• steak
• salt
• black pepper
• butter

To make it like a Dutch Steak, top with the following, and broil. Leave your steak nice and bloody if you plan on adding this topping. It should only need two minutes on each side.

• Mix together the following:
  • 2 tablespoons mayonnaise
  • 1 teaspoon sweet hot mustard
  • 3 tablespoons Parmesan

I’m sure most of you have cooked a steak before but for this steak I used Adam Roberts’, from the Amateur Gourmet, tip for cooking steaks like they do in restaurants. Before I cook any type of meat, I always season and allow the meat to rest for about half-an-hour before the actual cooking. This steak only takes no more than ten minutes to cook anyway. Hell, you could even cook it in about five.

Cover all edges of the steak liberally with salt and black pepper. I only dashed cayenne onto one side of my steak. This thing was about one pound. It was ginormous. I found it while browsing the local supermarket, they had some decent cuts of fresh meat on a special display designed to entice people into barbequeing. The cut was about half an inch thick and the length was approximately twelve inches. A decent slab of meat.

Prepping the nectarine was slightly more difficult than the steak. I bought a quite fresh nectarine so it did not want to part from the pit without a struggle. Just make some slices about 1/4 inch thick. If we make them too thin, we will lose the texture that we are aiming for.

Preheat your pan with three tablespoons of the butter. We are going to be cooking at a high heat so don’t be afraid to use the highest setting on your burner, unless you have cheap cook-wear. Once the pan is ready things will go very quickly from this point.

Place your seasoned steak into the pan and make sure you have your fan on or healthy ventillation because I neglected this step and my sister’s fire alarm went off for about five minutes before the air finally cleared enough for the alarm to feel comfortable with the air quality once again. We are going to sear each side for about thirty seconds so that both sides are nice and brown before allowing the rest of the steak to cook. I probably did this wrong compared to the method I was basing it on but it still turned out pretty good.

If you like your steaks slightly bloody in the middle do not be afraid to take the steak off too soon as it cooks very fast this way. After cooking each side for about two to three minutes arrange your nectarine slices on top then go ahead and use the rest of your butter as the pan is probably drying up by now. Cover your steak for no longer than three more minutes and turn the heat off if you need to if you want your steak medium rare. The nectarine slices will warm slightly but they don’t really need to cook all the way through. You should have enough slices of nectarine to cover the whole steak with no room in between.

Drizzle just a tiny bit of honey on top of the nectarines and then eat the whole thing. You can share your steak if you want or you can keep it all to yourself. I had two small children running around outside and they looked pretty hungry. Turns out they were, between the two year old and the three year old they ate half of my steak. Definitely a good meal to eat outside while it is nice.

I topped this meal off with some fresh corn on the cob with the husks still on. You can cook your corn at 450 – 475 for as long as you want. The husks do a great job of keeping the moisture in but I cooked mine for about foty-five minutes.

For dessert walk down the street and buy some shaved ice.

First I started preheating the oven while I wrapped a couple potatoes in some aluminum foil. Then I liberally salted and peppered the meat. I want the meat to sit in its own juices for a moment. A couple cap-fulls of vermouth and a splash of worcestershire probably won’t hurt the flavor.

After throwing the tubers into the oven, I tabbed about two almost three tablespoons of butter into my frying pan. I do not fear fats and oils. You should not either. The idea was to sear the steak and bring the internal temperature up to par as quickly as possible. From prior experiences we had learned that the quality of this steak was quite atrocious. I was hoping that cooking it in this manner would help to avoid the nasty chewy low quality beef flavor that we experienced from previous adventures with this meat.

I left the steak on each side long enough to create a deep brown color. Because the smoking point of the butter wasn’t as high as I needed, I didn’t quite get the color I was looking for. The ideal color would have been the brown you get just before it starts to caramelize on the outside.

After getting some color on both sides I started preparation of the onion. I only had half of a red onion left. About medium sized. This was all I really needed so that worked out fine.

The plan now was to allow that internal temperature to stabilize so I needed a few more minutes with the stove but I didn’t want all the heat going directly into the outside layer of meat. I dumped the onions into the pan and I love the sound that a pan makes when you throw in something fresh. It is one of my most favorite things to hear.

I love the bitter taste of onions so I did not want them cooking too long. Just long enough to soften them a little. So while those were cooking I spread, liberally, some stone ground mustard onto each side of the steaks and cooked both sides for another minute give or take. The smells coming out of my kitchen at this point were making me salivate.

This is where I turned off both the oven and the stove so as to allow the potatoes to cool off and let the frying pan cool a bit before taking the food out. I have this thing with leaving empty hot dishes on my stove. They need to cool off before I make them empty.

The potatoes received just a little bit of salt, butter, pepper, and a topping of ranch chip dip. I don’t know if it is really ranch or not, it is pink, but it came from my fridge and the container says ranch so I assume it is. It almost tastes southwest.

Anyway, I pigged out and ate a steak and a potato and then another half of the steak before I was engorged. Now I am sitting here staring at and smelling my food wishing that I could eat the rest. I really need to learn how to cook single servings.

keld's lentil soup

Christmas eve I had some friends over and took this opportunity to make some lentil soup that I had heard about from The Amatuer Gourmet. This recipe was perfect because I had exactly two cups of lentils left that I probably wasn’t going to get around to cooking later.

I also had some steaks that I pulled out of the freezer two days prior to this so I figured I may as well dice that up and throw it into the soup as well.

I will have to warn you. I do not measure ingredients and I will not be able to provide exact measurements. These recipes that I share are just suggestions.

First thing I did was start boiling some lentils. I’m one of those people who doesn’t use a timer. I probably should. Hell, I could even look at the clock once in a while. However, I prefer to cook until it’s done. I don’t know how to explain this concept but maybe I will talk about it more in the future.

While the lentils were boiling, I diced up five slices of bread. These I tossed in just enough olive oil to cover them slightly. Before tossing them in the oil, I whipped up the oil with some crushed garlic I had. Croutons would be perfect on top of the soup. Baked them at 350 until they were done.

Before the lentils were finished, I took about three tablespoons of butter and started sauteeing half of a large white onion. This was a very large onion. I sliced it into bite size pieces about 1/4 of an inch by 1/2 of an inch. Once the onions started cooking I placed two steaks, 6oz each, into the same pan. The plan here is just to brown them enough on each side so that we can dice it into smaller pieces while leaving the onions on the heat to become tranceluscent.

Unfortunately, the steak I had available was low quality. Even if it is not low quality steak, I highly recommend that you heavily salt and pepper the steak about one hour before use. I did not have time for this so I just fried in butter. After slicing the steak into cubes, I threw the chunks into the butter and onions.

I have dried herbs so I used them at this point. If they were fresh, I would add them at the end of cooking. Here, to the onions and steak I added some cayenne pepper, crushed red pepper, generous helping of curry (which I added more later during the soup cooking part) and a bunch of cumin seeds.

The lentils were done cooking at this point so I drained them and set them aside. After a few more minutes I dumped a 28oz can of crushed tomatoes into a pot along with the onions, spices and steak. This is when I added two capfuls of vermouth into the soup. Yum.

After a couple more minutes I used the empty can to pour the same amount of water into the mixture. Next, I poured in the lentils. We are almost done. While this was coming to a simmer, I rinsed and destemmed some fresh chard. After slicing this into long strips, I placed the chard on top of the soup and salted it a bit.

Just a few more minutes of simmering and I pulled the soup off the heat. Top with croutons and if you have a dollop of sour cream or yogurt available, that would make this dish divine.

Total preparation time was only about thirty minutes. This was a quick meal and my guests were impressed with how quickly the meal was prepared. I must warn you that this made a lot of food. We could have served about 8-10 people.

For dessert we had dark chocolate from IKEA with dried cranberries.