Quick Tomato Salisbury Steak

Tonight, I needed to make dinner quickly after getting home from Chris' Tae Kwon Do around 8:30 pm.  I was way too lazy this afternoon to cook dinner.  I had 2 lbs. of ground beef but didn't think I had time to do a meatloaf.  I looked in the veggie bin and the pantry and came up with this version of Salisbury Steak.  I thought it was pretty good and wanted to jot it down so I'd be able to re-create it later.  Here goes:

Tomato Salisbury Steak

Beef mixture:

2 lbs. ground beef
1 egg
1/2 c bread crumbs
1/4 cup milk
1/2 - 2.8 oz can French's French Fried Onions, crushed
salt, pepper, garlic powder

Gravy:

1/2 green bell pepper, diced
5-6 button mushrooms, sliced
1 can tomato soup
1/2 soup can water

Form beef mixture into patties and brown on both sides, not cooking all the way through.  Remove beef from pan.  Saute bell pepper and mushrooms in a few tablespoons water to deglaze pan.  When bell pepper starts to get soft, add tomato soup and water to pan, return beef patties to pan and turn to coat with gravy.  Spoon gravy over top of patties.  Cover and simmer on medium low for 20 minutes.  Tilt lid to let steam escape if gravy gets too watery.  Enjoy over mashed potatoes or hot rice.

Tea Bag Folding

Pat and I were practicing our tea bag folding yesterday and we made these "flowers".  We started with 3" squares and followed the instructions we found on http://www.paperprintables.com/.  Three inch squares, when folded, create a flower that is about 4" across.  Kinda big for a card but too pretty to waste, so here it is on the front of your basic A2 sized card.  We figured that 1 1/2" squares resulted in a flower that was good for treat bags and 2" squares created a flower suitable for a card.  You can get several of these flowers from a 12" x 12" piece of paper, but this is also a great project for scraps.  Watch out!  It's addicting!  Of course, YouTube is a fabulous place to start and this link takes you to a video by RubberStampRosie that is wonderful!  Who would have ever thought to use the inside of security envelopes for this project.  Great recycling project as well.