Steak and Sides

Even though we just had a full day of cooking yesterday, we decided to go at it again today. This time: steak, with a side of sweet potatoes, bell peppers and onions, and zoodles. We look far and wide for a cow to slaughter, but alas, none could be found. Thankfully, we had already anticipated this when we bought and age-dried a nice cut of bone-in steak the day before from a butcher stand at the Town Center market. This was an expensive steak. As such, we treated it as royalty by giving it a nice reverse sear. Step 1, bake at 275F for half an hour.

However, meat itself does not constitute a healthy and well-balanced meal. The British Nutritional Foundation recommends that we eat carbs. Rice is hard to come by, and potatoes taste like cardboard, so the obvious choice is the humble sweet potato. We dressed it with foil and stuffed it in the oven along with the steak.

A classic side to steak is caramelized onions with peppers and garlic. We julliened the peppers and onions and set them aside until the steak was finished cooking so we could use the rendered fat for additional flavor.

The latest trend in fitness replaces spaghetti with a vegetable alternative, such as the zucchini. In reality, spiralizing zucchini only makes it more visually appealing, but doesn’t actually make it taste much better.

After taking the steak out of the oven, we flavored it with rosemary and seasoned it with salt and pepper. We then put it on a screaming hot skillet and seared each side for a minute to make it look more appetizing and make use of the maillard reaction.

We cut off some of the strips of fat off the beef and rendered them down in a hot skillet until it released all of its oily-goodness. We then tossed in the onions, peppers, and garlic and let them sautee until the onions became translucent. The zucchini was blanched in a pan of hot water for about a minute, just so its consistency approximates that of al dente pasta.

Finally, we dressed the zucchini with some pasta sauced and plated the meal. There actually wasn’t really much of edible meat on the steak (a lot of it was connective tissues and fat). However, it still tasted really good with hints of funk from the dry age. The sweet potato was…sweet. The sauteed peppers and onions provided a nice salty flavor pairing to the umami rich steak.

Though the meal was quite good, we decided two big cooking projects in one weekend was too much for our bellies and our time, so we’ll be doing this more like once a week. Or two, if we’re fat.