Sunday, January 31, 2016.
Cooking Dangerously At Home.
Unless I am working on a cookbook, I don't cook often at home. This has been especially true since the kids graduated into Real Life, thousands of miles away from the Cool Water Ranch.
I have decided to cook something ambitious and new every Sunday evening. It will not be easy at first, but I'm hoping it becomes a foundation of our home life. Mary Ann's diet is so constricted that it's hard to move within it. But that's a challenge that might interest many other people.
This weekend was the perfect time to start. At the supermarket yesterday, I saw some sirloin strip steaks--my favorite cut of beef--in the case with all the other pre-cut, pre-wrapped cuts. But the marbling was so heavy on these New York strips that I couldn't resist paying around $13 for the two of them. They were cut thinner than I like, and a thick rind of fat lined one edge. But that last fact figures into a technique I have been meaning to try.
So did an oddball kitchen tool I found at the same store. It's a meat tenderizer consisting of two dozen nail-like pins, mounted in parallel. This thing strikes me as somewhat dangerous. When I opened the box to look at it, I jabbed myself pretty well with one of the pins. I will keep it on the same shelf as my other hazardous kitchen tool--a mandolin, also known as "the French widowmaker." (Of course, this says nothing about the dangers of using chef's knives. You have to be careful.)
At dinnertime, I trimmed most of the fat from the steaks, and rendered it in a skillet. Meanwhile, I poked the steak-jabber all over both steaks. When the steak fat cooled to warm, I stirred in salt, pepper, and some Tabasco Buffalo sauce. I worked the combination into the pinholes left by the jabber. In a sense, I was adding my own marbling to what was already there.
I cooked the steak using my in my standard indoors method of searing in a heavy skillet with a thin layer of butter between the meat and the pan. When the center got up to 125 degrees, I took the steaks out and put them on a plate in a 200-degree oven, just to keep them warm.
I deglazed the skillet with dry Marsala wine, Worcestershire sauce, and thin shower of lemon juice. (Lemon on a steak? Yes. Try it some time, but just a little.) I reduced the skillet's contents down to a thick, dark brown and translucent sauce. It must have been as good as I thought it was, because MA actually went back for more sauce.
She was also working on two sides: plain old steamed cauliflower and a blend of fresh spinach and ripe cherry tomatoes to make a unique side dish, one better than I expected.
We also had arugula salad with an Italian-looking vinaigrette in a quart bottle. Neither of us knew where it came from, but I liked it enough to jot some notes to test when we next run out of dressing.
So did an oddball kitchen tool I found at the same store. It's a meat tenderizer consisting of two dozen nail-like pins, mounted in parallel. This thing strikes me as somewhat dangerous. When I opened the box to look at it, I jabbed myself pretty well with one of the pins. I will keep it on the same shelf as my other hazardous kitchen tool--a mandolin, also known as "the French widowmaker." (Of course, this says nothing about the dangers of using chef's knives. You have to be careful.)
At dinnertime, I trimmed most of the fat from the steaks, and rendered it in a skillet. Meanwhile, I poked the steak-jabber all over both steaks. When the steak fat cooled to warm, I stirred in salt, pepper, and some Tabasco Buffalo sauce. I worked the combination into the pinholes left by the jabber. In a sense, I was adding my own marbling to what was already there.
I cooked the steak using my in my standard indoors method of searing in a heavy skillet with a thin layer of butter between the meat and the pan. When the center got up to 125 degrees, I took the steaks out and put them on a plate in a 200-degree oven, just to keep them warm.
I deglazed the skillet with dry Marsala wine, Worcestershire sauce, and thin shower of lemon juice. (Lemon on a steak? Yes. Try it some time, but just a little.) I reduced the skillet's contents down to a thick, dark brown and translucent sauce. It must have been as good as I thought it was, because MA actually went back for more sauce.
She was also working on two sides: plain old steamed cauliflower and a blend of fresh spinach and ripe cherry tomatoes to make a unique side dish, one better than I expected.
We also had arugula salad with an Italian-looking vinaigrette in a quart bottle. Neither of us knew where it came from, but I liked it enough to jot some notes to test when we next run out of dressing.
