#private selections

A while ago, I found some marinade at Kroger (from their Private Selections fancy pants store brand) and I didn’t know exactly what it was, but I liked the sound of the flavors (Korean Inspired. Tamari, Garlic, Ginger, Pear and Pineapple Juice. Private Selection Bulgogi Marinade is prepared with the traditional savory, sweet and mildly spicy flavors of Korean cuisine).  I got home and read the label more closely and discovered it was made for beef.  I don’t prepare beef very often, so I decided to save it until I moved in with bf so I’d have some extra help.

The instructions were not very helpful:

Marinate thinly sliced top sirloin beef, julienned carrot, button mushrooms and roughly chopped onion for at least 90 minutes, then place on a large piece of aluminum foil and seal. Grill or bake. Serve on a bed of rice and garnish with thinly sliced green onions.

The first part seemed easy enough, except I didn’t want to buy whole carrots that I’d have to peel and such, so I bought baby carrots since bf could eat the extra ones as a snack.  Baby carrots are tough to chop.  I thought it would be an easy prep task to give bf but his knife skills could use some improvement.  They were nowhere close to julienned.

For the thinly sliced beef, I had to conquer my fear of talking to people and try to get help from the meat counter, which ended up being no help at all.  My mom told me they should thinly slice it for me, but then they said they couldn’t.  I’m sure if my mom had been there, she would have known the magic thing to say to get it done, but they could probably tell I didn’t know what I wanted and just wanted to brush me off.  So I bought the beef and sliced it on my own, definitely not thin enough.

For marinading, I ended up using the entire bottle and it seemed appropriate,  With lots of slices of beef and all the onions and carrots, there was a lot of surface area to cover.

The last part was tricky... how to cook it.  The instructions weren’t helpful at all.  No temperature or time.  I tried Googling to figure out if anyone had made something like this, but every recipe I could find talked about cooking it on a stove.  Since there was so much food, I decided to split it in two and try cooking it two different ways.

One way was on the stove, like on the internet.  This gave the meat a really nice brown and caramelized the onions.  However, it was really messy as oil splattered everywhere.

The other method was trying to do it the way the instructions vaguely told me to do it.  I chose 350 and checked in on it every so often.  I don’t remember how long I cooked it for.  When it was done, I had to figure out how to get everything out without making a mess. I ended up pouring it over a colander over a bowl to catch the juice.  This helped save the juice for pouring over with the rice.  The meat and onions didn’t have the same nice color, and the juice was a little tricky to navigate.

Left you can see the oven and right you can see the stove.  We did half and half on each plate to compare and our taste buds couldn’t tell the difference.

This meal was a hit and gave us a lot of leftovers, which is plus.  I decided that for next time, we’ll try oven again, but put it in a Pyrex dish and maybe bake uncovered (or a combo of covered and uncovered) to hopefully keep some of the juicy, but make it less soupy and have easier clean up.  I’ll report back when and if we get to do it again!

Does anyone know a better way to cook meat on the stove in oil without having splatter everywhere?  Inquiring minds want to know!

Beauty is only skin deep, except when it isn’t. Ugliness is only skin deep, except when it isn’t. Can an oven at 375 degrees turn a frog into a prince? No. Except when it can.

The Private Selections brand, Kroger’s version of Target’s Archer Farms, has been dabbling in frozen goods for some time now, and Pesto & Mozzarella is a new experiment, and one with a worthy result (if you see where they’re coming from, that is).

Most will write off what I initially saw upon opening the box to laziness, or apathy. Unevenly placed mozzarella, clumps of machine-squirted pesto, a misshapen visage- but, delving into the intentions and minds of the creators, it’s clear what they were going for: a character arc with an interactive interface. From start to finish, the pizza evolves, and not in a trite or forced way, à la Anakin Skywalker: child-killer. Kroger took a risk that lets you be the kiss to the pizza’s frog, the Mickey to its Rocky, the wise old mentor to its hero (or, perhaps, something more sinister, if you felt the desire).

As I rearranged the toppings, I connected with the pizza. Each slice of cheese moved was a vertebrae snapped back into place. I placed the pizza into the oven and felt worried as I left the room. I wanted that pizza to never be alone again. But, ultimately, I left. And I ate the poor thing.