Our community food pantry celebrated its 10th anniversary today. The board decided to do an appreciation party for volunteers and people in the community who have helped in various ways. I was surprised to find out that we have given away about half a million pounds of food since we opened the doors!
I wanted to do a dinner, but the rest of the group only wanted to do cake and finger food. I decided to grill so there would at least be something with a little substance! I ended up making beef pinwheels for my contribution. I used about 4 lbs. of thinly sliced round steak stuffed with spinach and a mixture of cream cheese, smoked Gouda, mushrooms, onions, Italian and sausage, with Montreal Steak Seasoning on the outside. I ended up with 15 beef rolls and between 80 - 90 pinwheels. The rolls were small enough that I could use toothpicks instead of tying them; that way I could slice between the toothpicks and leave them in so it was easy for people to pick them up after they put them on their plate.
I made them yesterday. They were probably in the grill a little over an hour at around 250-275. They turned out very nice, but my dilemma is always how to reheat them. I have tried various methods in the past for stuff like this, but today I came up with what I thought was a semi-brilliant idea. Overall I thought it worked reasonably well.
Since I was going to serve the pinwheels out of a chaffing dish, I sliced them cold, put hot beef broth in the bottom of the pan and then placed the pinwheels on a wire rack in the pan, (so they were sitting just above the broth). I covered the chaffing pan and placed it in the stand over the pan of boiling water with the sterno underneath. I set it up about an hour and a half before serving. The steam warmed them up and kept them moist so they didn’t dry out.
My phone died, so I will try and post pictures when it is charged once again.
