Tag: recipe

Conway’s Mustard Steak

life
Comments

This is a very simple preparation and primitive cooking method, but the results are extraordinary. This is an old family recipe I learned a long time ago from a good friend.

Ingredients:

  • Steak (should be a large, thick cut of beef, such as London Broil, or Round Steak, at least 1.5-2″ thick.)
  • Ordinary yellow mustard (French’s, etc.)
  • Common table salt

Supplies:

  • Charcoal briquettes
  • lighter fluid
  • charcoal starter chimney
  • Fire starter

 

  • Casserole dish
  • Paper towels
  • Serving platter
  • basting brush
  • BBQ tongs or fork
  • Serving knife

Instructions:

Preparation:

1-2 days ahead of cooking:

  1. Dry the meat with paper towels, then apply a thick coating of yellow mustard with the basting brush until steak is completely covered on all sides.
  2. Sprinkle very liberally with salt until mustard achieves a paste-like, crusty consistency.
  3. Lay in casserole dish for 24-48 hrs in refrigerator, marinating.

Fire preparation:

  1. Fill charcoal starting chimney with briquettes. Wad up paper towels or newspaper, douse with lighter fluid, and place under the chimney. Don’t put fluid on the charcoal.
  2. Light the paper with the fire starter. The coals should ignite easily, and be ready in 5-10 minutes. Let them burn in the chimney until they are glowing orange, then spread them out on a scraped area of bare earth the ground, or in a fire pit, or in a charcoal grill.
  3. Make sure you have sufficient lit charcoal to cover the ground with a good, thick layer of coals, with no gaps between them, covering an area at least twice the size of the meat. This may be more than 1 chimney full of coal, so be sure to get enough going before you start cooking.

Cooking:

  1. Lay the steak directly on the coals, ensuring that the coat of mustard is still intact on the side touching the coals. (Usually, this will be the top side of the steak, as the juices in the bottom of the marinade pan will tend to wash the mustard off the bottom of the steak. Re-apply more mustard and salt on the now-exposed bottom side of the steak to restore a complete coating. The mustard will sear into the meat, protecting the meat itself.
  2. Once the meat is on the fire, let it sit. Don’t touch it or poke it.
  3. Let the steak cook for a long time. Exact cooking time will vary depending on thickness of the meat, but 10-20 minutes or even longer is typical.
    1. Don’t use a clock, however; rather, watch the steak for signs that it is ready. When you start seeing blood droplets appear on the top side of the steak, it will be ready to flip within a few minutes.
    2. Wait until you see droplets coming up all over, not just in one place. Then, using the BBQ tongs or fork, lift the steak off the coals, and knock any coals that have adhered to the meat off, then lay the steak back down on a fresh section of coals.
  4. Continue to cook on second side, once again waiting to see blood juices coming up through the top surface of the steak. It should take significantly less time for the second side to cook through.
  5. Once blood is again visible on the top side remove from the fire, knock off any stuck coals, and rest on the serving platter for about 4-5 minutes.

Serving:

  1. Slice thin and serve.
    1. Steak should be perfectly seared on the outside, and a full-spectrum gradient of done-ness should be evident through the cut, from well and crispy to rare or even blue in the middle, depending on the thickness of the cut and the cooking time.
    2. The mustard and salt flavor will have permeated the meat throughout, and especially the outside crust will be intensely flavorful.
  2. It will not need any additional seasoning or sauces.
  3. Serve with corn, potatoes, or other favorite BBQ side dishes, and your favorite beverage. Goes excellent with beer or a fruity alcoholic punch, margaritas, etc.

Guppy’s Great Steak

life
Comments

Ingredients:

Supplies:

Instructions:

Preparation

  1. Fill the charcoal starter chimney with charcoal.
  2. Put a couple of wadded up paper towels that have been doused with lighter fluid underneath the chimney, and be ready to go in 5-10 minutes. Don’t put fluid on the coals.
  3. Light the paper towel wad. The coals should ignite easily. Let them burn inside the chimney until they are glowing orange, then distribute in the bottom of the grill.
  4. While the coals are getting ready, prepare the meat.
    1. Meat should be close to room temperature, or slightly cooler.
    2. Pat meat dry with more paper towels.
    3. Once meat is dry, rub with steak salt and Montreal seasoning until both sides are coated.

Cooking

  1. Lay steaks over the hottest part of the grill, and cover the grill.
  2. Don’t touch the grill again until it’s time to flip. Let them set there for about 3 minutes for medium rare.
  3. Flip once, then replace the lid and leave it alone for another 3-4 minutes.
  4. When you flip the corners and edges of the filets should just be starting to char, and you should see grill marks seared into the surface of the meat.
  5. After flipping and waiting for the second side (about the same amount of time as the first side, or slightly less), pull from the grill, and then let them rest for a few minutes.
  6. While resting, apply 2-4 drops of liquid smoke on the top of the filets, and let it absorb.

Serving

  1. Slice thin and dip into the A-1 and stadium mustard. Put mustard on one half of a slice, and A-1 on the other half, and let the flavors blend together in your mouth. For best results use mustard that has aged in refrigerator for 3-4 years. It will have a mellow flavor and a creamy texture.
  2. Serve with grilled mushrooms and vegetables and your favorite beverage.

Recipe: really good very cute boyfriend stir fry

Best Of, life
Comments

When I’m cooking at home, I like to do stir fry dishes in my wok. Recently I have been doing this, and have been finding that I have been feeling extra-well, and more energized on days after I have the following for dinner.

So maybe it’ll help you too. It is easy to make, reheats well, and you end up with an amount of food that you can turn into about four or five good meals.

really good very cute boyfriend stir fry

Ingredients:

  • rice
  • tofu
  • broccoli crowns
  • white onion
  • green onion
  • canned water chestnuts
  • canned baby corn
  • snow peas
  • crimini mushrooms
  • baby bean sprouts
  • sesame oil
  • teriyaki sauce
  • hoisin sauce
  • soy sauce

Equipment:

  • Rice cooker
  • Wok
  • wood spoon
  • large pot with lid

Preparation:

Rice.

Start the rice first, because it takes the longest. Depending on the type of rice you use, it will take a varying amount of water and cook time, so I can’t get too specific on this. Just watch carefully the first few times you’re cooking the rice and learn what works with a specific variety.

Some people say you should soak and rinse the rice before cooking. I don’t really bother with that; just a couple minutes of soaking, while I’m chopping the vegetables, and no rinsing.

Press tofu.

Take the tofu out of the container, and press it between two plates with a weight on top. This will squeeze out excess water, resulting in firmer tofu. After pressing for about 20-30 minutes, you can cut it into cubes. You can get away with less press time if you want, but less than 10-15 minutes is not recommended.

Chop vegetables.

Chop the different vegetables up into bite-size pieces. If you want you can save some time by buying pre-sliced vegetables. I usually get pre-sliced mushrooms, water chestnuts, and baby corn.

For the green onions, you just want the pieces to be about a quarter of an inch long.

The water chestnuts and baby corn come pre-sliced in cans, but you’ll need to strain them.

Cooking

Note: With a few exceptions, I don’t really bother with measuring ingredients. Learning to cook isn’t about following precise steps exactly every single time. It’s about exploring and experimenting and being observant and understanding.

Measuring makes it easier to repeat a result, but only if the ingredients are constant. The thing with vegetables and other ingredients is, they’re not very constant. They vary depending on season and freshness.

So the amount of oil or sauce or temperature or cook time that might be good for one session might not work for another, or according to your taste.

You develop a feel for this over time. Vary and experiment until you feel like you know what you’re doing and know what works for you. Use your eyeballs and your head. Use your tongue. This recipe will tell you what I look for when I’m cooking and how I estimate, not how to be scientific and rigid with your cooking method.

  1. Start the rice cooker about 10 minutes before you start cooking the rest of the vegetables.

    I’ve found the type of rice I usually cook takes about 20-25 min to be done, and the wok items take about 10-12 minutes or so to do.I use a rice cooker that I bought at a drug store for $10 like 17 years ago, nothing special (but it’s a really well made and well designed appliance and I’m happy with it).

    Some people use super fancy rice cookers made in Japan, that cost $150+ and use sophisticated sensors and computer programming with AI and fuzzy logic to do perfect rice every time with no fuss. There’s nothing wrong with that. At all. The Japanese know WTF they’re doing with their rice. Someday maybe I’ll buy one myself.

    With my rice cooker, it just has a setting for “warm” and a setting for “cook”. It’s supposed to switch automatically to “warm” after the water boils off. I’m not sure how it knows to do this, I expect maybe it’s by weight but who knows.

    But usually it’s wrong, so I have learned to watch it and flip the switch manually. I just need to keep an eye on it, checking on it after about 15 minutes to see how much water has evaporated.There’s a narrow window (maybe a minute or two, tops) between the water boiling away and the rice at the bottom of the pan starting to burn. That’s what you watch for. When the rice is done, the water should be boiled away leaving moist steamy grains of rice that may stick together or not depending on the variety and whether you washed and rinsed it.
    Sometimes, I see little holes in the rice, that look almost like someone took a bunch of chopsticks and stuck them in the rice, then pulled them out when the rice firmed up enough to stick that way. These holes are created by the streams of steam bubbles coming up through the boiling water. You don’t see them until toward the end when the rice is ready, and they don’t always form. But if you do see them it’s a good sign that the rice is ready.

    My rice cooker has a second stage to it, a basket that goes on the top of the cooking bowl, which you can steam vegetables, dumplings, or other food in. I put the broccoli in here. If your cooker has this feature, you can do that too, if not just stir fry it in the wok.

    Broccoli is done cooking when it is still bright green and stiff and crunchy. It is overdone when it starts to wilt, turns a darker green with a brownish tinge, or gets mushy. Basically, you just want the broccoli to be hot, not to break down the cells of the plant that make it crunchy and crisp.

    Fortunately it takes about the same amount of time to steam the broccoli as it does to cook the rice. But you may need to pull the broccoli a little early. Just lift the lid and check on it after about 10 minutes and see if it looks good.

    I don’t put anything on the broccoli while it’s steaming, just let it steam on its own. After it’s done steaming, I’ll throw it in the wok for a few seconds to a minute, taking care not to overcook it, to get some flavor from the sauces and oil.

    As soon as the rice cooker is set up and going, I turn my attention to the wok and the vegetables.

  2. Throw some sesame oil into your wok, and ignite the burner under it. Gas stove top is the only way to fly here. A “splash” of oil, enough to coat the cooking surface and leave a slight puddle is sufficient. You’re not deep frying, so you don’t need to cover the ingredients in oil, you just need enough to keep them from burning to the cooking surface of the wok. As you run through adding the different ingredients, you may need to add a little more oil at times.

    Tilt the wok so the oil flows over the entire inner surface, as close to the edge as you can get without spilling the oil. Then put the wok on the burner and let the oil flow back down to the center and get good and hot. If it starts smoking, it’s ready, but it’s also ready before then. It only takes a minute or so to heat up good and hot. Woks are made from thin metal that heats up quickly, and don’t retain the heat very long. It should be hot enough to start cooking very quickly.

  3. Now, cook the vegetables and tofu in the wok. Wait, tofu’s a vegetable too, right? Whatever, just cook the vegetables.

    Starting with the thickest, sturdiest vegetables, working my way down to the flimsiest, I cook each ingredient with a little bit of teriyaki and hoisin sauce, and throw on a little soy sauce as well.

    The sauces help flavor the food as well as keep it from drying out while it’s cooking in the oil. Oil heats up much hotter than the boiling point of water, so it can really dry out food from the outside in and turn it crispy. That’s what deep frying is all about — drying out the surface of the food, making it crispy. But with stir frying, you want to preserve the moisture in the food, and just give it a light coating of oil so it won’t stick to the wok. The oil helps transfer the heat into the food. But you don’t want it to dry out or it will burn. So you add a little sauce to help balance moisture and add flavor.

    It’s easy to use too much sauce, but there’s no strict guideline on how much to use. When I first started my wok experiments, I used too much, and my food didn’t taste like the food it was, all I could taste was the sauce. Now, I use less, and it flavors the food, the sauce doesn’t mask the food and become the entire flavor.

    You don’t want a deep pool of sauce at the bottom of the wok that the food is boiling in; you want a coating of sauce that you can stir the food in.

    Soy sauce is the most watery of the three, and adds moisture to the food while also adding a salty flavor. Teriyaki is sweet. Hoisin is sweet and a little hot. I find these blend well together, but you can experiment with other types of sauces. Fish sauce, oyster sauce, sate sauce are all worth looking at, as well as others.

    If you want to you can also toss in other spices, such as ginger or dried chili peppers, or whatever else you want. These can add even more flavor. But resist the temptation to overwhelm the dish with these flavors. Strong spicy dishes can taste great, but if you dial back and let the spice accent the food flavor rather than smother it, it’s even better.

    I know lots of people like to flip and toss and catch their food with the wok, and this is considered the correct way to use a wok, but I don’t find this to be all that necessary. I just stir it with a large flat wooden spoon/spatula thing, and it works just as well, without risk of spilling the food or straining my wrist. If you enjoy flipping the food around and being a showboat, knock yourself out.

    The purpose of stirring the food is to move it around so it doesn’t stick to the wok and burn. Also it helps even out hot spots so that everything cooks to an even temperature. Also it helps distribute the spice and sauce over the whole surface of each piece of food. Also, it helps the food flip over so it gets cooked from all sides, not just the side it happened to land on when it landed in the wok. And if you’re cooking more than one ingredient together, it helps them to mix. That’s it.

    As each ingredient is cooking, I sample a piece every now and then to see how it’s doing. Once it’s done how I like it, I transfer the food from the wok to the pot, and put the lid on it to keep things warm. I work my way through the ingredients, doing the thicker, sturdier foods first, and cooking them longer, and the lighter ingredients last, cooking them briefer. Items like baby corn, water chestnuts, onions, mushrooms, and tofu all take longer, several minutes, and can be done together if they fit in the wok, or done separately if there’s too much. Broccoli takes long too, unless it’s already steamed, in which case it just needs a short bath in the sauces. Items like spinach leaves, green onion, and baby bean sprouts don’t take long at all, and can be thrown in toward the end for a minute or less.

    Tofu is done when it starts to brown on the edges and develop a bit of a skin. If it’s not pressed enough to remove enough moisture, it may not brown on the edges or develop a skin, so keep that in mind. If you want to, you can do meat instead of tofu: chicken, beef, shrimp, or something else. Be sure to cook chicken thoroughly.

    Once all the ingredients are done, mix them up in the pot and then scoop it out and serve with the rice.