Quick Steak dinner for 2 and good beer.

Cooking for two is much different than cooking for six. For the past few months, Erin and I have been living in my parents' house and on any given night there can be as few as one and as many as six people eating dinner together. Usually, my mom takes over most of the kitchen duties (which helps explain our lack of activity on FiT- that's Foodie in Training, for those not paying attention). Every now and then Erin and I will make dinner for everyone. Or my brother Greg and I will come up with some creation (our cavatelli with chunky tomato sauce and diced chicken was awesome).

But the last week, my parents and brother have been out of town, leaving Erin and I cooking for two, like we did quite often in Cincinnati. When cooking for two some things aren't as practical: huge roasts, baked pastas, casseroles, etc. We've made those things before, its just that you end up with more leftovers than dinner, and we get sick of the food before it spoils. Instead, our go-to meals usually involve a small package of some sort of meat and smaller sides.

On Tuesday, Erin and I bought a couple small steaks. They were pretty thick and lean top round cuts. Being so lean, and not the highest quality, I wanted a lot of flavor. I used salt, lots of pepper, oregano, parsley, and some "Mrs. Dash" seasoning blend (basically some dried onion, more pepper and oregano). I also added a drop of olive oil. Once my grill-pan was smoking hot with some Pam, I added the steaks, searing the pepper-heavy seasoning into the meat, creating a bit of a crust. (Caution- if you try doing this, make sure you are prepared for lots of smoke and your smoke detector going off. If, say, you are cooking at a home that has an alarm system that will call an alarm company and ultimately the fire department whenever a smoke detector goes off, you may want to disarm the system before you start cooking). I then turned the heat down a little and cooked the steaks to medium.

Erin made some spinach with lots of garlic and lemon (which is, again, my favorite vegetable side dish), a salad and a little brown rice. I also sauteed some onions and baby bella mushrooms for the steak and rice. The mushrooms and onions cut the peppery steak nicely. A nice little meal, just for two.


Beer: I tried a hI.P.A.- Magic Hat Brewing Company's extremely hoppy IPA. This is a beer made for hop-heads, and I fall into that category. There is a bit of a fruitiness, but your hardly can find it under all the hops at both the front and the back of the taste. I love IPAs, and one of the reasons is how well they stand up to hearty food, like steak. hI.P.A. is Magic Hat's spring seasonal, and let me tell you: I'm ready for spring. I've already had Great Lakes Brewing Company's spring varietal: Conway's Irish Ale. And, pitchers and catchers report today! IT IS SPRING!

Holidays

Erin and I had some great food while celebrating the Holidays. Some of the best:
1.) Filets at the Stookeys, Christmas Eve:
Erin's parents made some delicious filets. **So sorry I don't have a photo..I'm so mad, because they were soooo good!!
2.) What the heck is a stratta?
Turns out, it is some sort of quiche dish. It made for a pretty tasty brunch

3.) Nonna's Christmas spectacular:Similar to last year's, my grandma made a Christmas dinner for the ages. This year, we had Steak Sciscliano (prounounced SHISH-lee-ano). A very good cut of meat sliced into thin steaks, quickly seared on each side and soaked in olive oil and garlic and some italian seasonings. We had a lightly breaded and then baked shrimp; Pazella (italian style peas); homemade ravioli (with homemade tomato sauce)- they took my grandma something like 6 hours to hand make over 100 ravoli. They were the highlight of this wonderful meal. We had some nicely seasoned and spicy rappini (an Italian vegetable- a cross between spinach and broccoli).

4.) New Years Eve dinner: steaks at Red Gables Mesquittttte grill
We went to a small steakhouse in Sandusky with my brother and a couple friends on New Years Eve. The planning of our evening was very last minute, but we didn't complain. In fact, Erin ended up with the best steak ever. She got the filet, I got the ribeye. Both were perfectly cooked, high quality, and rubbed down with bold amounts of pepper and flavor. I tried a bite of Erin's- amazing.

**Also, sorry no photo, I guess the holidays=eating=Erin and Ryan's forgetfulness. I now have a New Year's resolution to remember to take photos of all this awesome food!

 A belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Years to everyone!

Some Good Things, some bad things

A few weeks ago when it FINALLY started to get warm out, we bought some steaks and we were ready to get the grill going. We also bought some shallots at the store and I wanted to use them in some sort of pasta dish. I'm not trying to be mean, but the steak and the grilled onion did not turn out very good, but the pasta dish was actually pretty good especially for totally winging it.
Ryan seasoned the steak with a lot of things, too much seasoning which was the reason it wasn't very good. Some of the seasoning was jerk seasoning I bought in Jamaica and other spicy things. It was waaayy to spicy for me so I didn't eat much of it. The other thing we made was grilled red onions. We have done this before and it is really good, grilling the onion brings out all of the sweetness and I swear it's better than any fried onion ring I've ever had. We made the mistake of just cutting the large red onion in half and grilling it. We made a balsamic dressing to pour over the grilled onion, but that couldn't save it either. It didn't cook all of the way and I don't really enjoy chomping on raw onion, so I didn't really eat much of that either....
My "winging it" shallot pasta actually turned out really well. I started by sauteing shallots in about a 1/3 cup of olive oil and once those had softened a bit, I added fresh garlic, minced. I did a trick that Ryan does when seasoning a sauce, I added crushed red pepper flakes to the hot oil and let the red pepper flakes flavor the oil instead of just having every other bite be spicy. Once the shallots and garlic were nicely cooked I added about a half cup of white wine and I also added basil and lemon zest. After the penne was finished cooking I drained it and added it straight to the saute pan to combine with the olive, shallots, wine and herbs. I added a little more wine and some lemon juice and let that flavors heat through a few minutes and it was ready to serve! Once in a serving dish I grated some Parmesan cheese on top. I must say, the pasta turned out great, it was a light sauce but the flavors of the white wine, lemon juice worked really well together.

We also made some green beans and just seasoned it simply with salt, pepper and olive oil.

We learned some lessons in this meal and proved that we are still foodies in training.

Surf and Turf for 2 for under $15

Yes, this is our third post of the day. We have been making lots of good food lately and today was the culmination. We were planning our Sunday meal on this beautiful March afternoon. I really wanted to make meatloaf. I bought eggs the other day for brunch and I wanted to use some of the eggs for the meatloaf. Ryan was inspired by the 60 degree sunny day and suggested something to cook on the grill. He stayed home and studied while I went to the grocery. While I was at the grocery store, I saw there was a special on scallops, but I thought that might be too difficult so I passed them by. When I shop for meat I always feel overwhelmed, I never know what cut is good or bad or if the price is good. So I went up to the butcher counter and saw there were boneless New York strip steaks on special. The strip steaks were huge cuts of meat and I knew that I could never eat a whole one by myself so I had the idea of just buying one and then going back to the seafood counter and buying a few of the scallops on special and doing a surf and turf. I got a few other essentials at the store and headed home to see what Ryan would think of my idea.

When Ryan saw the steak and scallops he was definitely on board and we got to cooking. Ryan was in charge of the steak (of course) and I was in charge of the scallops. I'll let Ryan talk about the steak, but first I'll talk about the scallops. They were still a little frozen so I immediately got them in a collander and turned on the faucet on icy cold and a very slow drip to slowly defrost them completely. I found a really simple recipe in the Cooking Light Italian cookbook we got from my parents for Christmas, sauteed scallops with parsley and garlic.

Once the scallops were defrosted I patted them with a paper towel to pull out some of the moisture and salted and peppered them on each side. When the steaks were almost finished, I heated a sautee pan on medium-high heat and added olive oil to the pan. When that was ready I added the scallops and let them cook on each side for 2 1/2 minutes. When they were done I removed them from the pan, lowered the heat and then added 1/2 tbsp. of butter to the same sautee pan and let it melt. Once the butter melted I added fresh garlic and dried parsley and let the garlic cook a little bit. Once the garlic was cooked, I put the scallops back in the pan and tossed them in the butter/garlic/parsley sauce. They turned out absolutely amazing and they were a great complement to Ryan's awesome steak. I'll let him take it from here...

What up my fellow foodie wannabes? So, like Erin said, she brought home a beautiful piece of meat. A classic N.Y. strip. It looked so good, and Erin's recipe for scallops were so simple, I decided to keep it simple when cooking the steak and making sure to let the great ingredients speak for themselves. I rubbed the steak down with some olive oil and seasoned each side with a bunch of salt and freshly cracked black pepper. I added the steak to the grill on medium-high heat, for about 4 minutes on each side. The high flame seared and blackened each side with all the olive oil, salt and pepper forming a wonderful crust. Another key was to let it sit for about 10 minutes before cutting it. I cut it in half and it was cooked so that the center was bright pink, but the outside was crusted with flavor: perfectly medium cooked. I could have even gone medium rare, but it was delicious, hearty and pretty tender.

Like Erin said, the scallops and steak made for a perfect combination. While the steak was red, salty, juicy and hearty; the scallops were light and were so buttery with a light garlic sauce and a hint of lemon that was fresh and delicate. We finished the meal with a simple baby spinach and onion salad, some good French bread and some corn: an absolutely perfect Sunday meal.