Steak and Potato Dinner (and breakfast!)

Matt has been craving a good steak dinner for a while.  We went to Gordon Biersch in Seattle before seeing Wicked at the beginning of October—a really tasty dinner for an extremely spectacular show.  Very satisfying night all around.  But the steak we ordered was not the steak we received (we didn’t realize until halfway into eating, because we were so hungry), and it didn’t really quench Matt’s craving…he kept bringing it up.

To resolve this, we visited a butcher in the Crown Hill neighborhood.  With lots of seafood options and only a few types of steak to choose from, we went with a rib eye.  A huge rib eye.  We only got one, but look how big and beautiful it is.

It was a little over a pound of meat, and there was no doubt in my mind that it would be more than enough for the two of us.  To cook the steak, I started with a brown sugar spicy rub.  I can’t remember everything that went into this, but it included (along with brown sugar) cumin, coriander, garlic powder, onion powder, paprika, red pepper, ground thyme…and probably some other things.  I tend to pull things out of the spice cupboard without remembering after the fact what it was so that I can replicate it.

I let the rub sit on the steak while I prepped the vegetables and other parts of dinner, which included three veggies.

First up, glazed carrots.  I have made these before and really messed them up, but this time around they were absolutely perfect.  Matt’s response was “please write down how you made these so you can do it again!”  With just a little bit of spice and a slightly sweet glaze, the carrots worked perfectly with the meal.

Perfection in Carrot Form

• 3 large carrots, washed, peeled and cut into thick-ish slices on a bias
• 1/4 cup water (plus more as necessary)
• Pinch of salt
• 1 Tb honey
• 1/2 Tb brown sugar
• dash of red pepper

1. Add carrots and water to a sauté pan with a lid.  Bring this to a boil over medium heat, covered.
2. Allow it to boil for a couple minutes and then remove lid and lower heat to a low low simmer.
3. Mix in salt, honey, brown sugar and red pepper, stirring to combine and dissolve.
4. Simmer, adding more water is necessary.  Keep an eye on it and add a thin layer of water anytime the pan dries up. 
5. Once the carrots are starting to get soft (still less tender than you want the final product to be, but getting past the crazy crunch stage), up the heat to medium/medium-high to bring it back to a boil and boil off any remaining liquid.
6. The goal is to get the liquid completely boiled away, leaving the sweet glaze on the carrots, right when the carrots hit the point when they are cooked through and tender with a slightly crunchy bite. This is obviously not your goal if you like your carrots on the mushier side…or the crunchier side.  It’s all in the amount of water you use and how long you simmer after adding the glaze.

The other two veggies are potato and parsnip.  Parsnips have a very sweet, carrot scent to them.  I’m not a huge fan of parsnips on their own…the flavor and texture are a little too much for me, but cut with some potato, they make a stand out side dish that still satisfies the comfort food cravings.  Just a tiny bit of parsnip will go a long way.  We had probably half as many parsnips as potatoes in this dish, just based on the amount we had in our CSA box, but the parsnip flavor was really prominent.

Potato Parsnip Mash

• Peeled, chopped potatoes
• Peeled, chopped parsnips    

• Half & Half
• Butter
• Salt & Pepper

1. Boil the potatoes and parsnips together until fork tender.
2. Drain and mash! You can puree these with a stick blender—we’ve done this before—but I think the parsnips create a gummy texture that is not so pleasant when pureed.  The parsnips also don’t mash as nicely as potatoes…they’re a bit more stringy, so the textures don’t meld completely.  Matt was really diligent about hand mashing as much as possible, and then went through with the stick blender to add a little bit of smoothness and avoid any huge parsnip chunks. 
3. Mix in half & half, butter, seasoning to desired taste and texture.

To cook the steak, I pan-seared over medium high heat with cooking spray, turning after 8 minutes a side, then continuing turn until my handy dandy instant read thermometer told me we hit medium.  Then sat on a plate, covered with foil to rest while everything else finished up.  I used the pan juices, the juice from resting and some beef broth to whip up a pan sauce.  YUM!

We split the steak into two good, clean pieces and one not-so-pretty chunk. The leftover steak turned into an off-the-cuff hash with toast and eggs the next morning.  Yum.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 7:05 pm and is filed under Leftovers, Matthew, Yum. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.