Grilling everyday?

Looking to bounce back after the burnt-old-broccoli-salad (which would have been an excellent accompaniment to the chicken with crushed cashews), we turned to the next edition of 'Everyday Food', which had the encouraging subtitle 'The Grilling Issue'.

The only problem: it was the middle of December (the 15th, in fact).  And grilling doesn't really work when it's freezing outside.  What do you do when you are faced with such a problem?  Do you sensibly put the book back on the shelf, so that you can come back to it when the weather is nicer?  Of course you don't.  Instead you bite the bullet, and you make not one recipe from it, but four!  So this is a 'bonus edition' entry on the blog.  The recipes are: 'Chili-rubbed skirt steak',

 with a 'spicy green salsa',

accompanied by 'green beans and almonds', and a potato salad:

First up, the chili-rubbed steak.  We didn't get skirt steak, but hanging tender.  I'm not totally sure of the difference, mind you.  They both seem to come from the diaphragm.  But we had had hanging tender the first time we made the thai-beef dish, and found it meltingly tender, whereas the second time we had that dish, we had skirt and found it too tough.  So anyway, this recipe calls for rubbing the steak with chili powder.  Not chile powder (powdered chiles), but chili powder (powder for making chilis).  (It's taken me a while to master the difference, not helped by the fact that British English more often uses the spelling 'chili' for the pepper itself.)    Here's the rubbed steak, infusing nicely:

Menawhile, I diced and cooked the potatoes, and toasted the almonds for the beans:

After the potatoes had cooled a little, I added mayonnaise and sour cream to make a gloopy mixture, to which the recipe calls for scallions to be added:

This was basically like a loaded baked potato, but in salad form.  Now, the recipe actually asked for crispy bacon pieces to be added, but we decided not to add them.  Yes, you read that right.  WHAT WERE WE THINKING???????  Well, bacon, mayonnaise, sour cream, AND steak seemed a bit much.

At this point, everything was going well.

What a cook who is pleased with himself looks like.

So I threw the steak on the hot griddle pan:

Here's another shot:

The problem is that the griddle just wasn't as hot as a grill would be.  (Perhaps I didn't heat the pan up enough?)  I think you can even tell from the pictures, because there's no smoke.  When I took the steak off (after 5 minutes a side), and rested it on a cutting board, it didn't bleed in the way I expected it to:

That was a sure sign it was actually too rare.  So I threw it on the griddle again.  Then I cut it up.  Still it was too rare (it was bleu and not seignant).  So I tossed the slices on the griddle pan one last time.  The resulting pieces of meat were disappointingly tough, and small wonder after all that griddling-resting-griddling-resting.  But it all looked good on the plate:

Note the failed attempt to stack the beans neatly.  This was not an easy dish to present nicely. 

Actually, apart from the texture of the meat, the dish was a success.  The crispy almonds went well with the beans; the salsa added tanginess to the already spicy meat; the potato salad helped offset the zing of the steak.

While I had been making dinner, Katherine had been preparing a gourmet treat for our little one: stewed apples and blueberries.

Once blended, they were decanted into little pots for freezing:

I even found time to help Katherine:

Next up: Everyday Food, Fall edition.  Well, at least it's more seasonally appropriate than the Grilling Edition.  So far, recipes for Sloppy Joe's and Chicken Pot Pie are looking good...

Who made up these stupid rules anyway?

Yeh, so it all sounded so good at the start. You must (or else what?!), you simply must, choose ONE recipe from every single cook book. Fine then. Next up is this doozy. It's one that my mother gave me many many years ago. If you are reading this Mama, no hard feelings, I've never cooked one recipe from this book. Having said that I did keep it all this time just in case. And here, indeed, was "the case"! She gave me several of these which are in are small magazine format (think Reader's Digest size), each containing many recipes but some articles and also advertisements (so watch this space... there's more on the way from these little magazines). Anyway - this is the 'special LIGHT issue' as it clearly states on the front cover. Right away I knew this was going to be challenging when Benjamin stuck his nose right up at the word "light". The terms "cooking" and "light" simply do not go together in his world. Anyway - at first glance there were a few dishes that sounded pretty good to me. One was a skirt steak that had many similar sounding tastes as a recipe that we'd made back in August, so we decided against that one. I then came across this one which I thought sounded pretty good.

Pasta Salad with Roasted Broccoli

Looks can be deceiving

Not sure if you can see well enough in the picture above, but this kind of salad is right up my alley. So Benjamin agreed (not that it sounded good but that I should make it). With the caveat that I could have it for lunches. Yes - *I* as in *he probably wouldn't be having any*. But that's ok. Really the pickings were pretty slim for anything for him from this book and I was quite looking forward to having a cold pasta salad. So merrily we buy all the ingredients for the dish (oh - it states to buy roasted red pepper from a jar but I decided that I'd roast my own red peppers). And then one day passes. And then another, And then another. Well I am not sure how or why (because I am writing this nearly three weeks after making the dish) but all the ingredients sat in the fridge for too long gathering dust (or rather, mold, most likely). So that didn't start things off on the right foot really. The broccoli didn't really work. The roasting burnt many of the tops of the broccoli (and smelled the whole house up for days). Burnt (old!) broccoli really is quite disgusting. When you get a bit of charcoal affect on other roasted veg (like carrots, potatoes or pepper) it can be quite tasty. But I don't really think roasting broccoli works very well in general. And it especially isn't nice on broccoli that's too old to start with! Anyway - so by now Ben is helping me with this dish even though he probably won't be having any (he can't help but help, really, because that's just how lovely a person he is).

Brocoli and peppers going in the oven

Ben removing the skins of the peppers

Roasted peppers and brocoli

By the time we stick the roasted broccoli and peppers together before we add all the other ingredients (which I promise didn't include Pedia Care as so carefully pictured here!) the house is already starting to stink of burnt broccoli. I am still hopeful though I can pull it all together. I almost forgot to mention that the recipe calls for cloves of garlic to be roasted with the brocoli. You are then supposed to crush the garlic into some olive oil and lemon to make the dressing. Sounds good right? I guess because it was a 'light' recipe there just wasn't enough olive oil and the lemon was too overbearing. So I added much more olive oil. Surely lots of olive oil could save the day?! So we finish by adding the crushed pecans (the recipe called for walnuts but we had pecans so used them instead), the olives and the cooked penne pasta. The end result looked pretty good. The taste wasn't as bad as the smell either. Mostly because the other ingredients were compensating for the bad broccoli. So I had a little bite, but put the salad in the fridge to eat the next day. Sadly - it really was completely inedible. The whole thing had to go into the kitchen bin :-(.

Finished product!

Still... we've had some hits and misses so far. This one was a miss. And I really don't think that even having fresher brocoli would have saved the day. We won't be trying this recipe again and in fact the magazine is going to be relegated either to the trash or to downstairs. We are having to make more room for newer cooknbooks and books that we feel we aren't likely to use again are going in the basement. For example this one I could NEVER give away for sentimental reasons. And who knows. Maybe one day I would want to create a cold salad that looks like congealed sick. Never say never. Meanwhile have very much been getting into the Christmas spirit around here.....

Evelyn's first attempt at pulling down the tree...

Next entry... something from the same Every Day Food series: The grilling issue. Which actually we've already had and Ben has very patiently been waiting for me to finish this entry before starting on that one!