Well, to my dismay I found practically nothing. Most people posted on their blog that they would try to re-cook it a different way to tenderize it. If you have been cooking for any length of time at all, you will know this won't work. Once it's done, it's done. All you can hope to do now is find a way to use the meat that is palatable.
Now I will interject a note here. I did find 1 or 2 comments on how to use the leftover meat. Some said that you could slice it thin against the grain and make meat sandwiches. That does help somewhat, but my kids won't eat chewy meat and if you can imagine taking a bit into that meat sandwich and when you pull your mouthful away from the sandwich, the bread, tomatoes, etc stays in your mouth but the tough meat just yanks itself back into the sandwich. You know what I mean. My kids won't touch that. I won't either.
A suggestion to cube it and use it in stew will work with some meats, but if the cubes are too tough to grind between your teeth, you can imagine the empty soup bowls being handed back to you with all the discarded meat remaining in the bowl. Not a success.
Well I will tell you what my dad used to do with leftover tough or dried-out roast. He had a meat grinder. You know, one of those that clamped to the side of the table and you put the food down into the hopper and then you turned the handle while the food was forced past a cork-screw shaped blade and came out the other end in tiny little pieces resembling fine-crumb cooked hamburger. It would all fall down into a strategically-placed bowl on the table. Then, he would run a dill pickle or two through the meat grinder. The dill pickle would then get stirred into the meat, and mayonnaise added to make a nice sandwich spread consistency.
I remember this so tasty and we just loved it in our sandwiches. I think I have an old meat grinder somewhere in the basement...but the truth is, it's so much easier to do it with a food processor and still works great. Most people don't have one of those old meat grinders anyway.
So here's what you do: Take the meat and cube it into chunks for ease of processing. Drop them in and process into it's small tiny shreds of meat. You choose how much to process, but don't go overboard and process it into powder.
There is a lot more you can do with it than just make meat sandwich filling. If you do want sandwich filling, only chop enough pickles to make what you can use right away. Don't process your pickles; they will turn to water. Just mince with a knife. Then add the mayo.
If you have a lot of meat shreds after processing, separate into 1/2-cup or 1-cup baggies and freeze some. Here is a list of ideas of what you can do with this transformed-to-lovely, already-cooked meat:
- sandwich spread
- taco meat
- add to casseroles
- add to soups/stews
- add to spaghetti sauce
- add to chili
- make into hash
- add bbq sauce for beef on a bun
- make a beef pie
- use your imagination
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