Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Meal Swap - Pineapple Sirloin Skewers

Last night I had my meal swap again. I am so excited that we now have 8 members again! One gal sat this round out, but I still came home with 6 meals which makes all the effort of producing meals in bulk more worthwhile than the last two time when we only got 4 meals.
This time I purchased my ingredients because my freezer is so low on supplies. I looked through the grocery ads and decided to make Pineapple Sirloin Skewers because both pineapple and sirloin were on sale at Fred Meyer. I also had to buy skewers, soy sauce, and fresh garlic. Here is the recipe:
1 8 oz can of pineapple chunks
6 T. soy sauce
2 T. brown sugar
2 T. vegetable oil
1 t. ground ginger
2 t. minced garlic
1/2 t. pepper
1 lb. boneless, skinless sirlong steak, cut into 1 # cubes.

Directions:
Drain pineapple, reserve juice. In a small bowl combine juice and all other ingredients not including meat. Reserve at least 1/2 cup marinade for basting & serving.

Pour remaining marinade in a large, resealable bag and add beef cubes. Refrigerate 8 hours or overnight.

Drain and discard marinade from beef. On metal or soaked skewers, alternately thread beef and pineapple chunks. Grill, uncovered, over medium heat for 5 minutes on each side or broil 4-6 inches from heat source, basting frequently, until beef reaches desired doneness. Serve over rice with remaining marinade.

This recipe was a challenge for me in the mathematical sense. I was making 7 meals to include 8 skewers each. I knew I needed to put at least 4 chunks of meat and pineapple on each skewer. I had to be sure I was preparing enough chunks overall, so I figured out I needed 4 per skewer x 8 skewers x 7 meals. That's 224 chunks of each. Can you imagine me counting out food bits in my kitchen?
I started with the meat. I had purchased the biggest package of petite sirloin I could find. It included 8 steaks. I quickly calculated that I needed each steak to make at least 28 chunks of meat. The steaks were of varying sizes, but I decided rather than try to make everything the same size from all the steaks I would just keep my sanity and make sure each ended up in 28 chunks.

Next I started on the pineapple. I purchased whole pineapples, sure that at the $2 sale price it would be less expensive than cans. You can imagine my horror when I saw (the same night I had purchased the pineapples) that 8 ounce cans were only $1 each. I could have purchased 7 cans for $7 instead of 5 pineapples and a separate can of juice totaling over $12. Worse I had all the labor involved with cutting up the pineapples. Can you say "kicking yourself?" Yeah.
I had never cut up a pineapple before, but watched my SIL cut one while we were in Hawaii. I started by cutting off the ends:


Then I 'shaved' the sides vertically to get a skinless pinapple.



I tried two ways to slice it. The first was in horizontal rings, then chunked from there.


The seconds was to further slice it vertically.

I had to call my aunt to ask about the core and if it was supposed to be cut up, too. After her istructions to leave the core out, I decided the vertical slices were easier to both remove the core and count chunks. Vertical slicing makes 8 symetrical pieces that are easy to multiply.
Then I threaded the pieces onto the skewers and voila! Pineapple Sirloin Skewers.


Well, not quite voila. These were supposed to be packaged for the freezer meal swap, but the gallon sized Ziploc bags I used would only fit about 5 skewers before they wouldn't close anymore. My not-so-brilliant solutation was to just poke the pointy end of the skewers out of the bag so 8 would fit. There wasn't excess marinade so they weren't too drippy. Oh well.
The total price for these came to about $4.60 for each meal.
Meat: $12
Pineapple: $10
Pineapple juice: $2
Soy Sauce: $3
Other spices: $2 total
Skewers: $3
Total: $32ish or $4.6o each for 7 meals.
Katie








































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3 comments:

  1. yum! The people in your group should be happy that you did the work! Fresh pineapple is so much tastier, especially if it's been nicely aged to ripeness. I agree that vertical slicing is easier :)

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  2. I hope they appreciate it! Thanks for your encouraging comments.

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  3. We had these last night and they were AMAZING. SOOOO good. John seconds that sentiment.
    Did you do anything to the meat besides just putting it in the marinade? It was so tender and I agree about the fresh pineapple making it extra delicious. Can't wait to make these myself. Thanks, Katie!

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