Quick dinner

Last Friday D came home with a bag full of groceries because he wanted to cook dinner (hence all the ingredients for our egg feast on Sunday). We usually are too tired to go out on Friday so we either order food or we cook something. This time he came home very hungry, therefore, before I even started unpacking all the groceries, I knew we had enough for at least eight people. Since most of our go-to quick meals consist of some sort of steak (for him) and a mixture of vegetables (for me), I knew what this dinner was going to be about. What I didn’t get was the fact that D knew that we were in the middle of our rose wine competition and he should’ve bought some sort of white meat (turkey mostly), but no, he bought two rib-eye steaks…

This recipe is not actually a recipe, but more like a quick hunger-fix that everybody does from time to time. Mainly I’m talking about steak and vegetables. I wanted to share it with you because D uses some tricks to make a steak appealing even to myself. One of his secret weapons is the cast iron pan he always uses for meat. I’ve talked about his precious pan in an earlier post. Another thing that he does for beef steak is the fact that he fries it with a bit of butter which makes it extremely tender and tasty. He rarely ever seasons the meat as in his opinion, you should do that after it is cooked.

Here’s what he bought:

• 8 spears of asparagus (he bought more – frittata – but that’s all he used for the side)
• 6 mushrooms
• 2 red onions
• 1 bell pepper (he bought three different coloured ones, chopped them all up and we got both a colourful frittata and a colourful side for the beef steak)
• 2 rib-eye beef steaks

What he did:

1. He chopped all the vegetables, put a bit of butter into a teflon pan and poured the onion first.
2. When the onion was a bit fried he added the asparagus and the bell pepper.
3. The mushrooms joined the party last as they do tend to leave a lot of water and he didn’t really want to make a vegetable stew.
4. On to the meat. He heated a bit of butter into his (by now) infamous cast iron pan and then he put in both steaks.
5. The secret with beef steak is to also put a bit of butter on top of it and when that butter is half melted you should start the dance of turning them from side to side every minute, that way you’ll get the perfect medium-rare colour that you usually only get at the restaurant (where a thermometer is used).
6. That’s about it! Arrange everything nicely on the plate a snap some pics in order to have proof of the whole cooking experience. These plate photos aren’t the nicest simply because D was starving and he couldn’t wait to eat.

Yes, as you can see from the pics, since we were in an ongoing rose wine contest, we had beef steak with rose instead of red, but as you know we don’t really value those kind of rigidities.

This was a light (for me) and healthy dinner. The nutritional info is for two servings considering that there are two meat-lovers eating. I only had some vegetables that evening, and D was left with a nice lunch the next day.

L.