Meat & Potatoes, feat. Onion Soup Mix

It's been a meat & potatoes kind of week. In the interests of saving money, I bought a bag of about-to-rot bell peppers for 99 cents at an independent grocer on Davie Street, about the same size bag of peppers I'd buy every week at the farmer's market for $4 in the summer. (That said, the farmer's market peppers were still better quality, no matter the degree of ripeness. These peppers had a faint chemical smell.)


I pan-roasted all the peppers on the stovetop while I boiled some baby potatoes, mashed them up with some butter, milk and grated cheddar, and threw them in the broiler. In the meantime, I was trying out this thing with some chuck steak.

I cut it into cubes, coated the steak in onion soup mix (an idea I got [via Jesse] from a chili recipe in In a Pinch), wrapped it en papillote in parchment paper and let it cook in the oven for over an hour at 325°F. Of course the recipe calls for leaving the meat in the oven for 3 hours to give it that slow-cooked tenderness… FYI one hour doesn't quite cut it; the meat was pretty tough. But the onion soup mix part was still a good idea! Finally a use for this stuff I've had sitting in my cupboard FOREVER.