Carne Guisada
This was one of the vaguest and most difficult to read recipes in the collection. Hand written, with several late insertions, I did my best to interpret it. It doesn't seem like my mother's handwriting - more like my grandmother's. But I can imagine my mother discovering Carne Guisada soon after we moved to Texas in 1976 and asking someone how they made it and writing down what they said. I don't remember her ever making it. I'm guilty of writing down a recipe that my mom told me and thinking I had it down clearly and then looking at it months later and not knowing what I meant.
Pandemic meat shopping - found stew meat. Not the normal antibiotic-free that I usually buy. 1.75 lbs of it. Usually I buy my stew meat in 1 lb. packs. I probably meant to split this in half and just have two 3/4 lb. servings but I didn't. I used all the meat and we only had a few pieces left over.
I rinsed the meat (instructions said wash) and squeezed out as much water as possible. I think modern-day advice is don't wash your meat because it gets any bacteria all over the sink. I don't know what the original intent of washing the meat was - maybe they wanted to get some of the extra juice off. So I "washed" it.
The idea of putting shortening into the pan provides a bit of a date to this recipe.
I bought a pack of tomato sauce at Costco - not realizing they were 15 oz cans instead of the normal 8 oz so I usually wind up using half the can and freezing the other half. So I had some in the freezer that I thawed out. As for peppers, rather vague, I chose a can of diced green chilies because I prefer those to bell pepper. For the garlic clove I always use the minced jarred garlic found in the Produce section.
The meat was browned...time to add the sauce, peppers and garlic.
My family liked the meal but said it wasn't restaurant quality. I was very pleased with and surprised at the flavor - it tasted like I had used a lot of seasoning but it was just the chili and garlic (and tomato sauce).
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