Ok, so wow - so very happy that we delayed last nights dinner plan until today. Our mealtime adventure started as when, as sometimes happens, Jim did a little impulse buying … he came home a few days ago with a gigundo organic rib eye steak and declared - “I think we should start eating steak”.
This being one of my all time favorite foods (except for my stint as a vegetarian) I couldn’t find any fault with his logic. There just remained the question of what to do with it to fully celebrate the flavor and luxury. We don’t often cook meat in the house due to the intense interest our cats have in it and the fact that we don’t often eat meat just out of habit. To say I am rusty at preparing such things would be overly kind. But its hard to go too terribly wrong with great ingredients, which we happened to have on hand.
The first would be the cup or so of semi-sauted Chanterelle mushrooms from the freezer. This fall we went mushroom gathering for the first time and harvested many more than a sane person could eat in a month. We were giddy from the hunt and brought them all home. After giving some away we still had an excess, and our mushroom mentor Linda said that by quick frying them halfway in butter you could store them in the freezer. New Year’s steak seemed the perfect time to finish off the last batch.
In supporting roles would be some lovely organic purple kale and a couple of shallots left from Thanksgiving preparations. Here is how it went…
In my very largest frying pan I defrosted the chanterelles with a bit of extra butter and a couple of finely diced shallots until it was all becoming a lovely golden color. Then I added some chopped kale on top and mixed it together until the kale was wilty and brightly colored. I removed this from the pan leaving as much butter behind as possible and added a bit more.
Then one big steak was seared on both sides until it was just about done (or so I thought) when I added back the veggies and a handfull of finely chopped parsley. The steak was seasoned with salt, pepper and a dash of worcestershire sauce. I had some trouble getting all of the meat to the same level of done-ness and ended up cutting it in half so I could rotate things around. I removed the greens and mushrooms to the plates as a bed for the steak and splashed brandy on the steak in an impromtu tribute to Steak Diane.
As seems to always happen we started in eating before I thought to get a photo for the blog, so the plating is sloppy and its not the best image - it was so incredibly tasty though. I am going to try to be more mindful of taking the pictures in the future.
Jim has declared this better than restaurant steak (although not topping Ruth’s Chris) and wants to start a weekly steak tradition. Unfortunately many parts were a overdone (medium rather than medium rare) so we only had glimpses of how great this meal could have truly been. But it gave us a goal and so starts our quest for 2008 - the perfect steak.
