Your Good Old Midwestern Steak Dinner

Matt and I flew back to (heavenly) South Dakota a couple weekends ago to do some wedding planning (!), and while there, enjoyed some fantastic steaks out on the town.  I don't typically order steak when dining out in Chicago -- a Nebraskan at heart, I can't handle paying $40 for a cut of beef -- so it had been a while, and these were well worth the wait.  The restaurant sources from local cattle ranches, and they were served just right: a piece of fresh, perfectly cooked meat on a plate.  No fancy sauces or glazes muddying the dish.
Sorry, vegetarians, but there is just nothing quite so satisfying as slicing into a rare filet, the flesh buttery soft and rich.

In any case, I was inspired from that experience to purchase some organic ribeyes to cook at home.  We did them really simply, just frying in a little butter for a few minutes on each side, then letting them rest in the pan, covered with foil to seal the heat in.

They came out exactly to my taste ... which is to say, practically bleeding:

And what's a steak without potatoes?  We oven roasted these guys with a little olive oil, salt, and garlic, and finished everything off with mounds of steamed broccoli with shredded sharp cheddar.

Okay, so in the interests of perfect honesty, I have to say that by the time we'd gotten everything to the table and photographed it, the steak was a little tough and the broccoli a little cold, but these are the hazards of food-blogging, I guess.  And it was all still pretty dang delicious.

Besides, this is just one more example of how nothing compares to South Dakota.

Dipping Foods

Approximately one month ago today (I know, I know), Matt and Mom and Mara and I made French dip sandwiches on toasted baguettes with oven-melted provolone:

The meat was left over from a beef brisket we'd had the night before, and was salty and garlicky, tearing off in juicy shreds; in true French dip fashion, we sopped up the jus, letting it soak into the bread until the crisp from the oven became this dense, melt in your mouth experience.

We paired it with not one, not two, but three styles of zucchini: battered and fried blossoms, battered and fried slices, and a small handful of oven grilled for those watching their waistlines.

The zucchini blossoms had come in Mom's CSA bag, inspiring the fry-fest; the tender petals and stems are a perfect match to the crispy batter shell.  I threw together the batter: an egg, milk, salt, and enough flour to get the desired sticky consistency.

We dipped the blossoms and slices in the batter, then dipped them again into a pan of hot canola oil for a few minutes, turning occasionally until they became a dark golden.

We pulled them out and patted dry with a paper towel, then served them with a simple bruschetta Mara had created: two tomatoes, a clove of garlic, a few sprigs of garden-fresh basil, a dash of olive oil and salt and pepper to taste.  

She was very proud.

She had every right to be; it was delicious. 

This Pizza is a Whole Food

BELIEVE IT. 

We spread Bertolli pasta sauce (tomatoes, assorted seasonings, olive oil) on a Rustic Naturals crust (flour, yeast, assorted seasonings) and topped with fresh grated mozzarella, some browned C&D farms ground beef, chopped mushrooms and black olives from Whole Foods.

HECK.  YES.

Snappy Garlic Carrot Meaty Loaf-Surprise!

Last weekend, both my ranunculus sisters and delightful seven-year-old niece came to Chicago for a visit, which meant A) the floor of my apartment couldn't be walked across for bodies B) more Apples to Apples than you can possibly imagine and C) near-constant eating.  Jen and Mara haven't yet been featured on the blog, so I am delighted to present them to you in this post.

Perhaps unsurprisingly in this family, they're a little strange.  But lovely.

On Thursday night, Jen and I decided on a whim to make meatloaf and mashed potatoes -- simple enough, and she has a favorite recipe which, when she initially described it, sounded like I had all the requisite ingredients: ground beef, milk, carrots, ketchup, oats.

The trouble began with worcestershire sauce, which I can't eat and don't keep in the house.  No problem, we decided.  We'll just season with garlic powder and salt, and it'll be a little bland but still tasty.

Jen was disconcerted when she discovered I only keep whole milk in the house.  But we shrugged and poured it in.  Then we asked Mara to grab out the oats, and when she handed us the container she found, we realized it had maybe seven individual oats left in it.  So we ripped up some whole wheat bread into crumbs, folding it in.

Meanwhile, we also searched my pantry for potatoes, finding only a handful of fingerlings: not really appropriate to mash.  Meh.  We diced, seasoned, and roasted them instead.

Jen usually bakes her meatloaf in a glass dish, but I don't have one, so we poured the mix into a metal bread loaf pan.  Forty five minutes later, and out came the LEAST. APPETIZING. THING. I HAVE EVER SEEN.

See that yellowish stuff mixing with the ketchup?  It's not mustard.  It's a pool of fat which collected on top of the browning meat; as the ground beef was extra lean grass raised, we could only imagine that the whole milk had done it.

We sopped up a little of the creamy fat pool with a paper towel, then tried to plate it.  Plating didn't help.

It smelled like hamburger day in a school cafeteria, and looked, well, like an oily meat slab.  The whole thing was so off-putting, in fact, it reminded us of the Weight Watchers recipe cards.  So we styled the dish and photographed with a bright flash in an effort to capture the effect:

Snappy Garlic Carrot Meaty Loaf-Surprise!

The best part, of course, was that when we actually ate it, it was kind of satisfying, in the way those old school hamburgers were...

... nobody ever accused the Summers family of leaving food on our plates.

NATIONAL CHAMPIONS

Matt and I toyed with the idea of going to Indianapolis to watch my alma mater Duke play Butler for the NCAA Championship (which, for those who live under a rock, we ended up winning by one point after a thrilling game).  When the logistics started getting too tricky, we made the decision that if we were willing to spend that much money and that much time going to the game, we should be willing to spend at least half that much money and that much time making our private viewing SUPER AWESOME.

We started with Swedish "cheese bread" toasted in a skillet.

Then it was enormous, juicy, 1/3 pound burgers from C&D farms, topped with artisanal cheddar, mushrooms sauteed in butter, organic lettuce, tomato, ketchup, and mayo.  We stacked it all on fresh-baked ciabatta buns from my local bakery, which were soft enough to rip when bitten into, but firm enough to hold ALL. THAT. FOOD.

I didn't have the wherewithal to fry fries, so we tested a recipe for kale chips we've been meaning to try: we brushed a couple cups of kale leaves with olive, sprinkled with salt, and toasted it in the oven for twenty minutes or so.

I'd doubted the recipe, which claimed that kale crisps under heat, but the "chips" did in fact come out crisp rather than wilted!  They were tasty (if you're into kale) but sort of odd, the crispness crumbling to a kale-y ash in the mouth.  I'd make them again, but really, if you're in the mood for french fries or potato chips, this just isn't going to be the replacement you're looking for.

Matt wanted to replicate my undergraduate basketball experience, so he was bent on making us "Big Beers" a la Satty's (shout-out to all the Duke grads reading this blog).  32 ounces of beer in a plastic cup.  Unfortunately, he failed to find a plastic cup capable of holding 32 ounces of beer.  We ended up with these, instead:

Finally, at half-time, when the game was nail-bitingly close, nothing would do to comfort us but a big pan of brownies, lovingly crafted from Ghiradelli unsweetened baking chocolate, fresh eggs, organic sugar, walnuts, flour, artisanal vanilla extract, and a stick of butter borrowed from our lovely upstairs neighbors, Joe and Lauren.

This feast may not have been better than actually seeing Duke win the championship in person, but it went a long way toward making up for it.

GO BLUE DEVILS!