Date night last night. My normal mode of shopping is to plan for the entire week so the idea of shopping for one meal that you’re going to cook in a few hours is a novelty. But I had company. The girls were gone so we could have fun cooking grownup food and sharing the kitchen.
We wandered the grocery store as we planned dinner, then went through and got what we needed: good steaks, shallots, mushrooms, a packet of frozen potatoes he likes, and some brandy and sangria for cocktails.
Cheap sangria by itself is a bit, uh, cloying. I like good sangria so had my doubts about this drink he had in mind. But add a splash of good brandy to the cheap sangria and it’s quite good! Refreshing and a nice change from my usual pre-dinner Chardonnay.
The steaks were seasoned with some seasoned salt and pepper, then cooked stovetop. I almost always grill stuff but these came out so tender and good I might rethink things. Of course, we started out with better meat than my normal.
The packet of frozen potatoes were easy and good. I could have easily made my own oven roasted potatoes but for a quick meal these are very good and easy. We added some asparagus tips to the pan and it made a wonderful combination.
The bearrnaise sauce. I haven’t made it in ages. It is so rich–but so good! He added some sliced mushrooms to the vinegar and shallots cooking, which made a good addition. Unfortunately, the sauce curdled at the end. We looked up two methods of “fixing” it but neither one worked. It still tasted good, but looked like…well, never mind what it looked like. So can someone tell me why it curdled? Did we cook it too long? Was it that the butter was cold when we added it? Those are the two things we came up with as possibilities. The steaks took just a few minutes longer than we’d thought so the sauce was on the heat a few minutes longer than we’d planned.
Anyway, a delicious dinner none-the-less and so much fun to cook with someone else!
I think you’re right about cooking good steaks stovetop. Using a hot cast iron skillet gives steaks that crust that you don’t get on the grille without burning them. The downside is that you don’t get the charcoal flavor, which is no big deal if the meat is tasty on its own or, better yet, has some bearnaise on the side.
That bearnaise is also really tasty with those asparagus tips.