-Fry Sauce:

3 1/2 TBS Cornstarch
1-2 tsp. grated ginger depending on your tastes, I like a lot--we buy a Hand Of Ginger "in town" and keep it in the freezer, it's the only way for us to keep "fresh" ginger in the house. Your palate will never know the difference and that hand will last you for a long time.
2-3 cloves minced garlic
3 TBS brown sugar depending on taste. Hubby likes his sweeter, I like mine less so, but the brown sugar is key to the recipe. I don't like enough so that I can taste the sweet, 2 tbs. is plenty for me. But without the sugar, the sauce really suffers. You can subsitute any sugary substance for brown sugar--honey, molasses, agave nectar--whatever works for you.
1/4 tsp. Chinese hot mustard if you've got it
1 1/2 cups chicken, beef, or turkey stock (use bouillon cubes or canned broth if you must--but don't use just water if you can help it or your sauce will be blah). Don't be afraid to use chicken stock with beef--it tastes marvelous. Beef stock would be better with beef, but any stock is better than none in this recipe.
1/3 cup soy sauce

Somthing HOT if you like spicy. We use a couple of dried Kung Pao peppers (crushed) or about 3 TBS of "fire oil." But you could use whatever spicy pepper you have available. Crushed red pepper is fine--start with 1 tsp. and use more or less next time depending on your taste. You could also use any minced fresh pepper that you fancied. I'm fortunate that hubby grows peppers in his garden that we can't buy here. I'm also fortunate to have Not One But Three of These Dehydrators. I love thrift stores!


Whisk all ingredients together except the stock. Add 1 TBS. of quality white wine vinegar or beer vinegar if you like a more "sweet and sour" aspect to your stir-fry--if using vinegar be sure to balance it by using the full amount of sugar/syrups/whatever. Heat stock to boiling and slowly whisk this in with the rest of the ingredients. Microwave for 30 seconds at a time until it just begins to thicken. This wakes up the peppers, garlic, and ginger. Set sauce aside to "marry up" while you prepare the rest of the dish.

Simple Stir-Fry Recipe:
Cook 2 cups of your preferred rice according to package directions. We use a cheapie rice cooker that I adore. It frees up stove top space and I don't have to worry about a timer or burning my rice. Although I do unplug the cooker as soon as I realize the rice is done--it stays hot for quite a while after it's cooked and I find that this amount of rice reaches an unpleasant consistency if left on the "warm" setting in the rice cooker for too long.
1 lb of thin sliced, bite-sized pieces of beef, venison, chicken, or turkey, put in a sealable plastic bag with a wad of several clean, fresh paper towels--the drier the meat the better the sear. WET, super moist meat dripping in juices and/or marinade won't sear properly unless you are lucky enough to have a specialty stove that will super heat your pan or wok. If you want to marinate your meat first, go ahead, but then be sure and pour off the marinade and stuff several clean paper towels in the bag and let it sit for awhile to soak up excess moisture. However, if your sauce is good and you are using tasty veggies, your meat will be just fine plain and unadulterated. Leftover meat instead of raw meat is fine, by the way--no need to sear it of course. We often make this recipe using leftover roast chicken or our canned venison (it's SO tender and delicious) and whatever vegetables we happen to have. If using pre-cooked meat in this recipe, shred it or slice it thin and set it aside until you are cooking the last of the veggies and add the meat to them in order to heat the meat.
7 or 8 green onions. Separate the green tops from their white bottoms and julienne them all, but keep them separate.

1 14oz. bag of frozen broccoli, unopened. Yes, use fresh if you like but in our area the best quality broccoli is usually frozen. The fresh stuff tends to be expensive and pathetic. Stab one side of your frozen broccoli bag a few times with a knife and then set in the microwave on the defrost setting until the broccoli is just soft enough to cut but still mostly frozen. Don't "cook" it. Cut your broccoli in strips, if you can. This isn't easy to do but the smaller, thinner strips will cook faster, be better tasting, and be easier to eat in stir-fry. We often use a frozen mixture of Asian-style veggies that are already the perfect size and shape for stir-fry, but I let them defrost a bit so they cook faster in the skillet. You can defrost them a bit by just leaving them on the counter for a while or by stabbing them repeatedly on one side of the bag (oh so cathartic) and defrosting them (slightly) in the nuker. The stir-fry veggies above are about $1.40 a bag and worth every little penny. If I bought these veggies fresh and seperately I'd not only have to prep them, but I'd have to use 'em quick before they rotted. Buying them like this is cheap, fast, and easy. The broccoli, at $1.99 a bag is still cheaper than fresh and requires almost as much prep as fresh would (for this particular recipe), but it's worth it to always have brocolli in the freezer when I need it.


What to cook this in: First things first, go set your A/C on "fan" so that you've got plenty of air circulating (or open the windows if it's nice out) and take the battery out of your smoke detector.

We can't get our wok hot enough to cook our stir-fry properly so we use an iron skillet. I put the skillet on high heat until it's smoking hot, usually takes five to seven minutes. I'm too lazy to cook small portions of the food at a time so I don't get that nice sear on the meat or the scorch on the veggies that you'd get in a good Asian restaurant. You need serious HEAT for that kind of searing. I'm determined to acquire a second, large iron skillet one day to speed up the process of cooking things like stir-fry AND to help increase my chances of getting seared meat and scorched veggies! With two large iron skillets, I think I could.


Have a large container with a lid nearby, get your pan smoking hot, add a tablespoon or two of peanut or other oil, and toss the meat in. Don't turn down your heat at any point from here on. Stir-fry the meat until it's nearly done and then put it into the lidded container to keep it hot and moist. If you want more of a sear on your meat, you can cook your meat a little at a time--but you'll have to let the pan re-heat between portions.

When your meat is cooked and set aside, let the pan reheat, add a little more oil, and cook 1/3 to 1/2 of your veggies (minus the green onion tops) the same way you did your meat. They'll cook fast. And you don't really want them to "cook" as much as you just want them to get hot. Stir-fried veggies should be crisp. As you can see from my photo, I didn't get a sear on my meat or veggies. But the meat wasn't overcooked and the veggies were still crisp--although the broccoli does look a little dull. Ah, well, can't have everything.

Once your last portion of veggies is heated through, put everything back in the pan and add your sauce. Cook this for about two minutes until sauce has thickened a bit, add the green onion tops and stir well, then remove it all from the pan and put it into your lidded dish to keep it hot and moist and also to keep your food from tasting like an iron skillet.

Serve over rice adding soy sauce to taste. This recipe sounds like a lot of work, but once you get used to it, it really is fast and easy. The most time consuming part is preparing the veggies. Everything else is a snap. I can prepare and cook it all in about 30 minutes. This serves us two with leftovers for one of us to have lunch the next day. We're big eaters, this would probably serve four normal, adult eaters, if you had a little something on the side to go with it, just fine.

A key to flavor in low budget cooking

Stock. Chicken stock, turkey stock, venison stock, beef stock, fish stock, or vegetable stock. STOCK STOCK STOCK! My kitchen wouldn't be complete without it. Stock and broth are two different things, by the way. This blog entry is about STOCK!

I have yet to master vegetable stock or even touch on fish stock, so I'm not going to talk about those. Chicken and turkey stocks are my favorite and I use them almost exclusively.

I used to put celery in all my stocks 'cuz everybody said to but I don't always want my stock to taste like soup so I stopped doing it. If you are making your stock specifically for soup, then be free with the celery and don't forget to add some celery leaves as well--they contain lots of flavor. For me, the ideal all-around stock contains few ingredients. This stock can become the can't-cook-without-it base for your soup, your secret ingredient for sauce (I use it in Asian sauces and in plain ol' gravy), or diluted with water to cook noodles in or to use in the best rice ever made. And if you're making congee (oh so easy and oh so good), you must have stock.

If you make a whole chicken or turkey, be sure and save those bones in the freezer for future use!

Chicken/Turkey Stock:

Chicken or turkey bones--I prefer to use two chicken carcasses but maybe that's because I always make such a big batch of stock. One turkey carcass is always enough.
Two or three cups of white wine if you have it
One large onion, halved. I prefer to use the peel although some people say it can make your stock bitter (I can't tell that it does this)--I do cut off the big gnarly end--mostly out of habit.
Several cloves of garlic, mashed, but still in skin.
5 to 10 black peppercorns, or to taste. Just throwing in a teaspoon of pepper or more to taste is fine too. I don't like a lot of black pepper myself
2 to 3 teaspoons of salt depending on your preferences
Dried or fresh parsley if you have it. A lot.
Save your leek tops in the freezer to throw into stocks, you won't be sorry. Or toss in some green onions if you have some extra in the fridge.
Poke around the fridge and feel free to toss in some stray veggie here or there just to see what happens--turnips, squash, some herbs, or even an apple or pear.

I limit what I put in my stock so I can use it in various recipes without being stuck with a flavor in there that I don't want--I can always add tomatoes, carrots, celery or whatever I want to the recipe I am using the stock in if I want to.

Cover your bones, veggies, and spices well with water and bring to boil then simmer for at least three hours. Once done, strain it well through a colander or sieve, then place in fridge overnight. The next day, the fat will have separated from the stock and hardened and you can just pick it off and throw it away. The more gelatinous your remaining stock is when it is cold, the better you have done. So pat yourself on the back if you have a big bowl of chicken jello. You now have a virtually fat free stock that is plum packed with flavor.

I like to freeze several 1/2 cup and 1 cup packages of stock for sauces. That whole thing with pouring it into an ice tray so you can freeze cubes of it is messy. I just buy the cheapest sealable bags that I can, pour 1 cup into each bag (a canning funnel is very handy here) and then freeze them. Once they are frozen, I stuff as many of them as I can into a gallon size freezer bag. Frozen stock, if not sealed well, will begin to dehydrate in your freezer and, if not stored well, it will just disappear. It needs, ultimately, to be stored in a quality freezer bag or container. You can vacuum seal your stock by pouring it into vacuum bags and setting the bags carefully in the freezer, unsealed. Once they are frozen they can be sealed. It's not really worth the fuss, however.

I also store stock in four cup amounts. It's about the perfect amount for a nice pot of soup--not enough to feed a large family but more than enough for you and one or two others.

Venison Stock Recipe:

Venison makes for such a strong stock that if you are going to do this, you must really like the flavor of wild game. Also, even for the most avid wild game fan, it's better to use a spike or young doe for your stock, older or bigger deer are going to have a stronger "gamey" flavor. This applies to Axis as well as White Tail. Axis stock comes out golden like turkey stock and always tastes lighter and more delicious to me than White Tail stock. Venison stock is delicious and when I can venison meat, I prefer to can it in venison stock.

On to the recipe....

You needs you some deer bones. You can crack rib bones easily with some pliers or a hammer--cracking the bones will make your stock much better. Don't go crazy, a crack here or there is fine. You don't want shards of bones ending up in your stock. If using leg bones, I find that a hammer is the easiest way to break the bones.

Add the bones you are going to use to your stock pot--a rear leg (needs a very large pot) or two front legs or five or six cracked ribs is sufficient for one batch of stock. Depends on you and how strong you like your stock. Making venison stock is really dependent on a very large pot unless you snag some vertebrae and take the time to separate them which is, actually, quite a pain.

1 large onion, halved with skin--big gnarly end removed just in case that's what those chefs are really talking about in regard to bitter stock

Pepper to taste--I prefer peppercorns but ground black pepper will do

Several cloves of garlic, mashed but not skinned

Two cups of red or white wine, I prefer white in venison stock

A whole bunch of fresh parsley or several tablespoons of dried parsley

Add water until it's all covered and refer to Chicken/Turkey Stock recipe above to finish up.

Beef Stock Recipe:

Follow the recipe for Venison Stock but instead of front legs/back legs/etc, use whatever bones you have available. If you happen to see some really cheap ribs at the store, buy them for stock. Or ask the butcher if he has some beef bones back behind the counter. I can't get beef bones from the butcher in my small town so I just buy ribs.

About carrots:

I don't like cooked carrots. And even though they add a nice flavor and wonderful color to just about any stock, I don't use them. Feel free to include a few carrots or parsnips (if you're lucky enough to get any where you live) to any of the stock recipes above. Personally, when using them, I advise not using too many. Carrots are sweet. You may like the sweetness they add to your stock, or you might be like me and just prefer not to go there.

Chef Christopher Allen Tanner On Making Stock--I can't wait to try it his way... by roasting the bones first!