It's A Familiar Theme

Welcome back to another episode of Grandpa's Gotta Cook. Today, we have beef kebabs with, yes, you guessed it, bell peppers, mushrooms and cherry tomatoes.

As usual, I was struggling with what to cook last Saturday. It's hard to get in a rhythm when you only cook once a week (not complaining) and then don't think about what you're going to cook with any level of care until Saturday morning.

However, after a brief consultation with my daughter-in-law, I decided on beef kebabs. The reason: without telling one another, we were both thinking about kebabs, which, is kind of cool, and kind of spooky, since our food tastes don't always line up.

So, then, it became a matter of how best to go about this. The meat we have is primarily frozen, which means some kind of thaw time, and then the potentiality of cutting it up. In this case, there happened to be two packages of stew meat already cut. I'm not a fan of stew meat when it comes to anything other than stew, but the idea of thawing and then cutting up a steak didn't appeal to me (yes, I was feeling lazy).

The next order of business was what to include on the kebab. Well, when I'm cooking, that's a no brainer. There needs to be bell pepper and mushrooms, which are mainstays of kebabs, plus a cherry tomato or two. I thought about onions, but only one of us really likes them cooked, so I refrained.

Then, I decided I needed a marinade recipe of some kind, so after typing in a few search words in Google I came up with one that we actually had all the ingredients for, in one form or another.

The recipe called for oil, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, lemon, mustard, garlic and black pepper.

Once the kebab fixings were cut up and the marinade was ready, it was all supposed to go into a resealable bag for 1-5 hours. Fortunately, I'd settled on this in time to give it a good three hours to soak in the refrigerator. I even managed to turn the bag over a couple of times.

Finally, when it was time to put the kebabs in the oven, I arranged the fixings onto wooden skewers that I soaked for about 15 minutes to avoid scorching. Then each kebab went on a flat metal pan with tinfoil. As you can probably guess, there were plenty of fixings left over, so they got their own pan with tinfoil. Both went into the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes. I also doused each with the marinade that ended up at the bottom of the bag.

Since this was an untried recipe, there was a little bit of concern about how they would turn out. There was no need on this particular food. The only problem was not having enough, apparently.

And the daughter-in-law? She ate three. :)