Posted By Julie on January 9, 2011

I know a recipe is a keeper when I start writing the blog post in my head before I’ve even finished eating.

Last night I saw Liv Life’s post about oatmeal souffle on Foodbuzz, and mentally filed it away for a future breakfast. Turns out I didn’t have to wait long to try it out, because Jeremy unknowingly suggested oatmeal for breakfast today. Nolan is less than enthusiastic about oatmeal in its basic state, but I thought he might give it another chance if I souffled it.

I’ve made a few souffles before—namely goat cheese and carrot—but never a sweet souffle, amazingly enough. Either direction you go, they essentially comprise a flavored custard base, enriched with egg yolks, into which stiffly beaten whites are folded for lift. A fluted ceramic souffle pan, while helpful in getting the coveted height, is not strictly necessary; I used a small casserole dish that was more appropriately sized than my souffle dish, and buttered and sugared the walls to give my souffle a better grip. I also made sure not to use my oven’s convection feature in this case.

The recipe at Liv Life is a healthified adaptation of one from Marion Cunningham’s Breakfast Book, which has been on my Amazon wish list for like five years. I took the liberty of bringing our souffle back a little closer to the original, full of sugar and fat, partly because I didn’t want an orphaned egg yolk rattling around in my fridge and partly because one egg, less than a tablespoon of butter and a few tablespoons of sugar per person does not seem so very extravagant to me. I also used some homemade ricotta that needed using up in place of the cream cheese. I omitted the walnuts and raisins, but while it baked, I simmered some diced pear and frozen blueberries with splashes of maple syrup and lemon juice for a quick sauce.

The souffle came out nice and light, actually much more so than I expected given the heaviness of your standard oatmeal. I found the texture just a little odd, since it combined the airiness of a souffle with the bite of our extra-thick rolled oats. With the original 1/2 cup of sugar, it was definitely on the sweet side, but we found that the pear-blueberry puree I made added a fresh tang that balanced it out beautifully. Jeremy inhaled his first portion and went right back for seconds, and even better, my toddler cleaned his plate, which makes this recipe an out-and-out hit in my book. Probably not an everyday breakfast, but certainly an excellent change of pace!

Oatmeal Souffle

1 C whole milk
2 T butter
3/4 C oatmeal, uncooked
1/3 C cream cheese or drained ricotta
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 C brown sugar
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp cinnamon
3 eggs, separated
1/2 C raisins, optional
1/2 C walnuts, optional

Preheat oven to 325ºF.  Butter a 1 1/2 cup soufflé dish or casserole, and sugar the sides with granulated sugar.

Place the milk and butter in a saucepan and heat until barely boiling.  Add the oatmeal, reducing heat to low and stirring often until oatmeal is thick.  Remove from heat and add the cream cheese or ricotta, salt, brown sugar, nutmeg and cinnamon.  Whisk until mixture is smooth.  Beat 3 egg yolks slightly, temper them with a small amount of the oatmeal mixture, and slowly stir them into the oatmeal. Mix in the raisins and walnuts, if using.

Beat 3 egg whites until stiff, but still moist.  Gently fold the egg whites into the oatmeal mixture, being careful not to deflate whites.  Fold only until no large lumps of whites remain.  Spoon the mixture into the prepared soufflé dish; run your thumb-tip around the edge of the dish to create a small channel around the souffle base, which will encourage it to rise straight. Bake for 35-40 minutes or until the soufflé is set but the center still trembles.  Serve immediately, either with milk as you would ordinary oatmeal, or a pool of pear-blueberry sauce.

Source: Adapted from Liv Life.

Category: Baking, Breakfast, Fruits, Nuts, Grains & Legumes | 8 Comments »
Tags: blueberry, oatmeal, pear, sauce, souffle

Posted By Julie on January 7, 2011

One of the last remnants of my winter squash extravaganza at the last farmer’s market was a spaghetti squash. Yellow and oblong, it was rather unassuming in appearance, but its promised stringy flesh was honestly more scary for me than the types of squash that can at least be pureed effectively and hidden in baked goods. I doubted the comparison to real spaghetti, and pictured a slimy sort of stringiness akin to acorn squash or certain sweet potatoes. Eventually, though, I knew I was going to have to take on that spaghetti squash, and last night was as good as any.

Seems like every recipe I researched had a different method of cooking spaghetti squash: halved or whole (with knife pricks), steamed, boiled, roasted, microwaved, cut halves up or down. Most suggest that you will pretty much get the same outcome no matter how you cook it, but Clotilde of Chocolate and Zucchini suggested that roasting evaporates some of the moisture from the squash, deepening the flavor and preventing mushiness, so I went that route. However you do it, if you cut the squash in half, go about it with caution—mine was really hard to hack into, and I ended up using a cleaver.

I was definitely not prepared to just cook up the squash, dump on some marinara, and pretend it was spaghetti. No, I need to ease into food this scary with a comforting application, and although I considered croquettes, in the end a gratin was just what the doctor ordered—creamy, cheesy, and covered with crunchy crumbs. I went light on the squash and heavy on the sauce, and then served it with some salmon fillets with a mustard-maple glaze. To my amazement, Nolan ate more of the spaghetti squash than he did of the salmon, which he usually loves; we all liked it, and scraped the dish clean.

I’ve still got about half the spaghetti squash in the refrigerator, waiting to be put to use differently. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, or I might end up just making another gratin—that wouldn’t be so bad, would it?

Category: Dinner, Seafood, Veggies and Salads | 4 Comments »
Tags: bake, Gruyere, maple syrup, mustard, roast, salmon, squash

Posted By Julie on January 5, 2011

I’ve been craving cinnamon rolls lately, but as with any yeasted breakfast pastries, getting up early enough to have them hot in the morning is a problem. That’s where muffins generally come into play, and last night as I was trying to decide what to make, the thought of cinnamon roll muffins wouldn’t get out of my head. Turns out I wasn’t the first to have a similar thought, and one particular recipe seems to have been making the rounds this past year.

For me, the catch was that we are currently out of eggs. Looking into substitutes, I recalled that flax or chia gel can be used as an egg replacer, and couldn’t resist giving it a try. I bought chia seeds from Rancho Gordo back in October—they are teeny tiny, essentially flavorless, and unbelievably chock-full of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, besides being easily digestible and high in fiber. Plus, you can smear them on whimsical ceramic animals or Obama heads! Like flax seed, chia is hydrophilic, so when you soak a tablespoon of the seeds in a quarter cup of water, you end up with a thick gelled substance that mimics the viscosity and volume of an egg; apparently it makes good a good base for pudding too.

I baked up my cinnamon roll muffins in a new set of Starfrit silicone muffin liners. My old silicone muffin pan is getting old, and I thought I’d give this single-serve model a try. I did pop them into a 12-well metal muffin pan for stability, and they worked out great—no sticking in sight! Notice that the chia seeds are barely even detectable in the finished product.

I didn’t get to try one of the muffins while they were still hot, but this morning I reheated a few in the microwave for breakfast and they were pretty darn good. A little dense compared to the real deal, but the flavor was there, and the look was spot-on. I have no intention of giving up honest-to-goodness cinnamon rolls anytime soon, but it’s nice to have a quick-fix recipe like this in the repertoire for emergency situations.

Cinnamon Roll Muffins

1 C buttermilk (I use half milk, half yogurt)
1/2 C brown sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 egg (or 1 T chia seeds soaked in 1/4 C water)
3 to 3 1/2 C flour
2 T butter, softened
1/2 to 2/3 C brown sugar
cinnamon

Measure the brown sugar, baking soda, salt, vanilla and egg into a mixing bowl. Add the flour and buttermilk in alternating thirds. Stir until thoroughly combined. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead for a minute or two.

Roll the dough into a 12-inch by 24-inch rectangle. Spread with butter. Sprinkle with brown sugar and cinnamon. Roll the dough into a log beginning at the wide side. Stretch the log slightly. Cut into a dozen two-inch pieces and put the pieces into greased muffin tins or muffin tins lined with cupcake papers.

Bake at 375°F for 20 minutes or until golden brown. Allow the muffins to cool for 5 minutes and then remove them from the muffin tins. Dust with powdered sugar or drizzle with a simple powdered sugar glaze.

Source: Slightly adapted from Ruby Glen.

Category: Baking, Breakfast | 11 Comments »
Tags: bake, chia, cinnamon, muffin

Posted By Julie on January 4, 2011

I have all these meat-centric posts backing up—one of everything, really—and surprisingly little to say about them, so I think maybe the best thing to do is combine them all in one big carnivorous post, Leftover Night style.

This was our New Year’s meal for 2011: your basic braised brisket and gravy over shiitake polenta, with a side of sauteed cabbage. I wanted to have some greens on the plate since they traditionally represent fortune, and although green cabbage is not the greenest green per se, it is probably one of my favorite vegetables; just slice it thin and dump it in a big covered skillet or wok with a knob of butter and a little water, tossing it around occasionally, until it is all wilty and luscious. The brisket was good too, very tender, and I actually saved out half of the cut to try my hand at corned beef, currently corning away in my refrigerator for a post in a few weeks.

This was another one of those little pork sirloin tip roasts from Costco. I used a Melissa d’Arabian recipe called “herb-crusted pork loin,” but this was actually more of a spice-and-crumb-crusted meal, if you ask me. Okay, so I left the cilantro out of the crust—I still wouldn’t have considered it “herb-crusted.” But despite that minor blip, this was a very tasty recipe, very moist and savory, and the crumb crust on the pork was almost thick enough to give off a stuffing vibe.

The crust didn’t really want to stay on the pork once sliced, so I just piled it up around the meat, along with some skillet broccoli and muffin-cup gratins, another Melissa d’Arabian recipe and one of my husband’s very favorite applications of potatoes.

This meal was just a roasted chicken with my basic mustard gravy and skillet Brussels sprouts. Tasty as both of those were, the real item of interest on the plate is the mash, which is actually a blend of rutabaga and ginger-roasted pears. Rutabaga takes decidedly longer than potato to soften up, and after the better part of an hour, the texture of the finished mash was still not quite as silky as I was hoping for, but the flavor was good, particularly in concert with the savory gravy.

And that brings us back up to the present, and a Dutch oven full of lamb shanks braised with lentils and curry. My overflowing freezer is badly in need of some relief, so last night I pulled out a package of lamb shanks that I bought at the farmer’s market a few months back from a local purveyor. Having just braised that brisket a few nights before, I wanted a slightly different flavor profile, and the curry certainly adds that, though its presence is a more subtle undertone than I would have guessed; it also gave the braising liquid a gorgeous, rich color. After two and a half hours, the shanks were fall-off-the-bone tender; we actually gave the bones to our German shepherd, who was in bliss for a few minutes before they started splintering and had to be thrown away. I used only half a cup of Puy lentils, and they miraculously expanded into about four portions’ worth; the leftovers were fantastic simply spooned over rice. Finally, I paired it up with some skillet broccoli dressed with a brown butter-apple cider vinaigrette, made with my homemade fruit scrap vinegar.

Category: Dinner, Meat, Sides, Veggies and Salads | 1 Comment »
Tags: beef, braise, bread, brisket, cabbage, chicken, curry, holiday, lamb, lentil, mushroom, pear, polenta, pork, roast, rutabaga, shiitake, spices

Posted By Julie on January 3, 2011

What you see here is something I haven’t eaten since I was a child: macaroni soup. It just consists of cooked macaroni in a bath of hot milk, melting butter, salt and pepper, and it was a special treat for my mom and me on days when my dad wasn’t home to eat lunch with us (he was definitely not a fan!). It was the perfect sort of meal for a super-picky kid like me. I’m not sure where it came from, just one of several recipes passed down through my mom’s family that I have never been able to track down elsewhere.

I honestly hadn’t thought of macaroni soup for years, but I’m still nursing a head-cold and I wanted a meal that was relatively bland, soft, and easy to make—this fits the bill perfectly, and I was able to share a little piece of my childhood with my son, and now with you.

Category: Dairy, Lunch, Pastas, Persnickety Bits, Soups | 4 Comments »
Tags: butter, dried pasta, macaroni, milk

Posted By Julie on January 2, 2011

Tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches sounded good for lunch the other day. I got the soup started and was pondering our cheese options, and before I knew it, a relatively easy meal had gotten a French facelift.

I’m not quite sure what to call what I made, but I’m pretty sure it is some sort of hybrid between a croque monsieur and a Monte Cristo. The latter actually sort of gives me the heebie jeebies, which makes the whole thing even more of a head scratcher. But whatever strange forces compelled me to combine Gruyere, prosciutto, Dijon mustard, an egg dip seasoned with herbes de provence, and a Parmesan crust, I hope it happens again—these sandwiches were awesome. Every element worked harmoniously, and I was seriously bummed that I only made one for myself. There are a lot of strong flavors in there, however—as much as I enjoyed the sandwich, it really benefited from the mild tomato soup to give my tongue some downtime.

Monsieur Monte Sandwiches

This is one of those method recipes; adjust for the number of sandwiches you want to make.

Good artisan bread such as Pugliese, sliced
Dijon mustard
Gruyere cheese, thinly sliced (1-2 slices per sandwich)
Prosciutto di Parma (1-2 slices per sandwich)

2-3 eggs
3/4 C whole milk
Herbes de Provence to taste
Grated Parmigiano-Reggiano or Grana Padano

Slice the bread, spread lightly with Dijon mustard, and make sandwiches with Gruyere cheese and prosciutto inside. Heat up a non-stick griddle or large skillet over medium heat. Beat together eggs, milk, and herbes de Provence; dip each sandwich in the egg mixture on both sides, holding it together as you work. Sprinkle top half of sandwich with grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and press to adhere; place the sandwich cheese-side down on the griddle and press more cheese into the exposed top piece of bread. Grill on both sides until Gruyere is melted, Parmigiano-Reggiano is browned, and egg dip is set. Serve with soup!

Category: Lunch, Soups, World Cuisines | 2 Comments »
Tags: cheese, egg, French, Gruyere, herbs, Parmesan, prosciutto, sandwich, tomato

Posted By Julie on January 1, 2011

I know everyone is probably already thinking about their New Year’s resolutions and dieting, but try to sneak in this cake sometime when you need a treat. It is a casually lovely cake that doesn’t cut into neat slices, and can be whipped up any old evening, provided you have some shredded coconut and a can of coconut milk on hand (staples in our house, to be sure!). I omitted the orange zest and substituted chocolate chips for the chopped bars; I also made a rather thin drizzle and poked holes in the hot cake to let it penetrate more fully.

Chocolate Chip Coconut Cake

1 3/4 C all purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp fine sea salt
1 C unsweetened shredded coconut (or substitute sweetened flakes)
3/4 C sugar
1/2 C (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
2 tsp (packed) finely grated orange peel, optional
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp coconut extract
1 C coconut milk
6 ounces bittersweet chocolate bars, broken into 1/2-inch irregular pieces, or bittersweet or semisweet chocolate chips
1/2 C sweetened flaked coconut

3/4 C powdered sugar
2 T (or more) coconut milk
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp coconut extract

Preheat oven to 350°F. Generously butter 9″ springform pan; dust pan with flour, shaking out excess. Sift 1 3/4 cups flour, baking powder, and sea salt into medium bowl. Stir in unsweetened shredded coconut and set aside. Using electric mixer, beat sugar, butter, and orange peel if using, in large bowl until light and fluffy. Add eggs 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in vanilla and coconut extracts. Add flour mixture in 3 additions alternately with coconut milk in 2 additions, beating just until blended after each addition. Fold in half of bittersweet chocolate pieces or chips.

Spread batter evenly in prepared cake pan. Sprinkle remaining chocolate pieces over batter, then sprinkle with sweetened flaked coconut. Bake cake until golden and tester inserted into center comes out clean, tenting with sheet of foil if coconut atop cake is browning too quickly, 60 to 70 minutes. Transfer cake to rack and cool in pan 45 minutes.

Whisk powdered sugar, 2 tablespoons unsweetened coconut milk, and vanilla in small bowl to blend well, adding more coconut milk by 1/2 teaspoonfuls until mixture is thin enough to drizzle over cake. Carefully run small knife around sides of cake to loosen. Remove springform ring and transfer cake onto platter. Using small spoon, drizzle powdered sugar mixture decoratively over cake. Cool cake completely on platter. (You can adjust the thickness of the drizzle to different effects: If using a thin drizzle, poke holes in the cake and pour glaze over while hot; if using a thicker drizzle, wait until cake is cooled before applying, for decorative effect.)

Source: Slightly adapted from Epicurious.

Category: Baking, Dessert | 4 Comments »
Tags: bake, cake, chocolate, chocolate chip, coconut

Posted By Julie on December 31, 2010

This year’s cooking had quite a crescendo. I started out far too lazy about my writing, letting interesting meals languish in the Drafts folder for months, and finally re-committed myself to my blog in June with the resurgence of the farmer’s market. After months of learning about traditional foods, baking all my own sourdough bread, and making friends with some of the vegetables from the bottom of my list—sweet potato, I’m looking at you—the year comes to a close with some family struggles that have taken precedence over the blog.

January: This year started out super-slow on the food front. Nolan started cutting his 2-year molars around New Year’s, which meant a miserable child who needed his mama’s undivided attention.

February: There were a few gold star recipes on the books this month. Jeremy now requests potato-crusted salmon practically every time we get fillets, and my pork carnitas are a great use for boneless pork ribs when we get tired of Hawaiian-style. I also made tiramisu using tea in place of coffee and wine, and it was a big hit at a family get-together.

March: This month I got my hands on some green garbanzo beans, which I had never seen before. I also learned an unusual new way of cooking ground beef, and made a decadent chocolate-peanut butter cake for my son’s second birthday.

April: I wrote up an in-depth guide to dealing with whole chickens, which had taken the place of boneless skinless breasts in our shopping cart. Everything from roasting and preparing gravy to rich crockpot chicken stock, to soup with handmade tortellini.

May: This month was kicked off with two stellar Mexican dishes for Cinco de Mayo—chile colorado and sopapillas. I momentarily conquered my husband’s distaste for polenta. I also made my first successful cream puffs, no thanks to my oven, which spazzed out in a major way and tried to burn them to a crisp. A few days later, we got a new oven, complete with convection.

June: With a two-year old who could handle long walks and a little down-time, I re-committed myself to posting more frequently on the blog and hitting the farmer’s market every other week; the website got a snazzy redesigned look for the occasion, thanks to my computer god husband. As far as food this month, I confronted fennel, turnips, massaged kale salads, empanadas, and strawberry brown betty.

July: This month saw my introduction to the traditional foods movement. I cultivated a sourdough starter named Oscar and started baking all of our bread, learned to make yogurt in my crockpot, and reacquainted myself with cooking dried beans instead of canned ones. I also harvested grape leaves from our backyard to make dolmades, played with garlic scapes, baked focaccia in my cast iron skillet, and tackled zucchini, apricots, golden beets, and breakfast radishes.

August: The highlight of this incredibly busy month was the Nourished Kitchen preservation challenge, during which I learned to make traditionally lacto-fermented vegetables like sauerkraut and pickles and squirreled away all sorts of wonderful fruits and vegetables. I took a peach-picking expedition with my aunt and made buckets of peach butter, tried my hand at home-curing salmon into gravlax, made mayonnaise and ketchup from scratch, hand-pulled Chinese noodles, and grew basil from a cutting. I also took on eggplant, sweet potatoes, and most amazingly, okra.

September: In which I explored seed-saving, blackberry foraging, and community gardening.  Purple veggies such as bell peppers, hull peas, and even potatoes featured large this month, but traditional fall items such as dragon beans, pears, collard greens and golden cherry tomatoes also found their way onto our table, and some fall highlights included crispy fish tacos, chicken with dumplings, moussaka, a crostata of beet greens, and fancy sugar cookies in honor of my son’s first day of preschool. I joined the board of our neighborhood garden, entered (and later won!) a Kitchen Play contest, and even made the Foodbuzz Top 9.

October: My birthday is this month, and I had a mini-shopping spree to buy spices from SpicesInc and dried beans from Rancho Gordo. Locally grown hazelnuts and a gently used dehydrator from my aunt concluded the festivities, just in time for the end of the farmer’s market; I mourned by loading up on various winter squashes, wild mushrooms, and purple cauliflower. I also helped out with an elementary school field trip to the community garden pumpkin patch and came home with several sugar pie pumpkins and a dozen squash blossoms for my troubles. Recipe highlights this month included gyros with homemade pita, lamb chili with masa dumplings, and an unusual slaw of Asian pear, daikon, and massaged Brussels sprouts.

November: With the exception of a few items from the community garden—radishes and their greens, baby lettuce, Chinese cabbage, and the aforementioned sugar pie pumpkins—our supply of local produce dwindled miserably this month. I clung to storage vegetables like celeriac, came to terms with sweet potatoes at last, baked brioche and mushroom-potato pizza, and made peanut butter popcorn from heritage cobs. I even gave in to the whoopie pie craze. We actually had company for Thanksgiving, so I went all out with a huge turkey that we hardly made a dent in after a week of eating.

December: This month our priorities shifted. Our son is struggling with developmental delays and we have been distracted with visits to occupational therapy, scheduling neurological testing, and seeking financial assistance, so exploring new foods—and even more, writing about food—has been shifted to the back burner. This sort of situation sends me straight into comfort-food mode and I did next to no Christmas baking this year, but I did have a few tricks up my sleeve.

What a year of ups and downs! My triumphant return to the farmer’s market, discovery of the traditional foods movement, and involvement in our neighborhood’s community garden already seem so long ago, and I have a strong impression that Nolan’s third year of life is going to be a pivotal one for him and for us. May God nourish my family physically, mentally, and spiritually in the coming year, and remind me to lean on Him completely whenever I feel the pressure of family crisis, financial difficulties, or my own personal sensory struggles.

Category: Persnickety Bits | 2 Comments »
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Posted By Julie on December 30, 2010

Since we’re all stuck in the house courtesy of torrential rain for days on end, I’ve been sitting here trying to work out the gardening plan for spring, oohing and aahing over seeds and trying to imagine spots for beds where the dog will be least likely to go trampling through them. Meanwhile, I’m trying to keep my potted herbs—thyme, rosemary, and believe it or not, basil—alive in the midst of some seriously dim days. Fortunately, my latest indoor growing experiment is less fussy about direct sunlight.

On my visit to the last day of the Saturday farmer’s market, in addition to a passel of heavy winter squash, I couldn’t resist lugging home a shiitake mushroom kit from Rain Forest Mushrooms. I didn’t get around to opening it up until Thanksgiving, several weeks later, and to be perfectly honest, when I ripped open the bag, I thought that maybe I had wasted thirty bucks by waiting too long to get started. Nevertheless, I soaked the slightly scary-looking lump in water for a few hours, and made it a new home in a container lined with newspaper and a plastic lid. Then I left it alone in a corner, half forgotten, until the week before Christmas, when I suddenly noticed it was doing this:

Mushrooms popping out all over like popcorn, some almost doubling in size every day. I gave them until a few days after Christmas, and decided I had better harvest the biggest specimens before the living room starts looking like something out of Alice in Wonderland.

For something I can grow indoors in the dead of winter, shiitake mushrooms are incredibly healthy: They have antioxidant, cholesterol-lowering, and immune-boosting properties, the latter of which we can clearly use since I feel the start of yet another cold coming on.  From what I was told, I may be able to harvest from this kit up to six times for a total of 3 pounds or more of mushrooms. At the rate they are growing, I am not convinced we will be able to eat them all along the way, but fortunately, mushrooms are incredibly easy to dry and reconstitute for later use.

I harvested about a third of a pound of shiitakes for dinner the other night to make a hearty chicken fricassee that I served over bulgur. The carcass of the chicken, along with the mushroom stems and some assorted vegetable trimmings, took a nice warm bath in my crockpot overnight. But there are still tons more to eat up, and if I wasn’t already impressed with the mushroom kit, the pristine cleanliness and obvious freshness of the shiitakes certainly tipped the scales.

Mushrooms and I have never been friends, and if you are in the same boat, I would highly recommend giving a mushroom growing kit a try. Not only will it produce the epitome of fresh mushrooms, watching them spring up practically out of thin air may help pique your curiosity. And if you are already a mushroom fan, can you give me some ideas of what to do with all these shiitakes, before they start coming out our ears?

Category: Meat, Persnickety Bits, Veggies and Salads | 2 Comments »
Tags: chicken, cream, farmer's market, gardening, mushroom, shiitake

Posted By Julie on December 26, 2010

We hardly ever eat steak; it’s one of those foods that we reserve for special occasions. Consequently, when we do get steaks, I usually end up scratching my head when it comes time to cook it. We don’t own a grill, and our tabletop electric model is sketchy at best, since it only has one heat setting—plugged in. For the most part, I have been sticking with a trusty cast iron skillet in cases like this, and I’ve been very pleased with the results; just know that if you like your steak on the well side of medium, you will probably want to stick them in a hot oven for a few minutes after searing them, to avoid burning the outsides to a crisp.

This time around we had New York strip steaks rubbed with a mixture of espresso powder, chile powder and a few other choice ingredients. Don’t ask me how, in our coffee-averse family, I went this direction, but the earthy flavor of the espresso worked really nicely in combination with the warm chile powders and sweetness of the brown sugar, in almost a barbecue-adjacent way. I seasoned the steaks when they came out of the refrigerator and allowed them to come up to room temperature before cooking them. The recipe below makes enough rub to keep for a while; I cut it in half and still ended up with enough for two steak dinners.

Espresso Steak Rub

1/2 C ground ancho or chile powder
1/4 C ground espresso
4 T hot or sweet smoked Spanish paprika
3 T brown sugar
1 T dry yellow mustard powder
1 T salt
2 T freshly ground black pepper
1 T powdered ginger
2 T chipotle chile powder

Mix all up and store in an airtight container. Makes about 1 1/2 cups.

Source: The Buzz Times.

Category: Dinner, Meat | No Comments »
Tags: beef, coffee, espresso, spices, steak