Lotsa Leftovers

I have to make this quick, because there's a football game on TV that I want to watch.  In an effort to make the best of what we had on hand, The Bride and I selected Caribbean Tenderloin With Black Bean Salsa, which is found on page 180. 

Believe it or not, we actually had almost all of this already.  The only subsitution I made was to swap out the habenero (because screw THAT) with my New Mexico peppers.  Oh, and for those of you ever need it, good luck finding chutney in the Norwood Kroger...it's next to the A1 sauce.  Go figure.  This needed to marinade for four to six hours, so that was the first thing I readied.

Before adding the tenderloins to the marinade, I needed to trim them.  Tenderloins are awesome because they are actually leaner than boneless, skinless chicken breast, and have the advantage of tasting nothing like boneless, skinless chicken breast.  However, they almost always come with a piece called silverskin, which tastes terrible and is, in fact, indigestible.   The first thing to do is pull back the thin layer of fat to reveal the silverskin.

Next you have to use the tip of your knife to get underneath it.

Then pull gently and let your knife slip just underneath it, trying to remove as little meat as possible.

Here the first loin is all trimmed up, with the other loin as you will most likely find it.

Once both were trimmed, I dumped them and the marinade into a Ziploc bag and went about my business for the next few hours.  This mostly involved watching movies on the couch with The Bride.

Once out of the marinade, I wiped off the tenderloins and prepared the rub.  I followed my usual tactic of combining the spices in a spice grinder and using a shaker to apply the mixture.

While The Forge was getting happy, I started in on the salsa.  With that done, I went outside with my timer, temperature probe, and a beer.  When the proper temperature was achieved, I brought them inside.

I sliced them up, plated, added the salsa, and we were ready.

I'll quote The Bride, "THAT.  WAS.  AWESOME!"  I agree.  As always with pork tenderloin, I would have liked a sauce; even just a reduction of the marinade would have taken this dish to the next level.  As it stands, I will be a happy boy with my leftovers tomorrow. 

Guest Chef 2

On Friday night The Bride's best friend came over, bringing along Cody, her twelve-year-old son.  He wanted to make grilled pizzas, so I took the opportunity to complete my last grilled pizza recipe, the Arugula Pizza on page 337.  That night was a mess, so I don't have the picture of the ingredients.  Cody wanted to help, so he became my second guest chef.  I took the responsibility of getting the dough started while the other three shopped for toppings.  The only addition I made to the dough was a teaspoon of dried Italian herbs, just for grins and giggles.  Once the shoppers came home, Cody and I set about preparing the toppings.  For my pizza, I had Cody begin by measuring out the necessary ingredients for the arugula pesto that would serve as the "sauce" under the toppings.

Yes, that is a rather large knife right next to him.  I am always available for babysitting!  The next thing Cody got to do was the use the immersion blender to make the pesto.  He liked this part.

While Cody worked on cooking the Italian sausage for the other pizzas, I grilled up some veggies.  Melissa (The Bride's friend) wanted bacon and onion, so I cooked the bacon and used the bacon grease on the onions instead of olive oil.  My pizza needed bell peppers, so I blackened the skin on them so that the skin would peel away and the sweet pepper flesh would be revealed.  Here they are, fresh off the grill:

Next Cody rolled out the dough, grilled them to a nice golden brown (I'm getting the hang of grilled pizza on the Weber), and we brought them inside to begin putting on the toppings.  Cody put down the pizza sauce, and then began putting on a rather ample amount of meat onto his pizza. 

While his was on the grill, I began making my pizza.  I began with the grilled dough.

I then laid in the "pesto" that Cody had turned into more of a puree with the immersion blender.  :)

I then placed the grilled peppers and mushrooms.  Then it was off to the grill with it all, and after a few minutes I was able to bring it back in and begin the second round of toppings.

Fresh off the grill, I added the cheese, more fresh arugula, and tomatoes.  I was finally ready to eat my own pizza, after cooking for everyone else!

 

All in all, this was good.  In fact, I'll venture to say that if you ever have to eat a veggie pizza, this is the way to do it.  It was fresh, flavorful, and well-balanced.  I then made myself a second pizza, much in the style of Cody's.

Old/New Toy

I promise to get back to posting about new recipes, but tonight The Bride wanted to use up the rest of our compound butter from the weekend.  So it was back to the New York Strip Steak With Roasted Garlic Butter for us this evening.  Meanwhile, I FINALLY remembered to break out my Christmas gift from my sister, Kara.  I had hung it in my hallway down to my basement with some other grilling apparatus, in the hopes that I would use it as soon as possible.  Long story short, I didn't because I kept forgetting.  Well, nine months later, here we are, about to use my "new" branding iron!

*AHEM*  YEEEAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay, so I prepped The Forge for Eight Circle of Hades, and stuck the branding iron in the coals, like I've seen on TV. 

I quickly realized a problem...I couldn't put the grilling grate down like this.  So I adusted it.

I waited for the coals to ready themselves (they are nowhere near where they need to be in the above picture).  When it was time, I put on the beef and closed the lid as best as I could, but the handle for the branding iron was protruding.  After ten minutes the steaks were ready...they probably could have used one or two minutes less.  I got The Forge a little too toasty, but inside the steaks were still medium to medium well. 

Now it was time to bring the sizzle!

Never before have I felt so American.  My life is now complete.  I have steak branded with my initials.

Finally, I also grilled some carrots coated with herbes du provence, which I cooked for ten minutes on indirect high heat.  The texture was perfect, and the seasoning matched the compound butter.

That is all.  I highly recommend that everyone gets their own branding iron.  It makes life quite enjoyable.

*SIGH* End Of Summer

For the last three years I have held an end-of-summer dinner, where I put together a meal over a couple of courses.  The idea is to show a complilation of new things that I have learned over the last year and to have a good time of it.  This year's meal consisted of a few recipes and techniques that I have learned from Weber, supplemented with techniques that I have learned elsewhere.  I'm still tired from yesterday's ordeal, so let's get right to it. 

After some basic appetizers, the first course last night was a plate of scallops in a beurre blanc sauce, matched with a grilled corn salad.  I first used scallops on The Forge when The Bride and I came back from Memphis, so I was pretty comfortable with them.  The beurre blanc sauce I have been making for several months now, so that was easy as well.  I wanted something a little refreshing to go along with it, and I had originally wanted to do a trio of stuffed vegetables with it.  But quite recently when I made a corn salad side dish I realized that it would go perfectly with the scallops that I was planning on making. 

This dish worked well, with the sweetness of the corn playing well with the natural sweetness of the scallops.  The mustard and dill added depth of flavor to the beurre blanc sauce, and I may have even converted a previously non-shellfish person to the other side. 

The second course featured something I did for last year's meal, but a little better.  I love grilled pork tenderloin, and when I recently did one of Weber's recipes for one, I noted that I preferred Alton Brown's technique of higher heat and faster rotation.  I also like adding a Calvados sauce, which is based on the French apple brandy that is awesome.  That in itself can be a little heavy of a sauce, so I made an apple and endive slaw which complemented that course with a nice change of texture and acidity.  

One guest mentioned that she wanted to cry.  I took that as a good thing. 

The third course brought in the heavy hitter of protein...steak.  To be honest, I probably would not have tried this recipe by now if it had not been for a guest chef picking it out.  It turned out amazing back then, so I brought it back for last night.  It has a rather Provencal feel to it, so I paired it with another classic dish from that region that I had done with Weber. 

The only addition I made was to add a classic French port-mushroom brown sauce. 

The final course had very little to do with Weber, but for the sake of completion, I'll show you the final course.  I made an apple tart tatin with a duo of sauces.  The first sauce was a classic crème anglaise (pictured on the right) and the second sauce was a riesling sabayon (on the left).  My oven wasn't working the way I wanted it do, so the tart tatin became somewhat of a cobbler, but that's just aesthetics.  It was tasty.

So summer is over, and tomorrow I get up real early to go sit in boring meetings.  In a couple of days I have a fresh set of students that I can't wait to mess up!

Butter Is Better

It's amusing to me that "butter" and "better" are only separated by one letter.  Tonight The Bride wanted to grill out steaks, and I couldn't agree more.  I needed a recipe, however, that didn't need any sort of marinade time, of which there were few remaining.  Many of the steak recipes left needed four to twelve hours to accrue added flavors or tenderize, but we did our grocery shopping at 7:00 p.m.  This left us with few options, so I decided to make New York Strips With Roasted Garlic Butter on page 100.  In previewing the recipe, I noticed that the steaks were rather straightforward.  A little salt, a little pepper, and eight to ten minutes on the grill was all that was involved.  The interesting part was the garlic butter.  Upon returning from the store, The Bride set about making some sort of potatoes au gratin, and I gathered what was necessary for the steaks.

The steaks went back into the fridge as I wouldn't be needing them for a while.  The first (and major) portion of the recipe was to prepare the roasted garlic.  I've done this in the oven before, so transitioning to the grill would prove to be rather easy.  You need to expose the cloves, so first make a cut along the top of the bulb.

Drizzle a little olive oil (this helps transition thermal energy and flavor to the cloves), and set it on a piece of aluminum foil.

Then you wrap it up, leaving room for steam to make things happy.  I typically like to leave a little vent at the top for the steam to escape. 

If you look closely, you can see The Bride's hand reaching for her phone as she was prepping the potatoes.  :)  I set the garlic on the grill, and forty minutes later it was ready.  The entire back yard had a pleasant and sweet garlic smell. 

While the garlic bulb cooled to a reasonable temperature that would allow me to handle it, I gathered the other ingredients for the compound butter.  For your tip of the day, I will give you an easy way to measure butter.  The recipe called for two tablespoons of butter.  Have you ever tried to measure cold butter?  This is especially difficult if you aren't working with a stick of butter that has the tablespoon markings.  I have learned from various baking experiences that the accepted mass of  one tablespoon of butter is fourteen grams.  As I needed two tablespoons, I used my digital scale to measure twenty-eight grams of butter.

Once the garlic was cool enough to handle, it was time to squeeze out the cloves.  The following video shows you just how easy this is with roasted garlic.

 I then used the back of a fork to bring everything together.  With enough mixing, I now had a compound butter (a butter blended with any other flavoring agent, still in a solid state).

Into the fridge it went while the potatoes cooked in the oven and the steaks readied themselves for the grill.  When the time was right, I prepped the steaks with salt, pepper, and a light brushing of the olive oil.

After about eight or nine minutes on The Forge, they came off for a brief rest.

The Bride's potatoes were ready, the steaks were ready, so we plated.  I added the dab of butter, and we were ready to eat!

Dear sweet Jesus, this was ridiculous. It is truly inspiring what a dab of butter can do to a piece of steak, let alone a compound butter.  There is, quite simply, no other easier way to truly enhance a piece of steak.  Rubs, marinades, and sauces can't touch what a compound butter can do to a piece of beef right off the grill.  It's so easy and adds so much that there is no turning back.  This will be the way I grill steak from now on.  The Bride's potatoes were religion-inspiring, bringing together bacon and smoked cheddar into an au gratin dish.  Well played, Bride, well played.

Back To My Comfort Zone

Between the heat, my schedule, other commitments, and general laziness, I haven't grilled in quite some time.  Figuring it was time to get back into the groove of things, I went with something a little more in my comfort zone than the last session: Southwest Sirloin With Corn Salad on page 112.  After a quick trip to Findlay Market, I had all that I needed.

Thank goodness I had done grilled corn recently. It gave me the experience I needed to pull together the corn salad. I prepped the cobs like I had done before, and while they were on the grill I prepped the sirloin.  First I used my spice blender to bring the rub together.

The recipe said to trim the steak of any excess fat.  So I did.

With that done, I applied the rub and waited for the corn to finish.

 The grilling was easy, and I completed the directions for the corn salad while the steak was cooking.  After twelve minutes of grilling and five minutes of resting, it was ready.

I sliced against the grain and plated everything.

It was SO GOOD to be back in my wheelhouse.  I love steak, and I love spicy.  The rub, per usual for Weber, was right on.  It may be a tad too hot for those unfortunate weaker souls, but was right up my alley.  The corn salad complimented the steak quite well.  In fact, I liked it so much that it will be making another appearance later next week.  I am planning a dinner for some friends to celebrate the end of the summer, and I had been looking for a side for one of the courses.  The sweetness of the corn plays well with the mustard-dill dressing, which will be a nice accompaniment for what I am planning.  As I was eating this, I also came to another conclusion.  This is a great recipe for quickly preparing steak fajitas!  Normally I like flank steak for fajitas, but they take at least four hours of marinating to make them approachable.  This was easy to chew, had great flavor, and can be done in about half an hour.  The corn salad would be a nice addition to the fajita as well, so I pulled together what I had laying around the house and gave it a shot.

In a word: awesome.

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