This Ain't Your Grandpa's Steakhouse!
Or maybe it is.
Welcome, one and all, to this week's edition of Grandpa Gotta Cook.
It's been a while. Grandpa Gotta Eat has taken center stage, when I've actually made a @foodfightfriday post. That means I haven't really cooked in a while, or at least not anything I really wanted to share. I just checked and the last Grandpa Gotta Cook post was back on New Year's Day for the Rose Bowl game.
Good times, good times.
At any rate, as the title clearly states, I will be sharing my last foray into cooking from the Saturday before, and covering some ground I've already ventured into some time ago. That being, steak, mashed potatoes, salad, with dinner rolls.
Practice, Practice, Practice
A sign of a good cook, or so I'm going to say now, is being willing to go back to the well and see if:
a) you can reproduce the good stuff you did the time before, or
b) improve upon the good stuff you did before, and in doing so,
c) avoid taking a step back
I'll let ya'll be the judge of just what happened as we move through the process. One of these days the blockchain will feature the ability to provide samples for dedicated #fff readers, but in the meantime, you'll just have to judge me by words.
To The Store!
When it comes to my turn to cook, I seem to nearly always find myself behind the 8-ball, as it were. I frequently don't have all the ingredients in the house I need (since I can't seem to ever be inspired with what's there), which means in addition to preparing and cooking the meal, I need to make a trip into town to buy something.
In this case, we didn't have steaks, the potatoes we did have were pretty spongey, and I've grown tired of eating the prepared salad in the bag sitting for who knows how long in the refrigerator (that basically resembles rabbit food).
Oh, and the rolls. We didn't have any of those, either.
I might have tried something else, but I'd been wanting steak for a while, and when the hankerin' hits, there's simply no denying the hankerin'.
When I go to the store, I like to get there as early as possible, avoid all the shoppers, get in and get out. For me, it is not a social event like it frequently is for my wife. In order to beat the rush around here, I pretty much have to be in and out by 10:30 AM at the latest. Which means I have to be ready to go and out of the house before that. During the week for work, that's no problem, but come the weekend, I just want to laze around.
Not good for getting something done. Like dinner.
Add to this particular instance the fact I would need to go two stores instead of one—Costco and Winco—it meant I would be navigating two parking lots for a space to leave my car, and getting around two huge warehouse-sized buildings to boot.
I know. You do that all the time.
Not me. And I'm happier for it.
Well, fortunately, things went off without a hitch. I just needed the dinner rolls from Costco (very delicious—like Pringle's potato chips, you can't eat just one). I could have bought the rest of the stuff there, too, I suppose, but the steak selection was too expensive, and I didn't need a huge bag of potatoes that would just end up going spongey on us again.
Thankfully, Winco and Costco are across the street from each other. I found a pretty decent deal on a package of petite sirloin (that was in actuality no way petite) with the requisite number of steaks—four. I found a smaller bag of gold potatoes, which we all like the taste of best, and then I bought a head of iceberg lettuce for the salad. I already had tomatoes and mushrooms and there was a little bit of a premix salad in a bag that would add in some carrot shavings and miscellaneous roughage.
Moving Parts
That accomplished, I had roughly five hours before I had to start cooking. I figured I would need at least an hour to get the potatoes washed, peeled, boiled and mashed, the steaks seared to everyone's liking, and the salad chopped up. The rolls could work their magic on their own.
The trick, as always, is to get things going so they all finish up around the same time. In this case, that meant the potatoes would be first. In the interim between shopping and preparing, I'd found a mashed potato recipe that was supposed to give us the creamiest mashed potatoes ever. It required warm milk and sour cream along with butter and garlic.
(All I had to do was read that combination of ingredients and my mouth was already watering.)
The potatoes were washed, peeled and put to boil. I waited several minutes into that before pulling out a skillet for the steak. I like to grill those, but it's been pretty wet and windy around here (up until this last week), so doing much outdoors, especially anything where you're just kind of standing around and waiting, was not at all appealing.
So, into the skillet the four pieces of steak went. I gave them all a nice thin coating of salt and pepper on both sides, then added a little bit of garlic. As they began to sizzle, the potatoes were getting near done, which meant draining the water and getting the warm milk and sautéed garlic in butter ready.
No more than a couple minutes later, the butter and garlic went on the potatoes, along with the milk and sour cream. Unfortunately, even though it was only a couple of minutes, I think I let the garlic go just a little too long, and while I didn't put in a lot, I ended up overpowering everything else.
I like garlic mashed potatoes quite a bit, and so do others in the household, but this was a little much.
I made the remark while we were eating that we wouldn't have to worry about vampires that night.
With mashed potatoes done, I made sure the steaks were cooked sufficiently (somewhere between medium well and well), and then turned my attention to the salad fixings.
Yes, the base of this salad was iceberg rather than Romaine. I happen to prefer the taste of iceberg better, even if there's supposedly no nutritional value whatsoever. And, as far as I know, it's not being recalled every five seconds, either. So, into the bowl it went, along with chopped up tomatoes.
The mushrooms I mentioned earlier were to go with the steak, which meant frying them up in another pan.
Time wise, everything was more or less ready within a minute or so of each other, and it was even close to 5 pm when we sat down to eat.
Taste Test
Generally, it doesn't take more than one bite to determine if something is going to be good or not. In this case, I didn't need to even try the potatoes. They were way to garlicky, but still creamy as promised. I still ate them all. Tone down the garlic next time, and I think we have a winner.
The steak turned out really good. These were thicker pieces of meat than what I thought I was getting, but they cooked up in short order and were tender enough to chew without taking forever to do it. The salt, pepper and garlic on it was just right. I think using the cast iron skillet actually helped with the flavor, too, over the standard steel pan.
With some Thousand Island dressing, the salad did its job and the rolls, well, I wasn't responsible for making them, so I can't take any credit for the awesomeness that they are.
All-in-all, a very delicious meal.
Hankerin' satisfied.
I Have A Need—A Need For...More Steak
I can't remember the last time I had steak, but it needs to happen more often. Alas, none of the other cooks in the household naturally gravitate to it, even though they all enjoy it and the fixings that go with it. I guess that means it's up to me to put steak on the menu more frequently. Which probably means more trips to the grocery store for me.
Woohoo.
Until then, though...
...Enjoy!
All images courtesy of Glen Anthony Albrethsen
This post of Grandpa Gotta Cook is published in conjunction with Food Fight Friday, that roguish group of culinary karate experts that come together weekly to show off what they've created and/or eaten. It's a contest that everyone is invited to participate in, as long as four simple rules are followed: write about food, post on a Friday near you, use the #fff tag, and then go and take a peek at the competition, because you'll be asked to vote for who you think had the best post that week. It's a jury of your peers you'll enjoy being a part of again and again.