Cookbook #147: Microwave Guide & Cookbook, General Electric Co., USA, 1979.

Who needs an instruction book for a microwave oven? You just put in your coffee cup or lunch, set the dial for a minute or two, and click start, right? And if you ever want to know how long to cook a particular food item, you just google it.

So were my thoughts as I sat down with this book. I started leafing through it. The very first pages describe how microwave ovens work. A magnetron in the microwave oven generates and transmits microwaves. “Microwaves” are high frequency (and short wavelength) radio waves. AM, FM and CB radiowaves are lower frequency (and higher wavelength) than microwaves. Your microwave oven is similar to a miniature broadcasting system! It is self contained – only the inside of the metal-lined oven sees the broadcast.

How do microwaves cook food? They agitate water molecules and cause them to vibrate and generate heat. Most food has plenty of water in it so it heats – and cooks. (And the air around the food does not get hot, so the food does not brown.)

On page 5 of The Microwave Guide & Cookbook, a potato is comparisonally cooked in a pan, an oven, and in a microwave. For each process, they recorded a “heat photo” or thermograph. This tickles my scientistific nerve! After 4 minutes, a microwaved potato is all yellow or hot, while it takes an hour for a potato in a conventional oven to show the same thermograph.

Twelve big pages show photos of foods that cook particularly well in a microwave; I find this practical, visual, and useful. This book recognizes the limits of microwave cooking, while reminding me that I could be using it for more foods than I currently do. A few pages describe microwave safe dishes and food coverings.

And then, in the defrosting section, a lovely photo of a block of ice partially thawed in a microwave:

Isn’t that cool? I think this book is a keeper! I like reviewing the science behind my appliances and I like having good cooking references at home for those times when we don’t have the internet in our semi-rural area.

The Microwave Guide & Cookbook presents different foods in separate chapters: appetizers, meats, poultry, fish, eggs and cheese, sauces, pasta and rice, vegetables, breads, desserts, and jams. Each of the meat, poultry, and fish chapters begins with a description of how to defrost different forms of the food (e.g., details for hamburger, steaks, and roasts) and then gives cooking instructions and a few recipes. The recipes are often for illustration – the cook is encouraged and guided to adapt his or her own recipes to a microwave version.

What I learned or found useful:

In the ground meat section, I liked the instructions for defrosting. My current microwave oven has an autodefrost function that works miserably; now I have the knowledge to use a manual defrost mode more effectively.

In the steak section, they say you can grill a steak briefly to get the grill marks and flavor, then heat it up in the microwave at dinner time. Sounds like a good idea for a busy cook.

I found a ham and pork loaf recipe that might help me use up leftover ham and have an interesting filling for sandwiches.

Bacon can be microwaved on a plate covered with a paper towel.

Explicit instructions for cooking chicken are given: number (and size) of the chicken pieces; cooking power; cooking times; turning instructions. This cookbook has a microwave version of Mexican Chicken Casserole that I would like to compare and contrast with the two versions I have covered in this blog: one and two.

You can boil pasta in a microwave! Maybe we will (again) have an extended power outage and I will only have the use of my microwave oven when using our somewhat-limited backup generator system.

The egg section gives a good “microlesson” on how to microwave scrambled eggs and how to poach an egg. I could definitely learn from this. Hey, they have an egg and cottage cheese scramble, like I make on the stove top! Microwave oven users are given a strict warning NOT to microwave whole eggs in the shell. Oh boy, I learned this in lab. Back in the 70s I was working in a molecular biology lab. We had a microwave oven in the lab, ostensibly to liquify agar gel for bacteria plates. Well, one of our young lab helpers decided to microwave a whole egg in it. It burst loudly and violently! The lab stank for weeks.

The vegetable section is excellent and complete with tables and comments. I know I’ll refer back to this in the future.

Desserts. How to melt chocolate, make fudge, s’mores, custards, puddings, and pies. Brownies. Cakes in a microwave oven rise higher but are not brown; the texture is great, though, and frosting will cover any difference. Quickie chocolate sauce, butterscotch sauce, and cinnamon sugar sauce might come in handy and tasty.

With all these good ideas and learning lessons, what to choose to cook for this blog? Umm, I do love meatballs. Let’s try a microwave meatball recipe and compare and contrast with my usual stovetop method. How about Swedish Meatballs?

In the Microwave Guide & Cookbook, general instructions for microwave meatballs are given on the same page as the Swedish Meatballs recipe. I find these instructions useful:

I halved the recipe for the two of us. I usually cook 12 ounces of meat for us – I cooked about 14 ounces this time and had a few meatballs left over. I didn’t have brown bouquet sauce (kitchen bouquet) so I left it out.

Microwave Sweedish Meatballs
serves about 2

• about 14 ounces ground beef
• 1 cup bread crumbs
• 1/4 cup milk
• 1/2 egg (whisk an egg, measure wieght or volume, use half)
• 1/2 packet onion soup mix*
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1 tablespoon flour
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 cup sour cream

*Onion soup mix still comes with 2 packets per box. But, now the box weighs 2 oz. instead of the old 2 3/4 oz. I opened one packet and used about half of it for my version of the recipe.

Mix the ground beef, bread crumbs, milk, egg, onion soup mix, salt, and nutmeg. Form into 20 meatballs (I used a kitchen scale to get them all equal-sized).

Put the meatballs in a glass baking dish that fits in your microwave oven. (I used a 9×11-inch glass pan.) Cover with wax paper.

Microwave on high for 6-7 minutes (until done), rearranging the meatballs halfway through the cooking. (If you question whether or not they are done, you can gently cut an opening in one to check.)

Remove the meatballs from the baking dish and set aside. Add the flour to the drippings that remain in the baking dish and stir well, then gradually stir in the milk. Microwave at high for 3-4 minutes, stirring every minute, until the mixture is thickened. Add the sour cream and stir.

Stir the reserved meatballs into the sauce and mix to coat evenly. Microwave at high for 1-2 minutes, until hot. Serve over noodles or rice.

Here are the meatballs before cooking:

And here they are cooked:

Plated:

I got raves for this simple dish! It really was easy and fast, and tasted great. I didn’t have a splattered range top to clean either. I did kind of miss the good odor of browning meat. But other than that, I think these are just about as good as traditionally-cooked meatballs.

It would be easy to adapt any of my current meatball recipes to this microwave version: the rule is 20 meatballs from 14 ounces of meat baked on “high” in a microwave oven for 6 minutes. If I used a pound of meat, I might increase the cooking time a half minute or so. If you are cooking two pounds of meat, cook in two batches.

Success!

Note: I covered another microwave cookbook (that I didn’t like) and a bit of the history of microwave ovens in a previous post. I got my first microwave oven (a Whirlpool) in 1981 and it lasted 23 years. I’m currently on my second microwave oven, a combination convection-microwave JennAir.

Cookbook #135: Let’s Cook It Right, Adelle Davis, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., NY, NY, 1970.

Adelle Davis. I remember this author as one of the gurus of the health food movement back in our hippie days.

My copy of this book is well-worn. I keep it in the kitchen as a reference for cooking meats because it has good roast-cooking time tables. I always cook turkeys according to her directions: stuffed and on a rack with the breast side down. Each Thanksgiving since 1995, I have left a note on a piece of paper tucked between pages 54 and 55 of this book. On each note is how I cooked the turkey, and how it turned out.

Let’s Cook it Right was first published in 1947, then updated in 1962 and 1970. My 1970 edition dedication reads:

“Dedicated to my daughter, Barbara, in the hope that here husband and children will not have to eat TV dinners.”

I haven’t actually read this book in decades. I recall Davis as being a bit “preachy”. But I liked her, partly because she – like me – earned a masters in biochemistry. This week I take some time scanning through Let’s Cook it Right. From the preface:

“Surely we all agree that our foods should be both delicious and sufficiently health-building to enhance our enjoyment of life; and that dishes which are good for you but almost impossible to eat deserve little praise. Since we spend approximately a thousand hours each year eating our meals, they should be pleasant hours, times of family unity and companionship.”

Davis stresses that we need to buy nutritious foods and then cook them correctly to preserve the nutrients. And she assumes the cooking is done by the woman of the household, as in:

“Despite the need to retain maximum value in all food preparation, women are advised by thousands of recipes to extract and discard nutrients or to destroy them by high temperatures, long cooking, or the incorporation of air”.

The tone of Adelle Davis’ writing is serious and didactic: women must learn how to cook properly so that they do not ruin or toss nutrients. Her reward for this work:

“When she hears her physician praise the beauty of her children, when she sees her husband, young beyond his years, succeeding because of his energies, when she feels the surge of vibrant health in her own body, she will realize that she is largely responsible. She has shouldered her tasks and has seen to it that good health has come from good cooking.”

Once I get past the preachiness and non-feminist ideas, I do like many of the concepts in this book. “You Need Have No Failures in Cooking Meats” is the chapter I have used the most. “Serve Your Salads First” is a firm and steady rule of my household, just ask any member of my family. In “Get Acquainted with Fish” she asks: “How many hundreds of tmes have you heard housewives remark, ‘I don’t cook fish because I don’t like the odor in the house’? The fact is that when fish is properly cooked, there is no odor.” Davis’ advice for cooking fish at low temperature helped me keep fish odors to the minimum.

Let’s Cook it Right leans heavily towards protein-dense foods. Adelle Davis frowns on sugar, and writes that if a person is sedentary, they should only eat 1 slice of bread per day. The chapter on bread is titled “If You Want to Bake Bread”. In her opinion, one should buy whole wheat bread loaves rather than bake it at home. I am the opposite – I love home-baked bread! From my notes in this cookbook, I can tell that I tried her whole wheat bread recipe, but I did not write whether or not it turned out. There are almost zero cake recipes in this version of Let’s Cook it Right. In the chapter on desserts, “Desserts Can Contribute to Health”, Davis writes: “Frankly, I have never been good at baking cakes.”

This excerpt from the bread chapter illustrates the tone of Davis’ writing:

“Never shall I forget a dinner to which a friend invited me, saying, ‘I’m going to prepare everything from your cookbook.’ It was her first attempt to use whole-wheat flour and powdered milk. She had tried to make yeast bread of rancid pastry flour and still more rancid wheat germ, purchased from a market where the turnover was slow. She had added to the bread powdered milk which should have been sweet-smelling and as fine as face powder but which had an offensive odor and looked like crushed rock; such changes occur when powdered milk has been left exposed to the air. It was impossible to say who was the more embarrassed, my hostess or myself. We ate cold cereal, however, and remained friends. But I shudder when I think of how many other hosewives may have unknowingly obtained products of inferior quality.”

Davis would be amazed to walk into today’s stores with their abundant fresh whole grain flours, not to mention the ready availability of responsibly grown beef, pork, and chicken products.

(I note this with some distress: Davis writes that if we are enjoying the aroma of something cooking, we should be aware that the nutrients are leaving the meal along with the smells.)

In Let’s Cook it Right, Adelle Davis does not toute vitamin supplements. But apparently that is not true of all of her writings. On Quackwatch, the article “The Legacy of Adelle Davis” by Stephen Barrett claims that her recommendations of supplements for certain conditions were sometimes dangerous. From Wikipedia: “She . . .  became the most recognized nutritionist in the country. Despite her popularity, she was heavily criticized by her peers for many recommendations she made that were not supported by the scientific literature, some of which were considered dangerous.” On the other hand, the Adelle Davis Foundation is entirely positive about her contributions and continues her legacy.

For this blog, I turn to the chapter “You Need Have No Failures in Cooking Meats”. Adelle Davis presents a wonderful way to cook a beef roast. You put it in a 300˚ oven for an hour, then turn the oven down to the temperature you want it to end up at (or turn the oven off) and leave it the entire day. Come home and the roast is cooked to perfection, evenly medium-rare pink throughout. I used to do this all the time! It’s great for the working person, and it’s also great (according to Davis) for keeping nutrients in the meat. This method is similar to sous vide, in that you slow cook the meat by setting the cooking device – the oven in this case – to the desired finished temperature.

(No scan of this recipe; Davis’ method is explained in a two-page section titled “Slow Roasting”.)

In the spirit of Adelle Davis, I buy a responsively grown 4 pound beef rump-round roast at Whole Foods. (She would not have approved of the cost, however!)

In 2015, I have an oven that I can set to any temperature from 100˚ to 550 ˚ F. This should work even better than the oven I had back when I first explored this method, as that oven did not have low temperature settings.

Slow-Roasted Beef

• 3-4 pound beef rump or round roast
• salt and pepper
• olive or vegetable oil

If the meat has more than 1/2 inch of fat on it, trim some of the fat off. Season the roast with salt and pepper (Davis says not to salt the meat; I disagree). Rub a little oil over the surface of the roast. Place the roast in a roasting pan, on a rack if possible. Do not cover the roast. Insert a meat thermometer in the center of the roast.

Place the roast in a preheated 300˚ oven for 1 hour (to destroy bacteria on the surface). Then, turn the oven down to internal temperature that you desire. (If your oven does not have a low setting, simply turn it off. It should work.) Do not open the oven door!

• rare 135˚
• medium 150˚
• well done 160˚

For a rare-cooked roast, it takes about 2 1/2 hours per pound.

When the meat has reached the internal temperature that you want, take it out and serve.

Mine turned out perfect! I cooked it to rare. It was evenly pink throughout, just the way we like it! Good the first night with mashed potatoes and gravy, and excellent sliced/shaved very thin for sandwiches the next several days.

Cookbook #117: Settlers’ Recipes and Remedies, Historic Boulder, Inc., 1978.

“Hiccups are immediately stopped by giving a lump of sugar saturated with wine vinegar.”  “For a headache, peel and slice raw potatoes and bind them on the forehead in a cloth that reaches around the head.” “It will be bad weather if carrots grow deeper.”

Such is the lore of the first settlers in Boulder, Colorado. Settlers’ Recipes and Remedies includes small black and white photos of people and serving ware and  a store and historic homes in Boulder. There are quite a few recipes – some basic, some interesting, some odd – but few very are practical for today’s cooks. No oven temperatures! No cooking times!

I must have bought this book used in a bookstore in Boulder, since “$3.00” is written in pencil on the first page. I’ve never used it as a recipe source. I can’t find any information about it online, except that the Denver Public Library has a copy. Historic Boulder has a current website, but they don’t mention this book.

I will cook “Wild Bill Hickock’s Smothered Beefsteak” for this blog. You take a thin steak, smooth a bread stuffing on top, roll it up, and cook it til done. Good basic foodstuff. Then, I will recycle this book.

Steak Roll
serves 2

• one thin-cut steak, sirloin or round, about 12 ounces
• 1 cup fine bread crumbs
• 1 tablespoon soft butter
• 1/2 teaspoon sage
• 1/2 teaspoon summer savory (or, use oregano or thyme)
• salt and pepper
• milk, about 1/4 cup
• salt pork, about a tablespoon, chopped
• beef broth, 1-2 cups, or use water
• flour

Lay the steak out on a breadboard and pound with a meat pounder/tenderizer until it is smooth and flat.

Put the breadcrumbs, butter, herbs, and salt and pepper in a bowl. Add enough milk to make a “stiff” mixture (one that hold together when pressed with your hands). Spread this mixture over the steak in an even layer.

Roll the steak (from either side, your choice) and tie with pieces of string. Set aside.

In a pot on the stove top, brown the salt pork. Add the steak roll and brown on all sides. Add beef broth (or water); the roll does not need to be submersed in liquid, just have the depth of liquid at about an inch. Cover the pot and simmer 1 1/2 – 2 hours. Check about every 30 minutes and add more broth or water if it is evaporating away.

The roll is done when it is knife-tender. Remove the roll from the pan and set aside. Add a tablespoon or two of flour to the gravy in the pot and mix in; add water until the gravy is as thick or thin as you like.

Slice the roll and serve with the gravy.

We liked these – good comfort food. They were excellent with mashed potatoes and peas!I think the salt pork added a lot of flavor. If you can’t find it, use a piece or two of bacon. I was able to find salt pork at Whole Foods. Part of the current movement to bring saturated fats back into the US diet, I guess!

Cookbook #112: Rice – 200 Delightful ways to serve it, Southern Rice Industry, New Orleans, LA, 7th edition, 1937. Prepared by the home economics department of the Southern Rice Industry, New Orleans; recipes tested and approved by the Home Economics Department of Louisiana State University (Director: Beth Bailey McLean).

“The set table must appear balanced. Dishes must be so placed that no spot is crowded, no side or end is over-balanced with dishes. All the lines on the table should go across or lengthwise of the table. A diagonal line attracts attention, and should be avoided. Therefore, the handles of dishes, bread-and-butter spreaders, oyster forks, salt-and-pepper sets, must follow this rule. If round doilies are used, the threads should also be placed parallel to the edge of the table, not on a diagonal. All dishes, linen, and silver must be placed to follow this rule, or the effect is one of carelessness.”

This is the delightful advice from page 11 of Rice. Yes the book has many recipes for rice, but I enjoy the glimpse into 1930s Americana even more.

My copy of Rice is almost 80 years old but is in excellent condition. I am not sure whether this cookbook was my mother’s, her mother’s, or from the “Ruth C. Vandenhoudt” house (relatives of my father’s mother). It doesn’t look like it was ever used: no writing or food stains.

As the title states, this book contains 200 recipes for cooking with rice:

“For this book, we have selected recipes that are usable in every section of the United States. Some of the rice recipes are excellent for the main dish in the low cost diet. Other rice recipes are ideally suited to the most elaborate menu in the high cost diet.”

Rice waffles, muffins, fritters; codfish and rice omelet, rice with poached eggs, cheese soup with rice, cream of rice soup, crabs with rice, Mexican and Uruguayan rice, rice loaves, jambalaya, risotto, baked rice and cheese, luncheon salad, rice pudding, rice and raisin pie . . . and more. The recipes are dated, but I’ll be able to adapt at least one of them for this blog.

More Americana, on “Types of Table Service”:

“The English, or family type, is the one most suited to the average family where there is no maid or cook. In this service, all the food is served att he table by the host and hostess, instead of being brought in from the kitchen in individual servings. The hostess of today would do better to perfect this type of service, rathere than to attempt the more formal types.”

 “Rules for Waiting on a Table”:

1. Food dishes and soiled dishes from the last course must be removed.
2. Clean dishes and food for the next course must be placed.
3. This exchange must be done quietly and quickly.
4. There should be no unsightliness or appearance of great haste.
5. There should be no display of dishes or silver.
6. There should be no unnecessary trips to and from the kitchen.
7. Always consider the comfort of those at the table. Do not make them fear an accident because of the clumsiness or carelessness of the waitress.

I TOTALLY FAIL! If I serve you food, you may be fearing an accident because of my clumsiness!

Okay, enough levity. For this blog, I decide to cook “Stylish Meat Balls”.

Tomato soup? Was there really canned tomato soup in the 1930s? Yes, apparently so. In 1897 a a chemist at  Campbell’s named Dr. John T. Dorrance “invented” Campbell’s Soup as we know it. His idea was to take the water out of the soup, thus selling it in a smaller can and for less money. Here is a little on the history of Campbell’s Tomato soup and on the soup can design.

I do keep canned tomato soup in my pantry, but mostly for making French dressing. For Stylish Meat Balls, I want to make my own tomato soup. I consulted Cooks Illustrated, and modified their recipe for “Ultimate Cream of Tomato Soup”. Below is my version of this recipe.

Uncanned Tomato Soup

• 1 (28 ounce) can whole or diced tomatoes
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 2 large shallots or 1 small onion, chopped fine
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste
• salt to taste
• 1tablespoon flour
• 1 cup chicken stock

Drain the tomatoes; reserve the juice. Pat the tomatoes dry, then place them on a half-sheet pan lined with parchment. Sprinkle the tomatoes with the brown sugar. Bake at 450˚ until the liquid evaporates and the tomatoes begin to color; do not let them char. Remove from oven and let cool.

Heat the butter in a pan and add the shallots (or onions). Cook until they soften, then add the tomato paste and a little salt. Cook a few minutes, then add the flour and cook, stirring constantly for about 30 seconds, until the flour is incorporated. Stir in the chicken broth, the reserved juice from the can of tomatoes, and the tomatoes that were roasted in the oven. Let simmer about 10-15 minutes.

If you have an immersion blender, use it to blend the hot soup. If not, let it cool a bit and then blend it in batches in a blender or food processor. If the soup is too thick for your taste, thin it with water or chicken stock.

The soup is ready to eat at this point, or you can add a few tablespoons of cream. I tasted it without cream and said “yum”. But we didn’t eat it as soup, I used it in the “Stylish Meat Balls”.

Below is my recipe for Stylish Meat Balls. Note that the original recipe says to shape into “small balls”, but also note that it says it makes 10 meat balls. For 1 1/2 pounds of meat, that’s 2.4 ounces per meat ball. I consider those large meat balls. When I made the recipe, I made about 16-20 meat balls, and they were bigger than the meat balls I usually make.

Stylish Meat Balls
serves 4-6, depending on appetites

• 1/2 cup rice
• 1 1/2 pounds ground meat
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/8 teaspoon ground pepper
• Uncanned Tomato Soup (recipe above)
• 1 tablespoon grated onion (this is very good)
• 2 tablespoons chopped green pepper

Mix the rice, ground meat, salt and pepper. Form into about 16-20 meat balls.

Heat the tomato soup. (I suggest a very large flat pan, so that the meat balls can rest in a single layer in the pan.) Add the meat balls, cover, and cook over very low heat for about 45 minutes. If you cook this too hot, it WILL stick to the bottom of the pan and burn. Check it frequently as it cooks and add a little water if it gets too thick.

Serve the meat balls – and the sauce in which they cooked – over rice or noodles. I served mine over brown rice with cooked mushrooms and fresh basil:

My Stylish Meat Balls got the comment “these are better than your usual meatballs”. I liked them too! The rice inside the meat balls keeps them moist. (They are kind of like inside-out Pearl Balls!) They definitely earned a “yum” from me.

Cookbook #102: All-Time Favorite Beef Recipes, Better Homes and Gardens, Meredith Corporation, Des Moines, Iowa, 1977 (18th printing, 1983).

More ways to cook beef! Guess you know that I am not a vegetarian. I acquired this book in the mid-eighties, and it is a good example of American cookbooks of that decade. The contents include recipes for roast beef, pot roasts, steaks (expensive and less-expensive), meat loaves and meatballs, hamburger recipes, soups and stews, leftover roast beef, and variety meats.

I find it refreshing to open this (dated) cookbook and not be barraged with brand-name ingredients, nor to see packaged mixes as ingredients. Plain fare mostly, not terribly inspiring but some good comfort food recipes.

Paging through this book, I re-discover a recipe I’ve always liked for “Italian Bracioli” – round steak stuffed with onions and rolled up and baked in a tomato sauce. When I was a working mom, I relied on this type of recipe, since I could cook it on a Sunday and heat it up on a weekday. I also tried (and liked) the Spinach-Stuffed Flank Steak and the Oven Swiss Steak. So, I’ll keep this cookbook.

I decide to make “Greek-Style Sandwiches” for this blog. It calls for pita bread, which means I have an excuse to go to the Mediterranean Market on Bluff in Boulder, always an interesting trip (I love exploring shelves of foreign cuisine products).

The above recipe is (in my opinion) an “Americanization” of Greek cooking, so I am calling my version “Beef Steak Pitas”. Most Mediterranean cooking calls for lamb, fish, or chicken rather than beef, and yogurt instead of the sour cream dip with chives. I kept the beef, but I substituted plain yogurt for the sour cream dip, added green onions, and added feta cheese.

Pita breads vary widely. I bought Greek pitas from the Mediterranean store: they were huge and tasty but they did not have pockets. We found we could fold them carefully over the filling like a taco, but it was almost easier to eat them with a fork. Next time I’ll look for pita breads that have pockets. Or, make my own.

Beef Steak Pitas
serves 3-4

• 1 pound sirloin steak
• 1/2 cup red wine
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1/2 teaspoon dry oregano (or use 1 tablespoon fresh oregano)
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1 1/2 cups chopped lettuce
• 1 chopped tomato
• 2 green onions, chopped
• 1/2 of a cucumber, peeled, seeded, and diced
• 1/2 cup crumbled feta cheese
• 1/2 cup plain yogurt
• pita breads

Slice the steak crosswise into thin strips, and then shorten the strips to about 1-inch pieces. Combine the wine, olive oil, oregano, and salt and pepper; add the meat, cover, and marinade up to 24 hours.

Drain the meat well, then fry in a hot pan for about 5 minutes. Meanwhile, ready the garnishes: lettuce, tomato, green onions, cucumber, feta cheese, and yogurt. (The amounts of these are approximate; add them to your personal tastes. A few hot peppers would be good on these too.)

If your pita is thick, microwave for a few seconds and place the meat and toppings on it and serve it like a taco. If your pita breads have good pockets, slice each pita in half and open each pocket and fill with the meat and garnishes.

I first sliced the meat into quarter-inch wide/two-inch long pieces before marinating, as directed in the original recipe (and as seen in the above photo). On tasting the cooked meat, I found it too chewy, so I chopped the meat into smaller pieces before serving. Next time I make these I’ll cut the steak into smaller pieces before marinating – I incorporated this change in my version of the recipe.

These are very tasty, albeit a bit unwieldy with the thick pitas. The meat really has a great flavor, and they look so pretty on the plate with all the garnishes. I’ll make them again!