This & That

Butter Biscuits

Cooking from the pantry this week, my husband was out of town for a couple of days at the big Sportsman's Expo in Salt Lake. When it's the Dark Time, you grab on to anything you can.

Early in the week, though, there were meals. We had teriyaki stir fry one evening. It's a family favorite and this time it was made with deer.

I've been craving tomato soup on these colder days, and made tomato bacon soup....so good. 

It really hit the spot and there were plenty of leftovers to have while he was gone.

There were 3 dead bananas taunting me from the freezer, so I made this banana cake which is is also a family favorite. Not for Elise, who hates bananas with a passion unequaled by any food aversion in the family, but for my husband who starts checking every cupboard in the kitchen for something sweet to eat when there isn't anything sitting obviously right on the counter.

I also took care of the beef stock project. I browned the beef bones in the oven,

then put them in my big countertop roaster for about a day and a half. My kitchen smelled incredible.

I got 14 pints of stock which will find a home in the storage room, and filled some of the jars that have been emptying as we've cooked from the pantry.

That brings us to absolutely the best biscuit recipe I've ever made. Truly. You have to have something to go with/dip in the soup and I wanted to try this new recipe. I'm glad I did. I like biscuits, but the whole rolling and shaping thing just seems like an extra step so I usually do drop biscuits. I need to rethink my strategy, because this is a case of "you get what you pay for." The work of shaping these makes layers and layers that puff up and rise to heights never before achieved. I like it. The recipe comes from this new cookbook or you can find it on her blog.

Butter Biscuits

• 2 cups flour plus a little more for shaping
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup cold butter cut into tablespoons
• 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons cold buttermilk (I rarely have buttermilk in the house, so I went the lemon juice/vinegar route)

Preheat to 450°. Lightly grease a 9×13 or other baking pan or cookie sheet.

Place the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a medium size bowl.

Using a pastry cutter, or however you choose to do it, cut the butter into the dry mixture until the pieces of butter are small and about the size of peas. Add 3/4 cup cold buttermilk to the mixture.

Fold the buttermilk and flour-butter mixture together. Do not stir, just fold until the flour is absorbed. If the mixture is too dry, add a couple tablespoons of additional buttermilk.

Dump the mixture out onto a clean, floured surface. The mixture will probably still be a bit dry and crumbly. Take the dough and pat as best as you can into a small square or circle, about 1 inch thick.

Fold the mixture over onto itself once. Repeat patting into a circle, and fold together again. Each time you fold the dough onto itself, it will start to come together and become less crumbly. Fold mixture again, for a total of three times folding together.

Pat gently into a circle or rectangle about 6 inches wide and 3/4" thick. Use a 2-3 inch biscuit cutter and cut into circular or square shapes. You should be able to cut about 9-10 biscuits from one recipe by reshaping the scraps. The last couple of biscuits usually look very pieced together as you can see on the very right side of the picture.

Place biscuits onto baking sheet. Bake for 12-15 minutes or until golden.

 

Overnight Sourdough Discard Sheet Pancake

I wasn't very good about photographing my pantry meals last week. My husband was still traveling internationally on Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday was a family favorite casserole I grew up with and I told him after all the exotic food he ingested on his adventure, my cooking would seem very ordinary. But then again.....Mom Food.

Thursday I tried a new recipe for White Chili from a fairly recently purchased cookbook, and honestly was a little disappointed, so probably won't be repeating it. I have an interest in Mennonite cooking since I have Mennonite ancestry. In general, I love this book, but this one recipe didn't do it for me. It redeemed itself for me on Friday when I tried a breakfast-for-dinner dish that involved potatoes and eggs. I kicked myself when I realized I didn't get a picture before eating it, because it was delicious. Matchstick-cut potatoes, and onions cooked up in a skillet, then making little "nests" for eggs that get sprinkled with a little cheese. Really good. Leftovers on Saturday in an attempt to clean out the fridge.

I didn't get a picture of Sunday dinner, either, which was Honey-Mustard Pheasant. It's game I actually enjoy eating. I caught this picture as my husband demolished the leftovers for lunch the next day. We baked potatoes and some butternut squash from the garden to go with it. 

I also made a batch of Snickerdoodles from the Bountiful Kitchen cookbook. I kept a few out for my husband and put the rest in the freezer should any grandkids happen to swing by the house.

I got out all the soup bones from the freezer and am in the middle of a batch of beef stock as you read this. These bones were taking up about a quarter of a shelf in the freezer, so it was time to deal with them. I didn't buy any groceries at all this week except some milk that was on sale, and an emergency quantity of Diet Dr. Pepper. When I get tired of doing the pantry thing, I'm going to do an analysis post of costs and such to see what the results of this experiment are.

That brings us to the recipe for today for Overnight Sourdough Discard Sheet Pancake, which sounds a lot more fancy and intimidating than it actually is. I've made sheet pancakes before and they were good, but both Elise and my husband agree that this is the recipe to stick to. It produces a very light, dare I say airy, pancake. All you need for this is an active sourdough starter which, yeah, I know is kind of intimidating. I was very reluctant and late to the party on the whole sourdough thing, but once you get it going, you can stick it in the fridge for a couple of weeks and not deal with it at all, then get it back out when you want to start it up again. You feed the starter by taking some of it out of the container and adding a little more water and flour to it. What's left in your original jar is called discard. Instead of throwing it away, it can be used in lots of different recipes. Some recipes are actually formulated for discard. It's like carcass broth...taking something you would normally throw away and making something new and delicious from it. I found the recipe in this book. You can put various thing in the pancake batter once you get it in the pan. Press any kind of berry in it, chocolate chips, sprinkle it with cinnamon-sugar, which is what I did with most of it here. I tried swirling some jam in one part of it, but that didn't work quite as well. It sank to the bottom and stuck to the pan. We like this a lot, and when Jack and Leo are here, happy, yummy noises come from the high chairs.

Overnight Sourdough Discard Sheet Pancake

• 2 cups whole milk
• 2 teaspoons white vinegar
• 2 cups flour
• 3 Tablespoons sugar
• 1 cup sourdough discard
• 2 eggs
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup oil
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

Combine vinegar and milk in a measuring cup and set aside so the milk can curdle a bit. (You're essentially making buttermilk.)

Combine the flour, sugar, milk/vinegar mixture, and sourdough discard and mix well. Cover the bowl with a towel and let it sit overnight. It will be bubbly the next morning.

Now add the eggs, salt oil and baking soda just before you're ready to bake it. Pour into a greased 12x17" pan and add toppings if you want. Bake at 350° for 15-20 minutes and serve with syrup of your choice.

Cookies & Cream Oreo Blondies

So my husband was gone all last week and just got home in the middle of the night last night. I actually had great hopes for some kitchen work last week, even though I wouldn't do a whole lot of pantry meal cooking. I was going to take beef soup bones out of the freezer, get them roasted up, and make some beef stock for canning. I was going to make something banana-ish from some bananas I discovered in the freezer but as you'll see, a pretty big wrench got thrown into the works.

To keep food waste to a minimum, I took the last of some leftover chicken and made it into salsa verde enchiladas. They went into the freezer for another day's meal.

I hard boiled some eggs and washed lettuce for easy salad making for lunches and made some honey mustard salad dressing to go with it.

I even tried out a recipe for sourdough pizza. I'm not sure it will replace my standard recipe. It was at this point that I got sick, so things came to a screeching halt until I started to feel human again.

I'd pulled a package of pumpkin out of the freezer before I got sick, so using that was a priority. Pumpkin Oatmeal Chocolate Chip cookies seemed like a good idea.

As I was able to start breathing through my nose again and stop coughing long enough to stand in the kitchen, soup sounded good. I had everything I needed for some broccoli cheese soup and that tasted really good. I got a new cookbook and this was the first recipe I tried from it. I've followed the author for several years on social media, and the cookbook is beautifully done, and very hefty. There's even a Facebook group started by the author and they're cooking a recipe a week from the book. The soup was last week's recipe and it's absolutely delicious and will be taking the "favorite"  spot for this recipe. I spooned some over the last leftovers of the chicken shepherd's pie and that was yummy as well.

That brings us to this week's recipe, which was not baked this week. This is one of the bar cookies I baked a couple of weeks ago for the youth activity we had here. The recipe is new to me and I found it here. I needed something to round out the selection and thought this one might work. It's a keeper. Notes about this particular recipe.....it can be doubled and baked in an 11x17 sheet pan. I used just regular Oreos, not the double stuff. 

Cookies & Cream Oreo Blondies

• 1 cup butter softened
• 1 cup brown sugar
• ½ cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 (3.4 ounce) box instant vanilla pudding
• 2 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
• 1 cup white chocolate chips
• 16 Oreo Double Stuff cookies (broken into pieces)

Heat oven to 350 degrees.

In a large bowl cream together butter, brown sugar and sugar. Then add eggs and vanilla. Stir until well blended.

Add in dry pudding mix and stir together until light and fluffy.

Then add the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt until it is mixed in well. Gently fold in the chocolate chips, white chips, and Oreo pieces.

Grease a 9 x 13 inch pan. Pour batter into the pan and bake for 20 – 22 minutes. Be careful not to over bake. Cook until the center is set, but still gooey.

 

A Week Cooking from the Pantry

I've mentioned that I'm trying to cook as much from my pantry as possible this month and maybe into next month a bit. The rules I've set up for myself are that I will buy dairy and fresh produce as needed. I'm also not counting things I buy for other purposes, like the add ins for the baking I did for that youth fireside last Sunday night....M&M's, Oreos, white chocolate chips...that kind of thing, since it was consumed by others.

Elise, Jack & Leo came up for the week. When it's just my husband and I, we usually find what we want for breakfast, but when she's here, I revert to hot breakfast mode, trying to get some leftovers to put in the freezer and send back with her. I had a little container of pumpkin in the fridge that I decided to put into some pancakes. The boys love pancakes. 

I also had a bunch of sourdough discard to use, so I did a batch of crackers. We had split pea soup in the instant pot that night, using the last of the ham from the freezer.

I forgot to take a picture of the orange/oat scones from breakfast this morning, but for dinner I put a freezer meal I'd prepped into the crock pot. It was a green enchilada sauce/chicken dish that didn't go over all that well with the boys, but I opened a jar of the salsa verde I made last summer from the green tomatoes to serve with it. I was skeptical about this when I put it in the jars, but after sitting on the shelf it's had a chance to mellow and it's actually really good. I'm going to repurpose the leftovers of this along with more salsa verde and turn it into enchiladas for the freezer. That corn was some we froze this summer.

The next morning it was a Dutch baby or German pancake, or whatever you call it at your house. At our house, we call it Bloop because that's what it was called at my husband's house when he was growing up. I discovered you can bake link sausage in the oven much like you cook bacon so it doesn't make a pig-mess all over the stove. I'm all for that.

I was determined to make something the boys would like for dinner. I know they like noodles, so we went for a hamburger, pasta, cheese skillet meal that was well-received by two hungry boys. A bath followed shortly thereafter because they were wearing some if it all over their faces and arms. This dish used some tomato sauce I bottled and burger we ground recently.

Breakfast this day was Orange Bran Muffins. Definitely a family favorite, but I forgot to get a picture. My daughter has her carnivore moments, so for dinner we cooked up some "steak." 

The morning they left, I tried a new recipe using sourdough discard. This is a sheet pan pancake and is the best one we've tried yet. I'm going to go ahead and post the recipe next week, even though I know most of my readers....all maybe 10 of them.....don't cook with sourdough. Maybe it will spur on some experimentation. I cut the leftovers of this into squares and sent it home with them.

It was just my husband and I for dinner on Sunday and I made a Chicken Shepherd's Pie with cooked chicken from the freezer, onion and carrots from the garden, celery we had in the vegetable drawer, and potatoes from a 20 pound bag I bought on sale last month and have been storing in the garage to keep them cold. 

So that's most of the meals this past week, and all of them came from the pantry. I did buy a salad kit, some extra sharp cheese for the potatoes on the shepherd's pie, and a gallon of whole milk for the babies. Everything else we already had in the fridge, freezer or pantry. As a reminder, my husband was gone for most of a week earlier this month, and left last night on another week-long adventure with Evan and Eric, so the bonafide pantry meals will be more sparse. It's why I've decided to go part-way into February, trying to get an accurate measure of what I save in a month of cooking this way. So far, it's been a fun experiment, but I'm not a hard-line pantry challenge participant. There are those who don't go to the store at all until the end of February. Yeah, I don't think I want to be that strict.

Kitchen-ing

I'm trying to do a bit of a pantry challenge for the next couple of months....trying to use things in the freezer and things I've canned as much as possible so things just don't sit there. Of course, with the crazy prices of groceries these days, it can't hurt at all. 

As I mentioned, my husband headed for the hills last week after I got sick, which messed with my cooking plan, but I can show a couple of things we ate. I pulled a freezer meal out one night. It was one I made from the Thanksgiving leftovers. 

Last night I used the last of the Christmas ham in split pea soup. I tried it in the Instant Pot this time and don't like it as well as I like it on the stovetop. The split peas just dissolved. Elise and the boys are here for a few days and the dissolved peas didn't bother Jack and Leo one little bit. 

We're having a church youth gathering here Sunday night and I'm responsible for some refreshments for about 70 teenagers. I've been making a pan a day of some kind of treat for the last several days, now that I'm feeling somewhat better.

Since there wasn't much going on in my kitchen, I'll show you a little bit from a couple of other family kitchens. Collin made some homemade pizza on his grill.

Looking at these, I have the urge to make pizza myself. 

Some bread Marc made, with a nice little design on it. Since my husband happens to be in town this week, I might get a few more pantry/freezer meals put together.

Peppermint Oreo Chocolate Chip Cookies

Every once in a while, I get the urge to try something different than the usual set-in-stone menu of Christmas treats/meals. I found the recipe here and I'd seen this one on Instagram several times. I thought the kids might enjoy them. I mean, Oreos, mini chocolate chips, and little peppermint pieces. What's not to like, right? I had a little bit of trouble sourcing the peppermint pieces locally and ended up ordering them from Amazon, hoping they'd get here in time. Rumor has it you can buy them already chopped into pieces, but it wasn't a problem to chop them up myself. Let me just say that the kids loved them and the adults who weren't foraging for their favorite regular Christmas cookies liked them as well. They might well be inserted into the set-in-stone rotation, and since they're drop cookies, they mix up really quickly.

Peppermint Oreo Chocolate Chip Cookies

• 3/4 cup unsalted butter softened
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 egg
• 2 teaspoons Nielsen-Massey's vanilla extract
• 2 cups flour
• 2 teaspoons cornstarch
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup semi-sweet mini chocolate chips
• 1 cup oreo cookie chunks
• 1 cup Andes Peppermint crunch pieces

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Cream butter and sugars together. Add the egg and vanilla and blend it. Mix in flour, cornstarch,baking soda, and salt. Stir in mini chocolate chips. Then the oreo cookie chunks and andes peppermint crunch pieces. 

Bake for 8-10 minutes until barely golden brown around the edges. Let cool on the baking sheet for a few minutes and then transfer to a wire cooling rack. Then serve.

 

 

Jalapeno Popper Chicken Sliders

This time of year, there's always a lot going on in my kitchen. The annual ceremonial making of the fruitcake has taken place, and I've got the Lemon Wafers are in the freezer, so my husband and I have our favorite Christmas baked goods taken care of.

I canned the turkey stock I made from the Thanksgiving carcass. I actually really love this process. This stuff is just so good and adds so much to whatever I add it to. I made some Broccoli Cheese Soup last night that called for 2 cups of chicken broth. I added some of this and  both my husband and I remarked on how tasty it was. I'm just going to go with the idea that it was the chicken stock.

I also tried a new experiment. This might look like a very mundane baked potato, but what you have here is homemade sour cream. Ta-DA!! It worked great and the only thing I need to tweak is the thickness. It's a little thinner in consistency than store bought sour cream, but I'll work on that.

Some chicken broth went into this slow cooker Tomato Tortellini soup and yep, we felt the same way about it. Yummy stuff, and isn't soup just the perfect winter food? Throw stuff in a pot and it comes out like magic in the end. Which brings us to this week's recipe for Jalapeño Popper Chicken Sliders. These are also done in the slow cooker and they are really, really good. I kept them on the mild side as you would suspect I might, but there was a little bite there, and that coupled with the bacon and creamy chicken produce a really tasty result. In my view, the slow cooker is also magical and additionally gives me a sense of power, since dinner is done early in the day for all intents and purposes. 

Jalapeno Popper Chicken Sliders

• 3 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
• 6 slices bacon, cooked and crumbled
• 3 Jalapeno peppers, diced (I think I used only 2, and took the seeds out of them)
• 1 teaspoon garlic salt
• 8 oz. cream cheese, softened
• 1/2 cup sharp cheddar cheese, grated
• 2 more slices bacon, cooked and crumbled
• 24 Hawaiian rolls
   

Put chicken breasts, 6 slices bacon, pepper and garlic salt into slow cooker and cook on low for 5-7 hours. Just before you want to eat, add the softened cream cheese and mix it around with the chicken. Serve on the Hawaiian rolls with cheese and more crumbled bacon, if desired. The leftovers are just as delicious.

All Over the Kitchen

As you might imagine, this time of year the kitchen cranks up, whether my husband is in residence or not. It's been a bit since I've done a kitchen post, and I have quite literally been all over the kitchen these days.

I took all the peels and cores from the apples I bottled and tried out a new recipe for apple scrap jelly. This experiment worked pretty well, although I did have to process it twice, because I've been working with a new pectin and I didn't add enough the first time around. It set up just fine the second time. Loved this project because I essentially took the stuff I'd throw away and turned it into something edible.

I tried a new recipe for pumpkin cake in the crockpot that also worked, much to my surprise. Elise was all over this one. That's caramel sauce all over it. Yep. 

Before everyone came for Thanksgiving, my husband and I had a true gather-your-fragments dinner. All the stuff was already in the fridge or freezer, including the pizza sauce, which was a garden canning experiment I tried this summer. Yay for garden canning.

Now, let me digress a little bit. All my boys are competent in the kitchen and I have the photographic proof from some of them at Thanksgiving. We had 2 turkeys this year. Eric brined and smoked one. I always do a plain, what I consider "normal" one, because I stuff the turkey just like my mother did. I might be tempted to try brining a turkey, BUT you can't stuff it because it's so salty from the brine, and I'm not ready yet to give that up. 

Marc bakes bread...all kinds of bread.  Whether it's sandwich rolls that get sliced up for soup night,

to the rolls we had for Thanksgiving dinner,

he can do it.

Collin did a turkey breast on his grill, then took the bones along with some he had in his freezer and made bone broth. 

And if you're still reading at this point we're going to talk about Magic Food. I've told my husband many times during our 43 years of marriage that there is no such thing as Magic Food...especially in situations when he thinks he needs to entertain a dozen of his best friends,  with no advance notice and they're coming in 30 minutes. He has absolutely no clue why this might cause anxiety. Now...on the OTHER hand, he left town at the end of Thanksgiving weekend and there were still dinner leftovers. I've mentioned that I've thought a lot about the ability to grow and preserve food this year, and I guess in my mind part of food preservation includes not wasting food, so I approached the challenge of turning a bunch of leftovers into Magic Food. And it was a bit of a challenge. The turkey, not so much. I made a couple of turkey "pies," using the leftover stuffing as the crust on top.

Turkey tetrazzini is always a favorite...sans mushrooms, of course. The leftover gravy went into the white sauce.

The leftover potatoes became loaded potato cakes...loaded with cheese and bacon. I flash froze these and they'll appear when I need a quick side for dinner.

The biggest challenge was the sweet potatoes. My husband makes them, and they have a sauce of brown sugar, butter and cream they kind of disintegrate into. They became muffins....

and pancakes.

A couple of those pancakes became my dinner one evening.....and they were good. So yeah, lots of stuff happening all over the kitchen lately, even without having to cook dinner since my husband was gone.

Some Time in the Kitchen, Not a Lot, Then It Turned Into a Lot

In the kitchen recently, dinners have been haphazard because my husband's residency has been haphazard. I can mostly count on him to be here on Sundays, but all other days of the week are negotiable, in his estimation.

For example, I've had the ingredients for these Italian Sliders sitting in various freezers for a while now, mostly because I couldn't plan on a night when my husband would be around to eat them. It finally happened this week.

There's also been a little prep for Thanksgiving going on. I do this kind of thing when my husband is not in residence just to keep my skill set up. One never knows when knowing how to cook food will totally disappear, and with as little meal cooking as I've been doing lately, that could be just around the corner. I roasted some of these little pie pumpkins so I could have pumpkin puree ready when I needed it.

While I was at it, I made up the pie filling for our Thanksgiving dessert.

I made some stew in the Instant Pot. I've discovered it really helps tenderize the exotic stew meat to do it this way, and in my world that's a plus.

Here's another experiment. These are sourdough discard crackers. What you feed the sourdough starter, you take a portion of the old starter, then add new food (water and flour) to it. What you don't feed is called discard and can be used in certain recipes. I've never made crackers before. These are my first attempt, and they turned out pretty well. The edges get a little toasty, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

You might have thought I would be done with canning. You would be mistaken. Cranberries are in season, so I tried some cranberry mustard. My husband pronounced it would be good on sandwiches, especially leftover turkey ones.

I also tried canning some whole berry cranberry sauce,

and some of the apples from our trees. I'm not sure how successful these will be since the apple trees we have don't produce the really firm varieties of apples, but the experimenting continues. The other day I counted up how many jars of various sizes I've filled this year. Anyone want to take a guess? 308. It's more than I've ever filled, and while I'm not doing the sheer volume of basics I did when the kids were all home (5 bushels of peaches, anyone?), I've tried a lot of new things in the sauces/condiments/jams categories. I mean, who would want to do a bunch of experimenting after canning 5 bushels of peaches?? And lots of quarts of pears and applesauce? That and a little freezer jam and I was just glad to be done. My shelves are full, and now I'm working on using what I've put into all those jars.

Salisbury Steak in the Crock Pot

In the kitchen this week, things have been a little all over the place.

My husband seems to be perpetually in the hills, but I'm feeding my mother these days, so I still need to do at least a little cooking. Still trying to use my crockpot as much as possible. I did some pulled pork. We put this on slider rolls with a little coleslaw and it was pretty tasty.

There was also a chicken/pesto/rice dish that could definitely be included in the cold weather comfort food category.

Some of that also went to my mother's house. It freezes well so she can take these containers out whenever she wants. I put a little label on them to tell her what's inside.

Since in large part it's just me here, the rest of it went in the freezer for future use by us or one of my kids.

Food preserving is still going on, but this is the last of the tomato products, as we had a hard freeze this week. It's a tomato soup base made with some veggies and garlic along with tomatoes. I'm going to see how well I can plug it in to the soup recipes we like.

I was really over canning from the garden until the freeze hit. Then of course, I wished I'd tried out a tomato-based BBQ sauce recipe. Next year. I picked some of the remaining jalapeños before things froze and made this pepper jelly. This is yummy stuff. Some crackers, some cream cheese and this? Yep. 

The experimentation continues, though. I tried this new recipe for jalapeño mustard. This is really good. Plenty of zip, but some sweet with it as well. It's definitely going into the rotation.

Which brings us to this recipe. I'm old enough to remember when TV dinners came in little aluminum foil trays and a little piece of foil had to be peeled back so the dessert square could be baked...in the oven, as in before microwaves and one of the most popular TV dinner offerings was Salisbury steak. I think you had a choice between that and fried chicken. When my daughter was here a couple of weeks ago, I tried to use the slow cooker as often as I could so we could do other things with the boys and not worry about dinner prep too much. This was one I tried and I have to be honest, even with childhood memory going, this was a darn sight better than the old-time TV dinner. Comfort food at it's best with some really tasty sauce for the potatoes and some of the bottled garden green beans. To top it off, it's easy to put together. Jack and Leo give it a big thumbs up.

Salisbury Steak in the Crock Pot

• 2 pounds lean ground beef
• 1 envelope dry onion soup mix
• 1/2 cup Italian seasoned bread crumbs (I used plain bread crumbs and added Italian seasoning)
• 1/4 cup milk
• 1 (10 oz.) can golden mushroom soup
• 1 envelope Au Jus gravy mix
• 1 1/4 cups water

In a bowl, mix beef, soup mix, bread crumbs and milk, then form into 8 patties.

In a skillet, brown patties on both sides. Don't worry about cooking them through, just get some color on both sides. I did this in my cast iron pan to get a good sear. Place browned patties in a slow cooker staggering them  so they're not sitting directly on top of each other. 

Mix together mushroom soup, Au Jus gravy mix and water, then pour over patties. Cover and cook on low 3-4 hour, until patties are cooked all the way through. Serves 8