The Marlboro Man Sandwich

This is it, the recipe I've been wanting to share!  I made this for dinner Saturday night and we ate it for leftovers last night.  Plus Jon took some for lunch today.  This meal can easily serve 6 people.

This recipe comes from The Pioneer Woman.  I heart The Pioneer Woman.  None of her recipes have every led me astray.  I wish I could go live with her for a week and eat all her yummy food!  Here's a link to the original recipe and below is how I do it.

The Supplies

Plus you'll need rolls and cheese.

(I forgot to include them in the picture.)

Please note-- those onions are fresh from our Pea Patch!

The Marlboro Man Sandwich (Abbey Style)
Prep time 15 mins
Cook time 20 mins
Serves 6+

Ingredients
1 whole large (or 2 Small) Onions
1 package mushrooms
1 stick of Butter
3 pounds Cube Steak
Johnny's Seasoned Salt (or Similar Seasoned Salt)
Lemon pepper
1/2 cup (approximately) Worcestershire Sauce
6 whole deli rolls
6 slices Provolone cheese

1. Slice onions and cook in 1/4 stick butter until soft and light brown. Remove and set aside.
2. Slice (or use pre-sliced) mushrooms and cook in 1 tablespoon butter until brown.  Set aside with the onions.
3. Slice cube steak against the grain. Season liberally with seasoning salt and lemon pepper.
4. Heat 2 tablespoons butter over high heat (in same skillet as the onions and mushrooms were cooked in) until melted and beginning to brown. Add meat in single layer. Cook one side until brown, then flip and cook until brown, about a 2-3 minutes on each side. Repeat until all the meat is cooked.
5. Return all the meat to the pan after the last batched is cooked.  Add the mushrooms and the onions. Add 1/2 cup (at least) Worcestershire sauce and 2 tablespoons butter.  Stir to combine.
6. Split the rolls.  Butter and then brown the rolls in either a skillet, small toaster oven (like I do) or under the broiler in your oven.
7. To assemble, lay bottom half of roll on plate. Place meat mixture on the roll, then a spoonful of juice from the pan followed with a slice of Provolone and top with the other half of the roll.  Eat.

Heaven.

This is one of my favorite meals.  The sauce is amazing and the cheese melts just enough to hold everything together.  Please don't skip toasting the bun, it adds an amazing element.  I'm not big on reheated meat, this is one of the few beef recipes that I'll eat for leftovers.  It's almost better the next day after all the juices and flavors have melded.  You really need to try this recipe!

If you go to The Pioneer Woman's (Ree Drummond) cooking website you'll find lots of variations of this recipe.  I've made this version earlier this year and it was heavenly as well.

One note, if you don't like worchestire sauce, you may not like this recipe.   We love worchestire sauce in our house so we love this recipe!

No cooking for me tonight.  I'm getting some Mommy time out with friends.  I'll be back tomorrow night with a comfort food favorite of Jon's.

Guest Star!

My wonderful husband loves to cook as much as I do but he doesn't get to do it very often.  Typically he comes home after working all day, I throw him and the boys outside and I'm left inside alone to cook dinner.  It's my very precious "me" time.


I think this same wonderful husband has a little bit of blog envy.  Every few days he'll say, "If you don't want to blog tonight, I'll do it for you." or "If you ever want a break from cooking, I'll cook dinner.  I'll even blog about it." or "If you ever want a break from blogging, just let me know.  I'll be happy to take a turn."  Whatever his motive, I think it's cute and I've decided to give him a turn.


We harvested the onions from our Pea Patch today and we now have a ton of onions.  Our favorite thing to make with a ton of onions is French Onion Soup. Jon is the French Onion Soup maker in our house.  French Onion Soup making is a weekend adventure.  It takes a lot of time for perfection but the soup is worth every second you wait.  We only make French Onion Soup once or twice a year and I savor every bowl.  I'm not a big soup fan, but there's just something about this soup that makes my mouth water.  So we had French Onion Soup for dinner, oh and hamburgers too.  I'll blog about the hamburgers when we have them next time; we have them often, the soup, sadly, not so much.


So without further ado, here's that wonderful husband of mine!

Hello, Jon here, taking over the blog for the evening. Like Abbey, I'm not a soup fan, I like Baked Potato Soup (heart attack in a bowl), Chili, Stew and French Onion. That's it. I never really thought or knew anything about French Onion soup until I saw my patron saint of kitchens, Alton Brown, make it on Good Eats.

A quick aside about Good Eats. I love the show. It's my absolute favorite on the Food Network. The humor and style is right up my alley. What I love most though is that he teaches you about food. You don't sit there and watch Alton cook something you'll never make (for the most part). He teaches you about techniques and ingredients. He teaches you about hygiene, storage, kitchen equipment, etc. I owe my love of cooking to this show.

So, needless to say, I made Alton's recipe. I'm not going to repeat the whole thing here but I'll go into our modifications. First, this is a dish to make if you like to cook and don't mind spending some time in the kitchen. You'll spend a lot of time on this dish with your knives. If you cook, you owe it to yourself to get a good chef's knife. Several years ago, I took one of those omnipresent Bed Bath & Beyond 20% off coupons and picked up basically this set. Take care of a good quality knife and it will last you forever. That means no dishwasher!

Anyway, back to the onions, 4-5lbs of Frenching onions. For those not in the know, Frenching is a style of cutting. If you're not sure how to dissect an onion, click the recipe link above and watch the video. I find a certain zen in it and really love Frenching onions. When done, you'll be rewarded with something like this:

At this point your kitchen will start to smell delicious. Honestly, is there much out there that smells better than onions and butter? Now the waiting starts, About an hour later you start working on the soup portion of things when five pounds of onions has cooked down to two cups.

Now its time for the liquid. Here is where we start to deviate from Alton's recipe. His soup came out too sweet for our liking. So we simply omit the apple cider and double the chicken stock. The wine and caramelized onions still leave plenty of sweetness but we feel the final product is more balanced to our liking. Here you see the soup approaching completion, complete with bouquet garni (tied up mess of herbs).

Now, if there is a reason for French Onion Soup to exist, it's the cheese toast. Today's batch was a little spur of the moment so we didn't get the best bread or cheese. Normally I'd prefer a crusty rustic loaf from Trader Joe's and some decent Gruyere, instead it was deli sour dough and Swiss cheese. Here's the finished product.

Not the prettiest presentation ever, the cheese was taking too long to brown and we were done waiting, but here's the great thing, even with "sub par" ingredients and not enough patience to brown the cheese, it was absolutely delicious. Maybe its the home grown onions or the time spent playing with my knives, but I always enjoy this dish. If you like to cook and like onions (and if you don't, what's wrong with you?), give this dish a shot, just make sure to set aside two to three hours or so. You're not constantly busy, but you have to check in on things from time to time. Good Luck!

Quiche part 2... The recipe

After a night's sleep (not good, just a night's) I'm less annoyed with the quiche. While it didn't work out for dinner last night, with two full quiches in the fridge we now have a week's worth of breakfast and lunch leftovers!

The recipe I’ve developed for my quiche is based on the quiche Lorraine recipe from my trusty Better Homes & Gardens cookbook. I'm not going to post the original recipe, because I've changed it a bit, I’m just going to post my version. Let's call it quiche Cantrell. Please note this makes two full quiches or 12 servings.

Quiche Cantrell
Prep time: 25 minutes
Bake time: 35 minutes to an hour
Makes 2 quiches

2 Premade Pie crusts
1lb Bacon, sliced into 1 inch pieces
4 Ounces mushrooms, sliced thin
1 Medium onion, sliced thin
6 Eggs
3 Cups milk
½ teaspoon Salt
Nutmeg
3 Cups Swiss cheese, shredded
2 Tablespoons Flour

1. Preheat your oven to 450 degrees. Remove pie crusts from the fridge and allow to come to room temperature, this takes approx. 15 minutes. Once the oven and pie crusts are ready, put one pie crust into a pie dish, yes you’ll need two pie dishes for this recipe. Poke the bottom of each pie crust with a fork 5-6 times to prevent big bubbles from forming while the crust bakes. Bake for 5-10 minutes or until the crust is very light brown and no longer looks wet.  Once the crust is done baking turn the oven down to 325 degrees.
2. While the pie crust is baking, cook the bacon until crisp. I use our cast iron pan on medium-high heat. This step can take 5-15 minutes depending on the size of your pan and how thick the bacon is.
3. While the bacon is cooking prep the mushrooms and onion. Then start grating the cheese. If you’re using pre-grated cheese, you can skip that last part.
4. After the bacon is crisp use a slotted spoon to remove from the pan and set aside. I use a paper towel lined plate to help drain off the extra bacon grease.
5. Using the same pan as the bacon, cook the onions until they start to brown, 4-5 minutes. Add the mushrooms once the onions are browned. Cook the mushrooms and onions together until the mushrooms start to brown, another 4-5 minutes. Finish grating the cheese if needed.
6. Once the mushrooms and onions are brown, turn the heat to low while you finish prepping the remaining ingredients.
7. In a small bowl, combine the cheese and flour. Make sure the flour evenly coats the cheese.
8. In a medium sized bowl, add the eggs and beat. Add the milk, salt and nutmeg. Stir in the bacon, mushrooms and onions. Next add the cheese and mix well.
9. Pour the mixture into the pie crusts, making sure there is an even (or as close to even as possible) amount of liquid and solids in each crust.
10. Bake for 35 minutes to an hour… or longer. The quiche is done once the top is slightly browned and you can insert a knife in the middle and it comes out clean.
11. Remove the quiche from the oven and let sit for 10 minutes before serving. This step is important. If you skip this step the quiche may not be fully set and could fall apart when you try to remove it from the pie pan.

I know this recipe sounds complicated, but it really isn’t. The original recipe only has three steps, mine has 11 because this is the way I prepare it. I hate when a recipe has 3 steps, but inside each step there are 4-5 steps they’re assuming you’ve already done. I found that very frustrating when I first started cooking. I learned to always read, reread and read again any recipe before starting it.

You can save yourself sometime by buying pre-grated cheese, but I like the taste of freshly grated cheese. You could make your own pie crust, I haven’t tackled that challenge yet, I’m perfectly happy saving time and energy using the premade Pillsbury stuff you find the refrigerated section at the grocery store. Oh, and 4 ounces of mushrooms is half a package.

I use fresh nutmeg, I think it tastes better. You can but whole nutmeg in the bulk section, they look like small walnuts. You just need a micro plane/zester . I use ours for nutmeg, garlic, cheese, lemons, and all sorts of stuff. I was scared of it at first, but know it’s one of my favorite kitchen tools.

For some reason I’m out of flour, strange I know, so I used cornstarch instead and it worked fine.

Make sure you turn the oven down to 325 after backing the pie crusts.  I've fogotten this step in the past and it wasn't pretty.
This is another dish that tastes better the next day. I always make two quiches so we have lots of leftovers, if you only want to make one, you can half the recipe and only get one. :)