While it may sound weird, we usually make sure that special days celebrating Brad involve meat. Strange, I know. The thing is, the guy loves meat. But he doesn’t cook, which leaves all of the cooking up to me – the one who would rather not eat any meat at all. And so, we eat vegetarian at home probably 95% of the time. Brad’s an incredibly good sport about it, but when it comes to things like his birthday, Father’s Day {or even his Christmas stocking}, I attempt to be a good wife include some sort of meat.
And so, with Father’s Day quickly approaching, I decided to try my hand at making something totally out of my comfort zone – homemade beef jerky. I didn’t really know where to start, but I knew it couldn’t be that hard… After all, jerky is just dried out meat much like fruit leather is just dried out fruit right? {This is seriously how I think.} And since I’ve made homemade fruit leather tons of times, I decided to take the same approach… Thin layers and low and slow in the oven. For flavour, I decided to go back to my meat eating days {I ate red meat until I was 12 years old and loved it – #albertagirl} and create a marinade similar to the one I used when I used to make Polynesian sauté beef skewers, and you know what? It turned out great and was so, SO easy – win!!
Now while I usually cook with my Miss G, my helper this time around was this sweet {and silly} little nugget…
While perched atop the table, he dumped our marinade ingredients into the bag, massaged the marinade into the meat, and later helped me peel the finished jerky off of the baking racks too! Such a good little sous chef already – I can’t wait for many more days in the kitchen with my sweet Sam.
Miss G’s contribution was arranging the finished jerky into jars and creating sweet little labels that say ‘beef jerky’ on one side and ‘Papa’ on the other, which in my opinion, totally finishes off the gift.
Now truth be told, the jerky didn’t make it even close to Father’s Day… It was gone in a day and a half {and I suspect that it only lasted that long because there was some serious rationing taking place}, and I was happy it was. We needed a taste tester and the fact that it disappeared so quickly was a great indicator of how well it turned out.
For all of the details and our full recipe, pop over to CBC Parents and check out our Easy Homemade Beef Jerky Kids Can Help Make post.
Now to make another batch before Father’s Day rolls around… We’re thinking something spicy this time around! Maybe sweet and spicy like our Sriracha cashews? Hmmm… Stay tuned!
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