Do you really need a recipe for steak and eggs? The title pretty much says it all. However, I did manage to distill the instructions into three easy steps . . . and in haiku too!
How to prepare:
1.
Room temperature.
Season with salt and pepper.
Heat oil till smoking.
2.
Sear steak on both sides.
Will have a very nice crust.
Let it rest a bit.
3.
Fry up your two eggs.
Sunny-side up is my thing.
Please keep yolks runny
4.
Sometimes toast is nice.
It is not necessary,
But it is tasty.
When looking for a recipe to try, I find myself repeatedly drawn to certain things. In general, I prefer natural food pairings: peas and mint, asparagus and parmesan, brussels sprouts and bacon. Even though I like flavor combinations to be on the conventional side, I do want food to be inspired, but never forced. I don’t like tortured dishes made from overly complicated recipes — meaning the ones with too many things going on.
I look for balance. I want harmony. The plate has to “work.” Most importantly, it has to let the ingredients shine. The emphasis should be on letting food taste like what it is supposed to taste like. I’m not that keen on hiding the flavors with a bunch of heavy spices, nor do I look fondly on over-worked preparation.
Simplicity is best. Simplicity is not boring, it’s elegant.
That is what I like about this recipe. It’s just enough work to be interesting, but not so much that it is a chore. I have tweaked it a bit from its original, but it makes a terrific little meal when you don’t have a lot of time, but want a lot of style.
Ingredients:
1 pound of tender cut beef, cut into 2-inch cubes (you should have about 12 cubes total)
About 12 thin slices of pancetta or proscuitto, one per beef cube
2 tablespoons of canola oil
1 shallot, finely minced
1/4 cup of Bourbon
1/4 cup of water
1 tablespoon coarse Dijon mustard
1/4 cup of heavy cream
2 tablespoons of parsley, finely chopped
How to prepare:
1. Pat the beef cubes dry with paper towel. Wrap each cube with a slice of pancetta or a slice of proscuitto, making sure to cover as much of the cube as possible. If you have rolled pancetta, you can unroll it and then wrap it around each cube.
2. In a large cast-iron skillet, heat the oil over medium-high heat until it starts to shimmer. Place the wrapped cubes seam-side down in the pan. Sear the cubes evenly on all sides, about a minute or two per side. You want the beef to stay medium rare, but the pancetta to crisp a little bit.
Remove the beef cubes to a paper towel-lined plate while you finish the sauce.
3. Reduce the heat to medium, and add the shallots to the same skillet. Sauté the shallots until they begin to get translucent, scraping up the browned bits from the bottom of the pan as you go. Carefully add the bourbon and the water to the pan. Dissolve the browned bits in the added liquid. Once most of the alcohol has cooked away, add the mustard and the heavy cream. Stir everything together. Continue to simmer the sauce until it has thickened. Turn off the heat, and add the parsley to the sauce.
4. To serve, top the beef cubes with the sauce and eat.
This is another recipe is from Epicurious. It is terrific for spring. I’ve modified the recipe a little bit, but kept the primary components.
I like to do steak in a pan the Tom Colicchio-way, basting the meat in butter as it cooks. Factor in about one steak per person.
I prefer my radishes crunchy, so I wouldn’t recommend letting them sit in the dressing for as long as the original recipe states.
I love fava beans. Get them fresh while you can (now is the season). They are extremely labor intensive to shuck and peel, but it is worth it. Here is a handy video clip to show you how if you have never cooked with fava beans before. Just ignore the cooking times that the cook in the clip recommends.
I never really measure out my oil or vinegar for the vinaigrette . . . If pressed, I would suggest that 3:1 ratio of oil to vinegar.
Ingredients:
About a 1/4 cup of extra-virgin olive oil
A splash of apple cider vinegar
Dijon mustard to taste (I use about a teaspoon and a half)
About 1/3 cup of fresh fava beans (from about 6-7 pods)
2 radishes, thinly sliced
2 filet mignon steaks, about 5-7 ounces each
Canola oil
Butter
Salt and pepper
About a tablespoon of chopped chives
Crumbled, soft goat cheese, or chèvre
How to prepare:
1. In a medium bowl, whisk together the vinegar, oil, and mustard until they form an emulsion. Adjust the seasoning to your taste.
If using fresh favas, you will first need to shuck the beans from the pods. Discard the empty pods, and blanch the beans in boiling water for about 2 minutes — any longer than that, and they will be mushy. Have an ice bath ready to shock the beans. By submerging the beans in ice water after draining them, you will retain their beautiful green color. When the beans are cool, you will need to remove the waxy outer-covering of each one. If you nick the end of a bean with your finger nail, you can easily squeeze the bean out of its peel.
Toss the fava beans and the radishes in the vinaigrette. You want them evenly-coated with the dressing.
2. Pat the steaks dry with paper towels, and season them liberally with kosher salt and pepper. In a heavy pan, heat the canola oil over high heat until it is almost smoking. You’ll be able to see when the oil is up to temperature when its surface begins to shimmer. Sear the meat on both sides, about 2 minutes per side. Reduce the heat to medium-low. You must reduce the heat to prevent the butter from burning on contact with the pan. Add a good knob of butter to the pan. Tilt the pan and, using a spoon, baste the steaks continually with the melted butter and oil mixture, flipping them halfway through cooking. Continue to cook the steaks until you have achieved your desired level of doneness.
Transfer the steaks to a cutting board. Let them rest a few minutes before slicing them.
Bear in mind that the steaks will continue to cook a little bit while resting, so you may want to keep this in mind and remove them from the pan when they are a little bit rarer than how you want to eat them.
3. Toss the fava beans and the radishes with the chives. Divide the fava bean and radish mixture between two plates. Top each portion with one of the sliced filet mignons. Drizzle some of the vinaigrette, and sprinkle on some of the crumbled chèvre over each steak. Serve immediately.
It is a stunning 92.7° outside.
92°. Even after 8PM. It is just barely June.
This is almost 20 degrees above the seasonal average. It feels like August. This is so wrong!
So what did I decide to cook? Did I have a cool, crisp salad? Did I just lie on my floor, alternating slices of cucumber between my eyelids and my mouth?
Nope. I made chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, and gravy.
Why? Because apparently, the heat has made me insane.
Or maybe I can blame it on my Arkansas-born father, say that I am simply channeling the Spirit of the South. You know that Spirit? The one that makes you crave stewed collards, macaroni and cheese, and smoked meat in the wilting Delta heat?
You don’t actually need a recipe for chicken-fried steak, but for reference, I give you the link to the Pioneer Woman’s version here.
Love her or hate her, the Pioneer Woman’s blog is terrific form of escapism. Everything about Ree Drummond’s life seems beautiful: she’s beautiful, she has beautiful children, her kitchen is huge and beautiful, her ranch is beautiful, her friends and family are beautiful, her photos are beautiful. Everything is highly calorific, and all the colors are super-saturated.
And her bodice-ripper stereotype of a husband is every woman’s dirty, little secret fantasy.
The Pioneer Woman’s little slice of Oklahoma seems fantastic too. True, there is a lot of backlash (some of it really funny, like this and this), but you can’t deny that Drummond makes American Comfort Food look really, really good. Plus she slayed the Flay in Bobby’s Food Network Thanksgiving showdown. Kudos.
So, how do you make chicken-fried steak without a recipe?
You will need:
Some cube steaks (or minute steaks)
Some flour
A lot of milk
2 eggs
Some canola oil
Lots of salt and pepper
Some seasoning.
First of all, pat the cube, or minute steaks dry with paper towels. In a large shallow dish, pour in about half a cup of milk. Beat 2 eggs into the milk. In another dish, stir together about 4 heaping spoonfuls of flour, about a teaspoon and a half of salt, a lot of freshly ground black pepper, and whatever seasoning you want to add (seasoned salt, paprika, cayenne pepper, garlic powder, onion powder).
Coat each steak, one at a time, with the milk and egg mixture. Dredge each steak with the flour. Dunk each flour-covered steak back in the egg and milk mixture, and redredge each in the flour mixture. Place them on a clean plate after you are done.
In a large cast-iron skillet, heat about 1/4 inch of canola oil over medium-high heat. You want the oil to just start to smoke. When the oil has reached a good temperature, add the steaks to the pan, being careful not to overcrowd it. Fry each steak until each side is golden brown. Remove the steaks to a paper-towel covered plate the drain.
Pour off all but about a 1/4 cup of oil. Add a heaping 1/4 cup of flour to the pan, and make a roux. Brown the flour so that your gravy doesn’t have that raw flour kind of taste. It should be golden brown when you pour in the milk (about two cups). You will end up with a lot of gravy. Whisk the gravy, breaking up any lumps, until you have the consistency that you want. This can take between 5 to 10 minutes. You might have to add more milk if the gravy starts to look too thick. Adjust the seasoning as you go along, adding more salt and black pepper as needed.
Ladle a generous amount of gravy over your chicken-fried steak. If you serve your chicken-fried steak with mashed potatoes, you can cover your spuds with the gravy too.
Enjoy responsibly: make this in November, not during a heat wave like now!
This is probably my favorite way to cook the terrific sausage that I get from my CSA. I originally got the idea from Epicurious, but have long since dispensed with the recipe itself.
First, I set a big pot of heavily salted water to boil (as salty as the Mediterranean, so it goes), and I preheat my oven to 350°. When the water starts to boil, I add the penne. I figure about 1/2 a pound of penne to 1 pound of sausage. You can cook your sausage any way you like; I put mine in the oven for about 10 minutes, about as long as it takes to cook the pasta. Drain your pasta, and return it to the warm pot. Slice the sausage at an angle, and add it to your drained pasta. Toss the pasta and sausage together with a good handful or two of arugula leaves (the residual heat should wilt the greens just enough), a drizzle of olive oil, a couple grinds of the peppermill, and the juice of one lemon. Top with freshly grated Dry Jack cheese (I find for this recipe, the more coarsely grated the cheese, the better).
Divide everything equally into warmed bowls, and enjoy!
Taco salad is easy to mock. Is it a salad? Isn’t it just a giant fried flour tortilla bowl full of calories? When Budweiser can sell beer by exploiting taco salad’s paradoxical nature in a very funny commercial, you know it probably isn’t that good for you.
But why can’t it be? Why not swap out the edible bowl for a just a few high-quality tortilla chips, and use really good, super lean grass-fed beef. Why not replace the iceberg lettuce (John Waters always calls iceberg lettuce the polyester of greens) with bright, crunchy, vitamin-packed Romaine? Why not throw in some organic cherry tomatoes? Just a sprinkling of good shredded cheese, the hormone-free stuff?
And forget the heavy Ranch dressing or giant scoop of sour cream. If your core ingredients are good, just a spritz of lime juice should do the trick.
Ingredients:
1 pound of very lean ground beef
2 tablespoons of olive oil
1 white onion, chopped
2-3 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 teaspoon of dried oregano
1/2 teaspoon of ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon of paprika
1/4 teaspoon of chili powder
Salt and pepper
1 head of Romaine lettuce, cut crosswise into 1/4-inch ribbons
1 cup of shredded cheese
1 pint of cherry tomatoes, diced
Tortilla chips
Lime wedges
How to prepare:
1. Heat the oil in a large heavy saucepan over medium-high heat. Add onion and garlic. Sauté them together until the onion is slightly softened, approximately 2-3 minutes. Add the beef and the spices. Cook until the meat is no longer pink. Adjust the seasoning. Turn off the heat and begin assembling the salad.
2. Make a bed of about a cup of lettuce in the bottoms of 4 good-sized individual salad bowls. Drain the beef if there seems to be a lot of oil or liquid in the bottom of the pan. Top each bed of lettuce with a scoop of ground beef, followed with the cheese, and then the diced tomatoes. Squeeze a lime wedge or two over the top. Serve with chips on the side.
Is it? Could it possible be?
Oh, yes. It’s macaroni and cheese. With hot dogs.
Don’t be a food snob. You know you want it.
Ingredients:
8 ounces of dry pasta
3 tablespoons of butter, plus 1 tablespoon
1/4 cup of flour
2 cups of milk
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
8 ounces of grated cheese (I used raw milk cheddar)
4 hot dogs, sliced into 1/4-inch wide coins (I used beef hot dogs from my meat CSA)
1/2 cup of breadcrumbs
How to prepare:
1. Preheat your oven to 350°.
2. Prepare the pasta according to directions, but drain the pasta just right before it’s al dente.
3. Now, while your pasta is boiling, prepare the béchamel. Melt 3 tablespoons of butter over medium-low heat in a medium saucepan. Add the flour and stir them both together to make a roux. Continue to heat the roux until the flour starts to just brown. Add the milk a little bit at a time, stirring constantly as you add it. It will seize up when you add the first little bit of liquid, but will relax the more you stir it. Add the nutmeg after you have added all 2 cups of milk. Continue to stir and stir and stir. Don’t worry about adjusting the seasoning; the cheese and hot dogs should add enough sodium. Once the béchamel has thickened to a nice, smooth white sauce, turn off the heat and move the saucepan off of the burner.
4. Combine the pasta, the cheese, the sauce, and the hot dogs in a large bowl. Pour the mixture into a good-sized baking dish.
5. Melt the remaining tablespoon of butter and mix it with the breadcrumbs. Sprinkle the breadcrumbs evenly over the top of the macaroni and cheese. Bake for 30-35 minutes until brown and bubbly. Serve with a good, heaping side of Midwestern nostalgia.
I like mashed potatoes on top of just about anything.
This dish is one of those great things that you can play around with, improvising with whatever you have around the house. Parsnips? Sure, throw them in. How about a turnip? Sounds good. Lamb? Change “cottage” to “shepherd” and you’re good to go. Beef? Beef is better than okay! Tomato paste? Some fresh chopped tomato. I say add whatever makes you feel warm and happy.
Just imagine whatever you would like to eat in your cottage if you had one (you might).
Ingredients:
3 medium Russet potatoes, cut into large dice
1 heaping tablespoon of kosher salt
2 tablespoons of butter
1/2 to 1 cup of milk
1 tablespoon of olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
2 large carrots or 3 medium carrots, diced
2-3 cloves of garlic, finely minced
1 pound of grass-fed, lean ground beef
1 1/2 tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce
1 1/2 teaspoons of fresh rosemary, finely chopped
2 tablespoons of flour
1 cup of veal or beef stock (you could also use milk or chicken stock)
1/2 cup of frozen green peas
Salt and pepper to taste
How to prepare:
1. Preheat the oven to 375°.
2. Put the potatoes in a large saucepan and cover them with water. Add the salt. Bring the water to a boil and cook the potatoes until they are tender. You will know that they are ready when you can crush a potato piece easily against the side of the pan with a wooden spoon. Drain the potatoes. In the same pan, mash the potatoes with the butter. Add the milk a 1/4 cup at a time until you get the right consistency. You don’t want the potatoes to be dry, but you don’t want them soupy either. Aim for a texture that is loose enough to spoon on top of your beef filling, but not so loose that the potatoes add a lot of excess water to your pie.
3. In a large skillet, heat the olive oil over medium heat. When the oil is hot, add the onions and carrots. You want to cook the onions until they are translucent and are just beginning to brown. At that point, add the minced garlic to the carrots and onion. Cook the garlic for about a minute until it is fragrant but not burning. Add the ground beef to the pan. Breaking up bigger chunks of ground beef with your wooden spoon, cook the beef until there is no longer any visible pink. Sprinkle the beef with the Worcestershire sauce and the rosemary. Cook everything for another minute or two. Sprinkle the beef with flour. Stir again and cook for a few more minutes to brown the flour. Add the stock to the pan and stir to combine everything. The sauce should begin to thicken. When the sauce has gotten to the point that you think it is ready (the mixture should be held together by a nice, thick sauce) , distribute the peas over the top of the beef and continue to cook everything together for about another minute before turning off the heat.
4. Spread the meat mixture over the bottom of a casserole dish. Spoon the mashed potatoes on top of the meat. You can even use a fork to rough up the surface if you like. Bake the casserole uncovered in the oven for 25 minutes. The potatoes will have just started to brown. Wait at least 15 minutes before serving.
How do you cook a nice, thick steak in a pan? You sear it, right? On high heat to get that nice browned crust. Then you move it to a hot, hot oven to finish. “Sear and blast,” goes the standard mantra.
But what if you did the reverse? In pursuit of the perfectly cooked, medium-rare steak without that darned grayish band of overcooked protein ringing the outer edge of the meat, those pesky perfectionists at Cook’s Illustrated did precisely that: they started the steaks in a reasonably cool oven, and then moved them to a hot pan to sear.
The result? Very. Evenly. Cooked. Steak.
Of course, under the weight of all their test kitchen trials, you might be persuaded that this is the right way, nay the only way to cook your meat.
But it’s not.
It is fun to try it, though.
Ingredients:
2 New York strip steaks, at least 1-inch thick
Kosher salt
1 teaspoon olive oil, plus 1 tablespoon
Freshly ground black pepper
2 nice pats of butter
Special equipment:
1 half-size heavy-duty sheet pan
1 wire rack to fit the half-size, heavy-duty sheet pan
How to prepare:
1. In order for this method to work, your steaks should be about room temperature before cooking. Be sure to take your steaks out of the fridge, or from wherever you are storing them, ahead of time.
2. Preheat the oven to 275°.
3. Using paper towels, thoroughly pat your room-temperature steaks dry. Season both sides liberally with kosher salt and rub the olive oil all over them.
4. Position the steaks on the wire rack that you have set in the sheet pan. Insert the meat thermometer probe into the center of one of the steaks. You will want the tip of the probe to be parallel to the steak, so the probe should go in the side of the steak instead of sticking straight up. Make sure not to position the probe tip too close to the wire rack or to the top of the steak. Set the timer to go off at 100°.
5. When the timer goes off, remove the steaks from the oven. Remove the probe. Heat the remaining olive oil over medium-high heat until the pan is nice and hot, and oil is not quite smoking. Sear the steaks on both sides. You should remove them from the pan when they reach an internal temperature of 125° for rare, or 130° for medium rare. While the steaks are resting, the internal temperature should continue to rise about 5 degrees.
If you feel like this is a bit fussy (those America’s Test Kitchen folks are really fussy!), you can just sear your steaks for about a minute or two per side and call it a night.
6. Place a nice pat of butter and a good grind of black pepper on each steak before serving. Serve and smile.
I got this idea from Martha Stewart and it has become one of my favorite things to make with ground beef from our CSA. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it’s delicious. On the table in less than 20 minutes too.
Now that’s what I call good fast food!
Ingredients:
Pizza dough, about 1 pound of dough will make two 12-inch pizzas, or one really big pizza
Marinara sauce
Low-moisture mozzarella cheese or sliced provolone
1/2 pound of grass-fed, very lean ground beef
12-14 grape tomatoes, halved
1/2 a small red onion, thinly sliced into rings
Maldon salt
Special equipment:
A large baking sheet
Parchment paper
How to prepare:
1. Preheat the oven to 450°.
2. You can easily make your own pizza dough, but I rarely ever do it anymore since I can buy reasonably good, organic frozen dough at the market. In a hurry, I have also been known to run down to the nearest slice joint and buy their dough. Most pizzerias will sell it to you, you just have to ask.
I know. Gasp! I don’t make it from scratch? No. On special occasions, maybe. But if I’m tired and hungry, no. And that’s okay!
Once your dough ball is made, defrosted, or acquired, you need to stretch it out. Start by flattening your dough ball into a disk. By flouring both sides, you avoid having to flour your countertop. Any hard surface will do to stretch out the dough as long as it is flat, clean, and dry. Using your fingertips, start pushing down on the dough, roughly making the border that will become your crust. Now begin using the palm of your hand to pull the dough away from you and away from its center while turning it. At this point, you can try tossing it up in the air. But every time I try doing that, I end up looking like a fool with dough on the floor. Instead, you can position your knuckles under the dough and start stretching it out off of your flat surface. This super helpful video will give you a better idea what to do (contrary to the video, you don’t actually need a marble or stainless steel surface. And just flour is okay if you have no semolina lying around).
2. Now that your dough is nice and stretched out, position it on your parchment paper- lined baking sheet. Egads! No pizza stone? No tiles or bricks wrapped in aluminum foil lining your oven to achieve optimal heat?
No. When I can afford a real, wood-burning Neapolitan oven outside my villa then I will do things like they do in the old country.
3. Spread your marinara sauce around your stretched out dough. I buy this too. I really like the sauces from Sauces n’ Love. They’re wonderful. The pizza sauce is good. Very good.
4. Top the pizza with either the mozzarella or the provolone. I like the flavor of the provolone better with the ground beef, but I love the melty creaminess of mozzarella. Try one, or the other, or both. Maybe at the same time.
5. Scatter the onion rings, halved tomatoes, and RAW ground beef over the pizza.
6. Bake in the oven for 15 minutes, longer if you want a more browned crust. I kind of prioritize though: absent the hardware and capability to get a really excellent crust, I aim for just really excellently cooked beef. Shower your finished pie with Maldon salt, slice, and serve.
coolcookstyle 