Steak, Rosemary Potatoes and Salad

I haven't posted in more than a week - already falling short of my goal to post at least three times per week. There are two reasons for my absence: I have been craving lots of raw foods and salad, so we have resorted to eating more out-of-season foods. I figure raw vegetables is a pregnancy craving I should listen to, but it doesn't make for interesting posts. I also have been reading the Steig Larsson books. Have you read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series? I got the series as a Christmas present, but just got around to starting it last week. It is hard to put the books down, and it is good that I'm on third (and last) book because it is interfering a bit with the rest of my life.


A couple of weeks ago at the farmers' market, one of the farmers was providing cooking advice to another customer on how to cook steak. His advice turned everything I knew on its head. He suggested first cooking the steak in a cast iron pan in the oven and then searing it. He gave a convincing explanation as to why this would cook the steak more evenly and keep more juices inside. I can't remember the details now.

We had a big thick 2 pound sirloin steak, and I tried cooking it at 350 degrees for 15 minutes. When I checked it, it looked gray and hardly cooked it, so I put it in the oven for another 15 minutes. I seared it for 3 minutes on each side, and it looked nicely browned. After letting it rest, we started to slice it and found that it was well done (instead of the medium I was hoping for), but it was still nice and juicy. I would try using this method again, but cooking it only for 15 minutes in the oven. My husband thinks its crazy, but I think I'll give it one more shot and see if I can convince him.

Have you ever tried cooking a steak in the oven first followed by searing? How did it turn out?

This post is part of SuzieQTPies Scraps of Life Link-up, and...

100th Post

This is the 100th post on City Share. This mile marker comes at an appropriate time because we are approaching a time of transition. All the posts thus far have been shaped by cooking and eating our way through our CSA share, but our summer share will end in a month. We are now researching some winter vegetable and meat shares (if you have any suggestions for NYC please let me know). Another change is that I have become motivated to not just keep eating local food, but to begin to incorporate more traditional foods into our diets. I have been inspired by Jenny at Nourished Kitchen and Ann Marie at Cheeseslave and many more. On top of these changes in our diets, we are going to move to Brooklyn next month. We are very excited to have found a lovely apartment with double the space of our current place.

To help me incorporate more traditional foods, I will be participating in Kelly the Kitchen Kop's e-class on Real Food for Rookies. The class has actually already started, but we have been busy lately so I'm just getting ready to begin on my own now. I will be sure to share my new found knowledge from her class.



In celebration of the 100th post, we have a delicious dinner to share with you. We had a flavorful grass-fed steak with sauteed leeks and mushrooms, a beet salad with yogurt dressing and green salad. Ahh, it was a fabulous treat dinner. The steak was delicious, the leeks and mushrooms were so good that we just kept eating them by the forkful before they even made it to the table, and the beet salad made my husband declare that "Beets are dirt candy."


Mushrooms and Leeks

1 T butter
2 leeks, the whites cut in half lengthwise and thinly sliced
3/4 lbs mushrooms, chopped (we used shitake and oyster)
1 T sage, finely chopped
salt and pepper

Heat a cast iron pan over medium heat and add butter. Once the butter is melted, add leeks and cook until translucent. Add mushrooms and sage and cook until the mushroom are tender. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Delicious eaten straight or over chicken, beef, rice, or pretty much anything else.


Look at this beautiful selection of beets.


After they are fork tender, peel the beets with a spoon.


Combine the ingredients for a dressing.


We added the beets and some chopped up carrot tops (parsley would also work) to the dressing, and mixed to combine.

Beet Salad with Yogurt Dressing

5 beets, scrubbed
1 t dry dill
tops of 2 carrots, chopped
1/4 small onion, finely chopped
1 clove of garlic, minced
1/4 C yogurt
salt and pepper

Bring a small pot of water to a boil, and add the beets. Cook until a fork can easily pierce the beets. Remove from the water and let cool. Use a spoon to remove the skin (we sliced ours in half first for the photo). Chop into bite sized pieces. In a bowl, combine dill, carrot tops, onion, garlic and yogurt. Add the beets and stir to coat the beets with dressing. Chill for 30 minutes to let the flavors combine. Salt and pepper to taste.

Thanks to all of you for reading. I appreciate your feedback and comments.

This post is part of Real Food Wednesday, Works-for-Me-Wednesday, Simple Lives Thursday, Ultimate Recipe Swap, Pennywise Platter Thursday, and Tasty Traditions.

Steak with Scalloped Potatoes

I am participating in the Foodbuzz Project Food Blog challenge. If you like what you read, please vote for me by clicking on my profile in the right sidebar and following the directions.

The other day my husband asked me, "How many apartments do you think we have seen since moving to New York City?" The answer is somewhere between several and A LOT. When we moved here two years ago, we sublet an apartment off craigslist that had beautiful photos. We were told it was furnished with cable TV, internet, and a fully stocked kitchen. It sounded great! When we arrived, we found a mattress on the floor, a TV without cable (which means we only got NY1), no internet, a bathtub coated in mildew, and a kitchen that was far from fully stocked. Although, it was so dirty that I didn't want to do any cooking in there anyways. Luckily we had only rented it for five days, and after seeing it we were bound and determined to have a new apartment at the end of that five days.

We looked at several apartments in Cobble Hill, several in Chinatown, several in the Lower East side, and finally ended up just North of Little Italy in Manhattan. Last year, we thought about buying an apartment and we looked at a bunch of places. We ended up deciding against buying a place. Once our lease was coming due, we thought about renting a bigger apartment. We looked in Manhattan and Brooklyn, but our landlord decreased our rent and then nowhere else could compete. This year we have looked at apartments in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn, and the time for a decision is almost here. We love our little apartment in NoLIta (North of Little Italy), but it is really small and we would love to have more space. We will let you know what we decide.


The other night we had steak, scalloped potatoes and salad for dinner. It was our totally local dinner. The steak was amazing. My husband declared that it was the best steak he had ever eaten. It was a local, grass fed rib steak and it had a great beefy flavor. We don't have a grill, so we just cook steak in a cast iron pan on the stove top. Warm up the pan, add a drizzle of oil, and add the steak that has been generously sprinkled with salt and pepper. We cooked it for 5 minutes per side, but cook yours until it's to your liking. We had a simple salad with greens and cherry tomatoes from our farm share and our house vinaigrette. Here is the recipe for our take on scalloped potatoes:

Scalloped Potatoes
2 leeks, whites finely sliced and rinsed
2 medium red potatoes, scrubbed and thinly sliced
1 T oil
2 T butter
salt and pepper

Heat up a large skillet, add some oil and add the potatoes and leeks. Add a quarter cup of water and cover. Cook until the potatoes are tender. Uncover and let the rest of the water evaporate. Remove from the heat and add the butter. Salt and pepper to taste.

I used cultured butter and Himalayan sea salt. The butter had a delicious rich flavor. I used Himalayan sea salt because it is full of beneficial nutrients. They are both new splurges.

This post is part of Real Food Wednesday at Kelly the Kitchen Kop, Works-For-Me Wednesday and Fight Back Friday at Food Renegade.

Making a Plan

We had a busy day walking around Brooklyn. We are considering moving to have some more space, so we were checking to see how we felt in a couple of different neighborhoods. There are lots of nice places, but we are weighing living space, distance to the subways, outdoor spaces, and things to do close by. It is hard because there are so many choices. It feels that we need to keep looking and looking so that we won't miss that one good deal right around the corner. A decision will need to be made in three weeks, which is good. Sometimes it is good to have deadline.

I thought we should get more organized this week and plan out our meals. We are going out of town for a wedding on Friday and Saturday, so this plan will only take us through Thursday. I want to eat up our farm share veggies and our farmers' market finds:

Monday - Stuffed Peppers with some grass-fed ground beef, corn, carrots, garlic, mushrooms and fresh tomato sauce.

Tuesday - Liver and Onions with Collard Greens and Corn on the Cob.

Wednesday - Salmon and a Mediterranean Salad with tomatoes, cucumbers, onion, avocado, chickpeas, sorrel, garlic and feta (inspired by a dish at Miriam Restaurant in Park Slope)

Thursday - Lentil and Beet Salad with goat cheese and beet greens


Last night, we had steak with leeks and mushrooms over some yellow beans (or should they be called wax beans?). It wasn't the most photogenic meal, but it was delicious. The steak was a tough cut, so we cooked it pretty rare.


Steak with Leeks and Mushrooms
1/2 lb steak, thinly sliced
1 head of garlic, minced
2 T soy sauce
Juice of half a lemon
oil
1/2 lb of Oyster mushrooms, chopped
2 leeks, whites finely sliced
2 T butter

Mix the steak, garlic, soy sauce, and lemon juice and let marinate for a few minutes. Heat a skillet and coat it with oil. Add the steak mixture and quickly toss it in the pan for a minute and turn off the heat. Cook mushrooms, leeks in the butter until brown (about 10 minutes). Combine and enjoy!

This post is part of Monday Mania and The Healthy Home Economist.

Red, Green or Christmas... Salsa

In New Mexico, when you order a meal they always ask, "Red, green, or Christmas?" They are asking about the type of chilies you would like. Would you like red, green or both (Christmas)? Tonight we had a bunch of tomatillos and several tomatoes that needed to be eaten pronto. We went on a little salsa making spree and made both red and green varieties.

I looked up several tomatillo salsa or salsa verde recipes and averaged them together to create a recipe we used tonight. I made one major change: I cooked the tomatillos in a cast iron skillet instead of oven roasting them as the recipes suggested. This hot weather friendly technique worked out well. We made our tomato salsa from a recipe we have used many times before.


Here is the finished product:



Of course red and green salsa is not enough for a meal, so we prepared several other veggies that needed to be eaten up too. My husband sauteed some onions, peppers and fennel. The fennel was strangely spicy. As he started cooking it, it made us start coughing the way hot peppers would. I'm back to not liking fennel. I had to pick it out of my veggies because it was making my tongue burn. The time I liked Parmesan fennel must have been a fluke.

My husband also cooked up some rainbow chard with garlic, and I prepared some black beans and local grass-fed steak. The steak was delicious - tender with lots of flavor! We both decided to have Christmas salsa. After the photo, we pretty much put the salsas on everything because they were so good!



Tomatillo Salsa or Salsa Verde
8 small tomatillos, quartered
1 clove of garlic, roughly chopped
1/2 lime juice
1 jalapeno, seeds and ribs removed, roughly chopped
1 thick slice of onion
1/2 bunch of cilantro, stems removed
1/4 t salt (or to taste)
oil

Heat a cast iron skillet and coat the bottom with oil. Add the tomatillos and cook until softened. Remove from the pan and add to the food processor or blender. Add the rest of the ingredients and blend until smooth. Refrigerate for at least an hour before serving to let the flavors meld.

This post is part of Two for Tuesdays at A Moderate Life blog.