Stretching a Roast
Meal #1 Cook the roast all day in the crock pot. Cooking your meat in a crock pot allows you to buy a cheaper cut of beef because the meat will be more tender if you slow cook it. Brown the roast and then throw it in with sliced onion, beef stock, garlic, and a few other miscellaneous spices. Serve the roast with mashed potatoes, peas, and fresh baked bread. Save all the stock (except the stuff used to make gravy).
As a side tip for saving stock. Let the liquid cool before putting it in your refrigerator overnight. In the morning scrape off all the fat that has risen to the top and then freeze the stock.
After the first meal, shred the remainder of the roast and put in the fridge.
Meal #2
Take about half of the remainder of the roast and chop it into small pieces. Use meat to make beef burritos. You can make these a variety of ways but I spread the following on a tortilla; refried beans, beef, chopped tomatoes (from a can), cheese, and onion. Roll them up and put them into a 9×13 baking dish and cover with enchilada sauce. Bake covered at 350 degrees for 25 minutes, then uncover and sprinkle with cheese and bake another 5 minutes.
You can really stretch your meat in the burritos, you can also add corn, black beans, rice, and peas to burritos.
Meal #3-
Use one of two recipes for the remainder of the roast. Either make a big batch of long grain and wild rice, cook up a bag of frozen vegetables and add them to the rice just before it is done cooking. Reheat the shredded roast. Put the rice and veggies in a large serving dish and add the roast to the top. It looks pretty with all the colored veggies and it tastes yummy. Also the kids will eat more veggies because they are mixed in with the rice.
The alternative meal #3 would be to make bbq beef sandwiches, if you had enough meat leftover. Heat the shredded beef on the stove-top with bbq sauce for 15 minutes or until warm.
By stretching the roast over three meals you are actually paying $3 a meal for your meat.
This can be a great deal especially if you are able to find a roast on sale.
