Flank steak: Going against the grain, beautifully

Slow marinating [in a mix of coriander, cumin, cinnamon, fresh ginger and garlic] and quick grilling make flavorful flank steak moist, tender and even bigger flavored. Recipe below.

Beef. It’s what’s for dinner.” When actor Robert Mitchum so beautifully uttered those words in a TV commercial voiceover, backed by Aaron Copland’s always stirring “Rodeo,” this is the kind of meal he was talking about.

As much as I talk about the blank canvas a chicken breast presents cooks or the underlying sweetness of a pork chop, there is something so satisfyingly rich and meaty about a good piece of beef well prepared.

And beef doesn’t get much more flavorful or meaty than flank steak. Also called London Broil or Jiffy Steak, this lean, flat cut is particularly known for its robust beefy flavor. With the right cooking and serving, it can be tender and moist too. Flank steak lends itself beautifully to marinating and then quickly grilling, broiling or pan searing. Don’t overcook it, though—that’s a sure way to make it chewy and tough.

I think it’s this reputation for potential toughness that unfairly puts a number of cooks off this delicious cut of meat, me included. Not anymore. Turns out there’s no voodoo to cooking juicy, tender flank steak—just two simple steps. I’ve already given you the first above: Don’t overcook it. Medium rare is perfect.

The second step is just as simple: Carve it across the grain after you cook it. According to Ask The Meat Man, it’s the only steak containing an entire large muscle. And unlike most other steaks, which butchers slice across the muscle fibers, flank steak fibers run the full length of the steak. You can see the fibers running across the tops of the slices in the photo above. So when you’re ready to serve the cooked steak, slice it into thin strips, cutting across the grain. Most sources suggest angling the knife blade at 45 degrees.

I can’t even remember now what suddenly put flank steak on my radar, but the more I read, the more I found recipes recommending marinating it, usually in some kind of spice rub. Not only does marinating it add to the already robust taste, it helps tenderize it. Some recipes call for a mere hour of marinating, but most said longer. This shouldn’t be a deal breaker; it just means you can’t do flank steak spur of the moment.

As usual, my spice rub marinade was the result of combining a couple of different recipes and then tinkering with them. In a somewhat unusual move for me, I resisted adding cayenne pepper or any other heat sources I frequently turn to. The spice rub mix smelled promising; my only concern was the meat itself. I needn’t have worried. The result was a delicious, complex complement to the rich beef flavor without any fire—and steak that was wonderfully tender. Continue reading “Flank steak: Going against the grain, beautifully”

Berry delicious: French toast with fruit and mint

Lightly sweetened seasonal fresh fruit with mint and a squeeze of lemon juice replaces sticky syrup and powdered sugar in this delicious take on a weekend breakfast favorite, French toast. Recipes below.

How has this happened? This is my 100th post at Blue Kitchen, closing in on two years of blogging about food, and I’m only now getting around to breakfast. This is just wrong; breakfast is very important at our house. Not so much as a big weekend ritual. [And we are so not brunch people—to us, brunch means too much food for too much money after waiting in line for too long.] For us, breakfast is a practical daily meal, breaking the fast [the period between bedtime and breakfast is the longest most of us go without eating], fueling up for a good start to the day.

Breakfast is usually foraged individually as we get going in the morning, especially during the work week, and often includes some combination of a fiberrific cereal, maybe an egg, maybe some toast [also fiberrific], a handful of nuts or a little peanut butter and maybe some fruit. Oh. And caffeine. Tea or coffee for Marion, iced tea or diet Pepsi for me.

But some weekends, we do opt for what we call a weekend style breakfast. Omelets or pancakes or, far too infrequently, French toast.

French toast’s origins are clouded in mystery. Hardly anyone thinks that it originated in France, although one source claimed authoritatively that it did, in the 16th century. Another popular story is that it was created in the 1700s by a tavern owner in Albany, New York—one Joseph French. And at least one source claims that the first recipe dates back to ancient Rome! No one really agrees on the name, either. We Americans call it French toast. In France, it’s pain perdu—lost bread. French bread dries out in just a day or two and this is a wonderful way to give it another life. In some quarters of the UK, it is apparently called “poor knights of Windsor!”

What all do agree upon is what French toast is: Bread dipped in a mixture of egg and milk, then fried until golden brown. Most also agree that it is delicious.

I’ll be honest with you, though. As much as I like French toast, what got me started on this post was the fruit. Berries and stone fruits only have a little more time left in the markets this season. Most of the time, they don’t make it past their original state in our house before being devoured. Last Sunday, Marion and I polished off a pint of blueberries driving home from the produce market [thank heaven for automatic transmissions]. But the berry mixture Susan over at Food Blogga created for her Skinny Berry Parfaits got me thinking. Then I saw a recipe for minted blackberries in the August issue of Gourmet. Never mind that that it was meant to top cheesecake. I was off to the races. Continue reading “Berry delicious: French toast with fruit and mint”

Taste of New Mexico: Carne Adovada

Marinated overnight and then slow cooked until falling apart tender, Carne Adovada melds the flavors of New Mexico Red Chiles, cumin, oregano and garlic in this traditional New Mexican pork dish. Recipe below.

New Mexico loves its chile peppers. There is simply no way you can overstate this fact. According to a fascinating article by Bonny Wolf at NPR’s Kitchen Window, New Mexico is the largest producer of chiles in the United States. And as Ms. Wolf sees it, there’s more to the state’s fascination than mere agricultural pride:

…In New Mexico, chiles are more than a crop. They’re a culture, a way of life. It is unimaginable to New Mexicans that people eat food untouched by their state’s chile.

There’s even an official state question: Red or green?

And if you can’t decide if you want red chile or green chile, you may answer, “Christmas,” and you’ll get some of both.

Interestingly, red or green, it’s the same New Mexico chile [also known as the California or Anaheim chile], just at different stages of development, either picked green or allowed to ripen into red on the vine. It’s what happens to the chiles afterward that makes the difference in the sauces’ flavors. Again, Ms. Wolf: “Green chiles are roasted, peeled, seeded and either used right away or frozen. Dried red chiles are ground into powder or strung into the lovely, deep-red ristras — strings in Spanish — you see hanging in many New Mexican homes. Northerners usually hang ristras for decoration while New Mexican cooks use the pods throughout the year to season food. Because the climate is so dry, there’s no fear of mold.”

On our recent trip to New Mexico, we rarely went a meal without being asked the official state question. And there wasn’t a wrong answer—both were delicious. We got our first sampling of both at Duran’s Central Pharmacy in Albuquerque; you actually walk through the pharmacy to get to an unassuming restaurant that serves up great New Mexican fare at very reasonable prices. We encountered excellent examples of red and green chiles in a number of restaurants: Little Anita’s, also in Albuquerque, and Maria’s, a friendly, rambling, down-to-earth place in Santa Fe recommended to me by Toni over at Daily Bread Journal, to name a couple.

We had plenty of delicious non-New Mexican food too. Crêpes at La Crêpe Michel in Albuquerque’s Old Town, transcendent burgers in the beautiful patio at Apple Tree in Taos, inventive tapas at La Boca in Santa Fe… And on our last night in New Mexico, craving something like we’d find at home in Chicago, we headed over to the neighborhood around the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and ended up in a Korean BBQ joint. Just what we were looking for.

But my favorite New Mexican dish, hands down, was Carne Adovada. A traditional New Mexican dish, it is meat—most often pork—slow cooked in adobo sauce. We had it at the rightfully popular Tomasita’s in Santa Fe. Housed in a 1904 red brick station house adjacent to the Santa Fe train station, Tomasita’s has been a fixture since long before the railyards became the Railyard District, an up and coming neighborhood of hip shops and restaurants [and a welcome relief from the tourist hothouse that the heart of Santa Fe can be].

From the first bite, I knew I would have to try to make carne adovada. It was falling apart tender and coated in an almost velvety red chile sauce, not buried under it as many New Mexican dishes seemed to be. And it had a wonderful blend of flavors with just the right amount of heat. This hearty dish can be served with flour tortillas, in taco shells or with rice and beans, as I did here.

There are about as many takes on carne adovada as there are cooks. They range from fairly complex [like one from Kate in the Kitchen that has you make your own adobo sauce from dried chiles] to overly simple. One version from a Santa Fe cooking school, of all places, dispensed with the marinating and only cooked it for an hour! Even I could tell that was a recipe for an underflavored, chewy disaster.

In the end, I settled on a recipe somewhere in the middle complexitywise and doctored the heck out of the spice levels. Then when it came out of the oven and the sauce was a watery, bland mess that wasn’t sticking to the blondish chunks of tender meat, I did more doctoring, with the ever supportive Marion at my side. Here’s how that played out, by the way. First I looked at the way too liquid sauce. Not good. Then I tasted it. Even less good. Then I called for back-up. Marion suggested we transfer the meat to a bowl and work on the sauce, adding more spices and boiling it to reduce it. A good start tastewise, but still far from the velvety coating sauce we remembered from Tomasita’s. I’m sure I had a deer-in-the-headlights look at this point, until Marion uttered three magic words: “Make a roux.” I did. It worked. In the recipe below, I’m going to write it as if it’s how I’d planned to cook it all along. And how I will cook it the next time I make it. Continue reading “Taste of New Mexico: Carne Adovada”

Potato salad: A classically done American classic

Nothing says summer like a classic American potato salad with mayonnaise, yellow mustard and the crunchy bite of red bell peppers. Recipe below.

I was going to attempt on of our favorite dishes from our trip to New Mexico this week. But a relentless onslaught of vegetarian houseguests and hot, muggy weather dissuaded me from making a meaterrific dish that would need at least a couple of hours in the oven. So instead, I turned the kitchen over to Marion, who made this perfect taste of summer.

At our house, a lot of the food we love is something we’ve come to in adulthood, and even recently. Part of this is because of the great revolution of American eating habits, which has so thoroughly swept up our household. Now so many foodstuffs and cuisines are so accessible to so many of us. We eat not just to live, but to keep ourselves healthy, to entertain our palates and to experience the infinite variations of this most evanescent of art forms.

Thanks to the food revolution, we are all not just aware of a world of flavors and styles, but we seek them out and demand them in their best and most authentic versions. A food that, 20 years ago, might have been impossible to find or too bizarre to even consider putting in the vicinity of your face, much less in your actual mouth, today is just one more delicious dish joining the rainbow of deliciousness available to us all. At least half of my own lexicon of vital, beloved flavors is composed of things I never met as a child. Vietnamese fish sauce; miso; Époisses; lemongrass; seaweed; crème brulee; dried daylily buds: As another minor example, although I grew up in Detroit on an almost exclusively Eastern Europe diet [with daring family forays into things founded on Jell-o or onion soup mix], today there are periods when I eat as much Szechwanese food as, well, people in Szechwan.

But potato salad is a message from childhood. There is such an amazing spectrum of potato salads—warm, cold, mayo-based, vinaigrette-based, with bacon, with anchovies, crudites, pesto, curry, toasted cumin, with roasted tomatoes, with smoked turkey, with no potatoes whatsoever [“mock potato salad,” based on kohlrabi, on the wonderful site chow.com]. You can explore this universe of potato salads, but, let’s face it, in the end, for almost everyone I know, the potato salad you love best and always return to is the potato salad you learned as a child.

This to me is the index classic American potato salad, the one I am most faithful to—mayonnaise-based, and the reason why we always have a plastic squeeze bottle of French’s yellow mustard in our refrigerator. It is almost identical to my mother’s recipe—one of the very few American dishes she ever seriously tried. Her original also included fresh chopped dill, which I also add when I remember to pick it up at the market, and was always finished with an ornamental hard-boiled-egg slice, a sunburst of thin pepper slices, and a delicate sprinkling of paprika on top. Continue reading “Potato salad: A classically done American classic”