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...