Pennsylvania Dutch Cooking

I love to cook traditional PA Dutch meals, but sometimes it is only me and my husband that eat these kinds of meals. Occasionally our son will eat, but he doesn't eat much, because he isn't fond of some of them. One meal I love to make (and eat!) is roast beef with egg noodles and mashed potatoes. To make this, I would typically buy a shoulder roast or a butt roast beef. But then half of it is wasted or frozen with good intentions then forgotten. When I do remember that I have leftovers in the freezer, I make an awesome BBQ with it!

To save money on this meal, I buy stew beef or beef strips for stirfry. It's the same thing and I cook it the same way, it's just a whole lot cheaper to buy it that way!

The way I prepare this meal is - I sear the beef in a cast iron skillet on top of the stove until the sides are nice and brown. Do not poke the meat. You want all the juices to stay inside the meat and if you poke it all the juices will run out. After it is done searing, I put it in a crockpot and cook it on low for about 8 hours along with the juices that I loosened with some water and scraped up to make a gravy. For more flavor, add a bouillon cube or 2 in the crockpot. Add more water if you need to, the pieces of beef should be covered. But if you are using a whole roast, do not completely submerge your beef. It takes the flavor outta your beef. 

After your beef is all done, take the juice that it was cooked in, put it in a saucepan, add egg noodles and cook them according to the package.

Serve with mashed potatoes and another veggie, cause around here potatoes are not a veggie! They are a gravy holder :-) I like to put my noodles on top of my mashed potatoes. The hubby likes to put his noodles beside his mashed potatoes and put gravy on his potatoes.

Don't worry about browning your beef too much. It just makes better juices/gravy!