"Cordon Bleu" Thai Beef

The next book is Le Cordon Bleu Complete Cooking Techniques.

This book is more of a book about how to cook rather than a recipe book, although it does have recipes in it.  We opted for Thai Beef.  (Other possibilities included a delicious gnocchi recipe, and a braised stuffed lamb dish that looks to be a good dinner party dish).  This recipe calls for ingredients that we don't normally use: lemon grass (more on that later), mango, cucumber, coconut milk.  It is a salade tiède: a lukewarm salad.

I'm drinking a beer while preparing it, but it is going to be a hit with the Tavel Rosé I have in the fridge...  Katherine is upstairs initiating a new regime with Evelyn (giving her breastmilk from the bottle before putting her to bed).

I hit a couple of problems making the dish.  For instance, it calls for rump steak.  That cut does not really exist in the States.  Instead, I substituted (uh-oh - that dreaded culinary word) 'hanging tender'.  It's important to note that my substitution is not a like-for-like substitution (the closest to rump steak is apparently Top Round, but there's no way I'm finding a Top Round steak in McCaffrey's).  Rather, the substitution occurred to me because Hanging Tender (aka hanger steak) is a cut usually associated with Mexican cooking, which uses many similar ingredients to Thai cooking (chillies, coriander, lime, etc.).  Here is the meat seasoned and ready for the griddle:

The recipe calls for a dressing made with ginger, soy, garlic, oil, chillies, and sugar.  It came out of the blender tasting insanely good.  Fresh yet biting and subtle at the same time.  The next step was to start the rice: jasmine rice cooked in coconut milk (and water) with a hint of lemon grass.  (A stalk, the recipe says, to be taken out before eating.)  Hmmm.  Lemon grass.  No chance of finding that at McCaffrey's either.  I bought a tube of 'freshly chopped' lemon grass, which is all very well, but (a) it's hard to know what the equivalences are (how many teaspoons is one stalk?) and (b) even when I do add some to the rice, there's no chance of getting it out at the end.  I considered boiling the liquids together with the minced lemon grass and then straining, but in the end I thought just one teaspoon added to the liquids would be fine.

Finally, the most difficult thing of all.  Cutting up a mango and cucumber, for lining the plate on which the beef would go.  How do you cut up a mango attractively?  Answer: look it up on YouTube.  Here are the mango and cucumber ready on the plate:




The meat looked pretty good when it was griddled and seasoned and rested:

And even better when tossed with the dressing, and various chopped herbs, and some more minced lemon grass (1 tbs for 3 stalks), presented in the middle of the cucumber and mango:

To serve: coconut rice and extra dressing on the side.  It was delicious.  A winner.  Katherine wants us to serve it at a 'luncheon'.  Here is the whole dish on the table:

You can't really see the dressing in the bowl by the wine.  I think it was probably the best bit, and we are contemplating reproducing it just as a normal salad dressing (in an avocado salad, for instance).