Slow burger

This Marin Sun Farms grass fed burger sits on top of a pile of wild arugula, and a thick slice of heirloom tomato. It is garnished with sautéed crimini mushrooms, sharp cheddar, grilled bacon, marinated red onions, and fried sage. I skipped the bun and fries - why bother? - and ate it with knife and fork. Tastes like meat.

For the burger:
1/2 lb ground grass fed beef
1/2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
Sea salt, fresh ground black pepper
Olive oil for the grill

Season beef with Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper. Shape into a ball, then flatten on a cutting board to about 1 inch thick burger. Make a shallow depression in the center to allow for expansion while cooking. Preheat gas grill. Oil the grill, cook burger over direct heat, covered, 3-4 minutes per side. Add toppings and cheese for the last minute of cooking.

For marinated onion (makes about 1/2 cup, keep unused portion refrigerated for up to a week): Slice 1 small red onion into very thin rings. Rinse under cold running water, drain. Season with a pinch of sea salt. Toss with 1 Tbsp sherry vinegar and 2 Tbsp white wine vinegar. Let sit 30 minutes at room temperature.

For fried sage: Heat 3 Tbsp olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add 6-8 large sage leaves. Cook until crisp, 3-4 minutes, turning carefully with tongs. Dry on paper towels. Use to garnish grilled meats, soups and salads. Cool and reserve the aromatic oil for use in salads.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:San Rafael, CA

Grilling simplicity

I am a victim of a steak accident: the five large grass fed New York steaks that I left at my dear friend K's freezer in order for him to bring the still frozen steaks to our ski cabin in Tahoe, he forgot. Instead, he brought them to the last Saturday's picnic in Sonoma. Carefully defrosted. Together with a couple of gallons of lamb and beef kabobs, marinated with red wine and onions. For the seven of us.

Of course, after struggling to get down all the kabobs (delicious, just way too much!) no one cold even think about the steaks. So they gave them all to me, to take home. I told them I already have a large chunk of beef tenderloin at home. They wouldn't listen. So R. and I are stuck with steaks for the rest of the week.
Luckily, I have a wonderful cookbook to read for inspiration, Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way . It's all about steaks and wood fire, including a recipe for a whole cow, roasted over wood coals on a metal frame. If he can do a cow, I can do 5 strips and a tenderloin. And I have the Farmers Market for the vegetable support.
Grilled baby artichokes and Russian Banana fingerling potatoes:

Remove the outer leaves from baby artichokes, trim the stalks. Cut the artichokes in half, place in a pot with cold water, a pinch of salt, and a lemon, cut in half. Bring to boil and cook until they can be pierced easily with a knife, about 10 minutes. Drain and let cool.

Cover the fingerling potatoes with boiling water, parboil until tender, 15-20 minutes. Drain, let cool a little, cut in half lengthwise.

Preheat the grill to hot.

Season 1/2 cup mild olive oil with salt and pepper. Toss the vegetables with the oil. (Brush the remaining oil on the steaks.) Grill the vegetables until slightly charred, turning once.

Grill the steaks on one side without moving them, until they come easily off the grill, about 3 -4 minutes. Lift and rotate 60 degrees. Grill for 2 minutes. Turn and grill to desired donness. Press the steak (carefully, hot!) with a finger. When it's as soft as the first joint of your index finger it is rare, the medium joint is medium, and the top joint is well done. Or use a termometer.

I don't specify the quantities here. Everyone's steak accidents are different.

A simple salad of mixed greens and heirloom tomatoes is dressed with juice and minced rind of one small blood orange + 2 Tbsp EVOO + salt&pepper.

Malbec.

Food for skiers. Goulash soup.

Lake Tahoe is my love forever. In summer, the unbelievably blue color of the water, the clearest one can swim in, and the magical smell of tall pine trees in the sun are enough to make me happy. In winter… I am a skier, do I have to explain? I’ve been coming to some of my favorite Tahoe ski resorts for years, some seasons every weekend plus a few week days, when the snow report makes it impossible to go to the office.

Every mountain has its character, defined both by the terrain and people who work there. There is a place that has a famous ski school and offers lessons on advanced techniques and guided backcountry tours; another one is so enormously big that you can ski there for days and never do the same run twice; there is a mountain with the best fresh runs in the trees, and one where the lifties always play just the right kind of music.

However, all California ski resorts are missing one important thing: good food on the mountain. Skiing is a sport, and very energy-consuming one, if you do it right. It makes one hungry. And if you got hungry in the middle of the day on one of our mountains, the options are few:
- Go to one of the messy crowded slopeside “restaurants” and see if you can stand the look and smell of the fast-food-quality food on bent paper plates (and can afford it).
- Call it a day, and go to a restaurant in town, or back to the cabin and cook.
- If you brought sandwiches and were carrying them in your backpack, chances are that you fell a couple of times, or leaned on the back of the lift chair, or something. Then you and your buddies can get your sandwiches out and have some good fun comparing resulting shapes and counting pieces. But the sandwiches will be cold.

My solution so far has been: smashed and broken homemade ham and cheese sandwiches or beef pierogi from my backpack + paper cup of hot wine from a cafe.

A few days ago I found a blog post of my friend’s friend, posting from San Anton am Arlberg, a Tyrolean ski resort where my brother from and I like to meet and ski for one week every few years. We would stay in the village of Lech (San Anton covers two valleys and five villages, you can get from one to another by bus, or on skis and lifts – this takes some time and work). That blog post reminded me how we used to get on the lift next to our hotel in Lech in the morning and ski down the other side to Zurs. There we would enjoy some very long steep red pistes, some off-piste powder skiing, and by the lunchtime we would come to Seekopf, the ski foodie’s dream.

The restaurant sits in the middle of the mountain, overlooking Zurssee lake, lifts and ski trails; accessed by chairlift. It has a large patio and an extensive ski rack outside. Mostly Tyrolean traditional food is great, and you eat it from real plates, and drink your weissbier from a tall elegant glass, and your gluhwein from a cozy ceramic mug, while watching avalanches going down distant slopes.

Sausages rule the menu, of course. For soups (and the weather calls for a soup) they have Austrian goulashsuppe and an unlikely chili. (Californians should all go to Austria to sample chili and to learn how to make it. The best chili is not made from a can in a microwave, but is actually cooked using meat, beans, and peppers. )

Austrians adopted goulash from their Hungarian neighbors, who make it as a thick stew of beef and beef heart with a lot of paprika. In Austria, they left out the beef heart, and made goulash into a soup. Hot, fragrant, and filling, perfect lunch on a cold day.

My goulashsuppe is reverse-engineered from what I had in Zurs. I cooked it at home this time, but I wish I could get a bowl of it, or a decent chili, and a mug of hot wine, in any Tahoe ski resort, right next to the lift.

Hungarian paprika comes in hot and mild varieties. I am not very heat-tolerant, so I always use mild. That's just personal taste.

Goulash soup
4 large servings

2.5 lb beef chuck, trimmed of fat and cut into 1 inch cubes
1 large yellow onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, chopped
2 Tbsp olive oil + more if needed
1 large (28 oz) can whole peeled tomatoes, with juice
1 red bell pepper, cored and chopped
3 cups beef or chicken stock
2 tsp Hungarian paprika
1 tsp caraway seed
2 bay leaves, broken into a few pieces
4-5 dried oregano sprigs (1/2 tsp)
4 juniper berries, lightly crushed
salt, pepper

Optional garnish: 4 tsp creme fraiche, 4 sprigs of parsley

Brown the beef on all sides in a heavy large sautee pan with some oil over high heat.

Heat a little oil in a medium heavy pot over medium heat. Add onions and cook, stirring, until transparent. Add garlic and cook another minute. Add tomatoes, peppers and stock. Bring to a low simmer. Season with paprika, caraway, oregano, bay leaves, juniper berries, salt and pepper.

Reduce the heat to maintain the lowest simmer. Cook until the beef is very tender, about 2 hours.

Divide between bowls, garnish with creme fraiche and parsley. Serve with a mug of hot wine, or a glass of beer.

Christmas roast beef well done. Lesson learned.

I don't use my convection oven too often. In fact, I even try to adjust some oven recipies for stovetop.

I know, it's a luxury to have a convection oven in a rental place, but in a small place with an open kitchen the loud oven fan sounds so annoying that it takes most of the pleasure out of cooking, and there is no escape from it. If I have to use the oven, I'd better know how long it would take, and go for a walk to get away from the sound.

As a result, I don't know the oven's character too well. It's OK for slow-cooking braises, where an extra 15 minutes won't make a lot of difference, or for baking small things - I'll just sit outside in the garden, and come check my cookies every five minutes.

A New York beef roast is different. It takes a while to cook, and the timing should be precise. I had figured 10 minutes searing at 500, then 1 hour at 325 for a 4 lb. roast should be good. So I seared the roast, reduced the temperature, and went for a short hike in the hills.

When I was back, the roast was medium-well done! You can see that all the bloody life is gone out of it's center. It turnes out that the convection cooks beef much faster than the usual 15 minutes per pound.

Well, this made R. happy - he thinks that I usually undercook my meat (not that it would stop him from enjoying it), and I learned a lesson.

I was very happy with the rest of the dinner: red wine and mustard sauce, roast potatoes and garlic, steamed bok choy, baby arugula salad with persimmons and pomergranate vinaegrette dressing, and especially with the wine. A forgotten bottle of Dry Creek Mariner meritage 2004 turned up on the bottom of the wine refrigerator by surprise; the wine was wonderful, and the cork was at it's limit, a couple more month and the wine would be in trouble.

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Tasting a new mushroom:

Matsutake mushrooms have been all the rage recently. From the Farmers Market to foodie blogs everyone is very excited about their unique aroma.

I approached them in the market a few times, but I didn't like the smell at all, and ended up getting other mushrooms instead.

This Saturday, while shopping at San Francisco ferry building, we were confronted by the wealth of mushrooms at Far West Fungi. The selection is overwhelming. They have black and white truffles ("Why so expensive? Are they hallucinogenic?"), porcinis, two tipes of chanterelles, and about any other mushroom I've seen in this country; fresh, dried, canned, and mushroom-seeded logs to grow your own. I had to satisfy my curiosity this time, and gor fresh matsutakes.

I cooked them with a little onion and rice, smelling all the time in the hope for the wonderful aroma to emerge in cooking. They smell the same cooked. I find their sharp resinious smell mildly irritating, chemical, and not food-like at all. They smell of a pine forest all right, but not of a sunny bright pines by a sea shore that I hoped to get, but of wet, cold pines on a rainy day, with a highway nearby.

It reminds me of retsina, the Greek wine that was traditionally preserved by sealing it with pine resin. I managed to develop a taste for chilled retsina on a hot afternoon, with bright lemony Greek summer fare; similar smell in a fall mushroom just doesn't make sense to me.

So this fashionable mushroom didn't take. I'll give it another chance by grilling it next time. But the first impression is that for the same money I would rather have porcini every time.

The longest night of the year

It's not just the longest night, it's the darkest, the storm raving outside, the power going off every 15 minutes. Cold. Dark. Wet. Coyotes cry in the hills.

The good news is that the days will get longer from now on. And that the rains brought fresh tender greens to the farmer's market. As a matter of fact, these market greens are never green. The chicories range from pink to deep blood red:

And the purple kale shows a dramatic combination of grayish-blue with bright violet.
The pea shoots are green all right. They just made their first appearance this season, and they are oh so tender.

So the dinner for the longest and darkest night of the year is all about color: beef tenderloin steak with red wine sauce, sunny soft polenta, wilted pea shoots, and a salad of bitter greens with balsamic vinaegrette.

And a bottle of Bordeaux.

The spring is coming.

Beef skewers with mushroom pilaf

It's fall here, and this means the weather has to get bad on weekends. It's still sunny and the 90'es over the week, but Saturday comes and it starts raining.
Now I'm really sorry that I came back from Maui.

It rained this Saturday, so the trails in the hills got all muddy, and we couldn't go for a hike. So as soon as the rain stopped, we went to San Rafael downtown, to have an espresso and to go for a walk afterwards.

The main street was closed to traffic, and there were crowds, music, and delicious smells. We parked a couple of blocks from the event, and went to see what it's all about. It was BBQ and Blues Festival. The blues musicians competed on two stages, set at the opposite ends of the area, and there was a large span in the middle where you could actually hear both bands at the same time. And between the stages, huge southern barbeque grills, barbeque carts and barbeque vagons were making grilled corn, sausages, chicken, pork, and beef roasts, and filling the area with dense, wonderful smelling smoke. We sampled a few, and ordered the one we liked the best, a tri-tip roast sandwich from Jake's BBQ.

Unfortunately, the piece we sampled was the last one of a batch, and it takes about an hour to slow-roast a tri-tip. We didn't mind the wait. We hung there, drunk wine and beer, watched people, talked to Jake, and inhaled the barbeque smell. The next tri-tip roast was ready just as I was getting tired of hearing two bands at once.

So we got our tender medium-rare tri-tip slices on a sandwich roll, with "medium-hot" sauce that I could barely eat without crying. And to reward us for waiting, Jake gave as a jar of his dry rub. He also shared his roasing technique: toss the tri-tip in the dry rub, sear it over direct heat on both sides, then move it over indirect, and roast slowly to 120-125 degrees for rare or 130-135 for medium, about 1 hour. Slice against the grain.

I used Jake's dry rub for these beef kabobs: cut beef sirloin into 1 in cubes, tossed them with the dry rub, let sit for about an hour (meanwhile prepared the pilaf and heated the gas grill to about 400F). Threaded the meat on skewers, brushed with light olive oil, grilled, turning three times, about 9 minutes.

Garnished with Farmers Market heirloom tomatoes (I am researching colors and textures for my next food styling class, so the tomatoes have to be of at least two varieties), and tiny rosemary sprigs. Served over mushroom pilaf, to celebrate the Fall.

Mushroom Rice Pilaf

serves 2

2 Tbsp light olive oil
1 medium or 1/2 large onion, chopped
2 large garlic cloves, minced
8 medium white mushrooms, coarsly chopped
2 Tbsp dried porcini mushrooms, crumbled
1/2 cup frozen baby peas
1 cup Basmati rice
2 cups hot water
6 drops black truffle oil (optional)
salt, pepper

Heat the oil in a large deep pan over medium heat. Add the onions and garlic, sautee till the onion becomes transparent and starts to turn golden. Add the chopped mushrooms, frosen peas and dried porcini, add a little salt and pepper, turn up the heat to medium-high, stir until the liquid released by the mushrooms and peas evaporates. Add the rice and cook, stirring, for 1 minute.

Add the water, reduce the heat to low, cover, and cook for about 20 minutes, or until the rice is tender.

Add the (optional) truffle oil, adjust the seasoning, fluff the pilaf with a fork, and serve.

Steak Tartare

I was browsing through piles of mostly useless stuff in a discount store the other day, in hopes to find some props for my next food styling class, and this book caught my attention. I hate it when people try to tell me what I should do before I die; my own list requires me to live at least another 150 years. So the book is 101 Dishes to Eat Before You Die, by Stefan Gates, a British food adventurer. I would pass, but it had nice photographs with well done styling, there was a story or two included with each recipe, and it was just $6 – so I bought it. Then I went to Amazon to give you a link and found out that it’s not yet available. These discount stores are full of surprises.

Despite the author’s excessive, to my taste, use of the first-person singular personal pronoun (for a book, that is. It’s fine in a blog), the stories are entertaining, informative, nostalgic, and spiced up with irresistible British humor. I don’t care much for the recipes: besides using shortcuts like store-bought red currant sauce or Chinese pancakes and not being precise, most recipes are so well known to any Western cook that you don’t really need to read them to start cooking.

I do agree with the author on most of his must-try dish suggestions, and I cannot agree more on Steak Tartare. It’s surprising how many meat lovers don’t know about this classic, simple and stylish dish. There are many versions explaining why this French dish of seasoned raw beef got its name. Stefan’s explanation is that it was named so because ancient Tatars were known to be bloodthirsty. He also mentions that in rural France the Tartare is sometimes made with horsemeat. But he doesn’t connect the Tartare to anything in Tatar cuisine, which traditionally uses horsemeat, may be more often then beef and lamb. I have to do some research; there must be a Tatar recipe that the French transformed to make their own.

As a descendant of the bloodthirsty ancient warriors, I have taken my horseback riding lessons, but I am still waiting to try horsemeat (I've had a sausage made with horsemeat, but with all the other stuff they put in sausages it's very hard to tell what the meat really tastes like). But you know what? There was a nice cut of beef in my refrigerator, a tenderloin tip that I was just going to grill. So why would the proud daughter of the ancient nomads cook her meat if she can devour it raw? It’s Steak Tartare for dinner.

Of course, if you buy your fine cut of meat packaged in a supermarket, you can expect to turn it over and discover all the fat and sinews still attached. The supermarket has to make some money, after all! I used the technique that I learned from my brother, a vascular surgeon and a gourmet with a passion for red meats (and all things with fat and cholesterol in them), to carefully separate the muscle from the sinews with my fingers, no knife required, resulting in very pure meat, and lost very little in trimmings. Then I got out my favorite chef’s knife and minced the meat. A grinder or food processor doesn’t give you the same texture, so it’s worth it to spend a few minutes chopping.

Most Tartare recipes call for Tabasco or some hot sauce. I cannot eat anything that hot, so I left it out. If you like spicy foods, add it back.

All ingredients should be cold; refrigerate them for at least 30 minutes before cooking.

Steak Tartare
Serves 2

½ pound tenderloin tip, trimmed and minced
1 shallot, minced
1 Tbsp capers, rinsed, drained and chopped
4 anchovy fillets, chopped
1 tsp Dijon mustard
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1 Tbsp cognac
salt, pepper

2 whole raw egg yolks

Mix all ingredients except egg yolks in a bowl. Divide between two plates, shape into fat patties. Make a depression in the middle of each patty and carefully place an egg yolk in it.
Serve with boiled potatoes and green salad.

Diners mix the egg yolk with the meat at the table.

Alternative: Divide the meat only between plates. Serve all ingredients in separate small bowls and let the diners mix their own. Don’t forget to put salt and pepper mills and a bottle of Tabasco on the table.

Grilled Tri-Tip with Chimichurri

Tri-tip roast is a treasure. Exceptionally flavorful, quite tender when cooked to medium-rare, perfect shape for marinating and grilling, and cheaper than the tomatoes that I bought to make a salad to go with it! The size (1.5-2lb) makes two servings, plus a couple of sandwiches for the man to take to work the next day. And it's very traditionally Californian too: the classical way to cook it is Santa Maria style.

Here I gave the tri-tip roast a South American accent by marinating it in chimichurri sauce, and using more chimichurri to serve it. Most recipes recommend to grill the tri-tip roast over medium indirect heat, then sear it over high direct for a few minutes. The one I had was small, a little over 1.5 lb, and relatively thin, and I used my monster gas grill that gets very hot but has to be covered, so I figured that if I sear it first, it may not require additional roasting - and I was right! The little meat termometer inserted in the thick part of the roast was showing between "rare" and "medium" by the time the grill marks were ready on both sides.


One of the reasons why I try to have fresh herbs growing in the garden or in containers at home all the time is that most herbs don't keep too well. So need a few sprigs for a dish, you buy one of these huge bunches in the supermarket, and you are either stuck with putting dill or cilantro on everything that you cook for a week, or you toss most of it, feeling sorry as you do; or both.
Parsley is a different story. After a friend came back from Argentina and told me how they make chimichurri to go with their famous steaks, I am not afraid to buy all the parsley they want to sell me! Even when there is a lot of it growing outside, I can always use more.

I replace some of the vinegar in the original recipe with lemon juice to make the sauce even more tangy and fresh, and add a lot of garlic, just because I love it, and to make up for the heat of the chillies that I cannot eat. The recipe below makes almost 2 cups. Leftover sauce can be stored in a covered container in the refrigerator for about 10 days and used with any meat or even grilled fish, in sandwiches, or add more olive oil and dress a salad with it.


Grilled Tri-Tip Roast with Chimichurri
3 servings

for chimichurri:
1 large bunch of parsley, chopped
5-6 large garlic cloves, chopped
1 hot chili pepper of your preference, seeded and chopped (optional)
juice and grated rind of 1 lemon
1/2 cup of white wine vinegar
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup of olive oil

1 tri-tip roast, 1.5-2 lb, trimmed of most of the fat

Puree all the chimichurri ingredients except the oil in a blender. Stir in the oil.

Place the beef in a glass or plastic container (or a large plastic bag), spread 3-4 Tbsp of the chimichurri on both sides. Close and refrigerate for at least 4 hours and up to 2 days.

Remove the roast from the container and wipe off most of the marinade (discard the marinade).
Grill over high direct heat about 8 minutes on each side. Check for donness (anywhere from rare to medium is good, overcooked=tough). If not done, roast for additional 10-15 minutes over indirect medium heat.

Remove the roast from the grill to a cutting board, let sit for 10 minutes. Slice thinly against the grain. Serve with additional chimichurri.