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With Food costing ever more it’s time to find more ways to save money. Here’s an example of what you can do if your ever have a cast iron pan that someone is targeting to get rid of. Cast Iron (and carbon steel) are great in that they use seasoned oil as their non-slip surface for cooking. This saves you from using teflon that can have negative health outcomes. They also are only cleaned with water and elbow grease, which is very environmentally friendly. (Never use dish soap on a pan, that breaks down the non-slip surface.) Below is a gif that shows my restoration of a pan that was given to me. I used a drill attachment steel brush to remove the rust. Wipe down the pan after to remove the iron dust. Then seasoned the pan with 10 layers of ‘seasoning’. To season the pan I took about 2 tbsp of vegetable oil and used a cloth to wipe on a thin layer. (All over the pan). By thin I mean let it barely glisten. You can’t over wipe the pan with the cloth, only under wipe. Place the pan on a cookie sheet with parchment paper. (Otherwise you might accidentally season your cookie sheet.) the pan in the oven for 1 hour at 400f and let it cool on its own in the oven. Yes that means I spent more than 10 hours on the project but I mainly just did this oven was already hot from cooking. If you are fixing a seasoning that isn’t working for you you likely could get away with a lot less. I was almost satisfied after 7 coats, but found that when I cooked eggs there was one sticky spot I missed. I’m now proud to say it’s completes the egg test. A general test to see if you seasoning it good. If you can’t cook an egg over easy, you need more coats of oil. This raises the question do you need to cook only low FODMAP in the seasoned pan. Although I”m not a scientist I would suggest that you do not need to be that careful. FODMAPS are not oil soluble and with reasonable cleaning you should not have to worry about it.

Do you miss hamburger helper? DId you ever have it? Need a simple way to dress up some ground beef? We have the recipe for you! Bonus if you happen to have a fish allergy this is fish free!

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low [FODMAP] Beef Stroganoff

This will warm you up on a snowy day

Prep Time5 minutes mins

Cook Time30 minutes mins

Course: Dinner

Cuisine: American

Servings: 4 people

Ingredients

• 1 lb ground beef
• 400 grams sliced and chopped oyster mushrooms ~2 packages
• 1 tbsp garlic infused oil
• 1 tbsp onion infused oil
• 3 cups low FODMAP beef broth
• 1 sheet kombu seaweed (6 inch by 6 inch piece) can substitute 1 tbsp low FODMAP worcestershire sauce in a pinch
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 tbsp cornstarch
• 1/2 cup Cold water
• 3/4 cup sour cream
• 1 tbsp chopped fresh parsley
• 3 cups cooked egg noodles

Instructions

• Cook Egg Noodles according to directions.
• Simmer seaweed in beef broth for 30 mins.
• Cook ground beef and mushrooms in garlic and onion oil.
• Remove seaweed, then add beef broth to cooked beef/mushroom mixture, and add salt.
• Bring to boil, then cover and reduce heat to simmer for 15 minutes.
• Cook egg noodles
• Prepare cornstarch flurry by mixing cornstarch and cold water.
• Add cornstarch slurry to beef mixture to thicken.
• Add sour cream & parsley and heat until hot. Do not boil. serve over noodles

I am not an expert just like to eat cost effectively. To get a good steak right now it’s expensive. Here’s how to get one of the steaks on your table for $5 a steak.

Buy a tenderloin in bulk. (Costco is a great option)

When you get it it won’t be clean. It will have more tallow(beef fat) and silver skin than you want to eat. Silver skin is very chewy so please remove it:

Us a thin sharp knife to cut off extra fat and silver skin. Do not throw it away. It can be cooked and throw into your stock pot. Here’s trick for silver skin. It’s really tough, but you can cut yourself a flap to grab:

Silver skin is stronger than the meat it’s on and will literally allow you to “Pull it” off the meat:

Repeat this as many times as needed. Cut off any part that won’t make an appropriate sized steak and use this for your Kabob meat or smaller pieces as Beef and Broccoli meat.

Now you can cut this into steaks you enjoy. As thick or thin as you like. I usually way what I just cut so I can make a call about how large my next cut will be. There are no mistakes here only happy accidents.

Just another update on reaching out to Campbell’s to get more information about ingredients that are included in “Chicken Stock”. I asked this question on Feb 24th. and it took about a week to respond. This is consistent with my previous ask to them. It appears that Chicken Stock does not contain Garlic/Onion. (At least in Canada it doesn’t.) Here’s their response:

Thank you for your patience while we reviewed your question on this product.

We have checked with our product development team and Campbell’s® Chicken Broth does not contain garlic or onion.

Product recipes change frequently, and ingredients are periodically added and replaced.  This makes it difficult to maintain an updated list of products that either contain or lack a particular ingredient.  If you have questions about a specific product, please refer to the ingredient label on the package for the most current information.

Sincerely,
Consumer Advocate

This looks like good news. I did not ask about celery unfortunately so I’ll have to follow up with them.

This is a follow up to my previous post: The mystery of “Ingredients”

I’m posting Campbell’s response to my ask about [Chicken Stock] so it can be read in its entirety:

Thanks for reaching out regarding the garlic and onion used in our products.  

Although labeling the presence of garlic in the product’s ingredient statement is not mandatory in Canada, Campbell Company of Canada has begun listing garlic on all new labels, no matter how small the amount. We will not include garlic, regardless of the form, under the broader listings of “spices” or “natural flavors”. Labels already in market may not include this voluntary labeling disclosure.

Unfortunately, we don’t maintain updated lists of products that contain or do not contain garlic or onions. Product recipes change frequently, and ingredients are periodically added and replaced, so we don’t attempt to keep lists of products that either contain or lack a particular ingredient. Please click on the link below and provide name and flavor or UPC number of the product and we can look further into this for you.

I hope I’ve been able to answer your question. Please contact Consumer Care at 800-410-7687 or visit Campbell Company of Canada website if you have any additional questions.

Sincerely,
XXXXXX
Consumer Advocate
Consumer Care

If you are like me you likely spend a lot of time looking at ingredients. Metro (A canadian company) has recently tried to help identify low FODMAP foods by adding it to the labelling on their shelves. This “Should” be helpful. It’s certainly helps to identify items that we could be low FODMAP. But here’s where it could fall down, below is a product that Metro has identified as low FODMAP. Tell me if you can spot the problem.

Campbell’s^® Concentrated Chicken Broth (250 mL)

Ingredients: CHICKEN BROTH (WATER, CHICKEN STOCK), YEAST EXTRACT, SALT, SUGARS (DEXTROSE), CANOLA OR SOYBEAN OIL, SUNFLOWER OIL, CARNAUBA WAX, NATURAL FLAVOUR.

If you are a computer, then you would think this result is “Safe”. But what’s in the Chicken Stock? Chicken stock usually contains some vegetables so which ones? I want to commend campbell’s as they do call out a lot of things on their labels that makes me feel like they are doing an accurate job and a product I can trust. Please do not think that I’m calling them out as being bad at listing ingredients. Their beef broth ingredients does really do a good job of calling out onion and celery in their seasoning. This would make me feel like they ‘should’ have called out if they were using it. But it’s not clear to me after looking at their website what their policy is. I did reach out to Campbell’s to ask what’s in their “Chicken stock” recipe. At the time of publishing this article they had not responded to my request. I will update this post if they do respond and help to clarify their position.

Fodmapeveryday.com has a great article on “Natural Flavouring” and “Spices”. Definitely worth a read.

TLDR:

You are responsible for your own health, use store label’s to help identify what “should” be good, and then as usual do your own homework.

When you order from Costco and Package up the meet into usable servings it takes effort. Here are some Costco packaging Hacks to help you get through your processing of a large order.

• Calculate how many bags
  • Look at the weight ahead of time, or the number of cups and just write on the bags in advance. This makes it a log easier than labeling after the bags have meat/stock in them.

• Use wax paper to extend you countertop
  • When you are working with meat it’s easy to make a mess. Make your life easy and give yourself a ton of counter space by using wax paper/plastic wrap to make for easy cleaning.

• Go Vampire – Keep the blood
  • When butchering larger pieces of meat they often have blood in the packaging. This is an amazing additive to create a rich gravy. I highly suggest draining the blood into a bowl and keeping it for another day.
• Get Creative
  • Do not be afraid of immediately turning your leftover meat scraps into a meal for another day.
  • Below is an example. I had some leftover ground beef but it wasn’t enough to keep in it’s own. I could either make all my ground beef bags more than a pound, or I could premake some Burgers. I use a convenient freeze tray here but you could just use a cookie sheet and form your burgers on that, freeze them on that, and then after frozen bag them up for later use. (Freezing them before putting them in a bag will prevent them from sticking.

• Lets not forget the water trick we’ve talked about in the past.
  • Closing the bag %90 of the way,
  • Dunk the bag in the water and it will force air out of the bag.
  • Completely close the bag.