Ground – Kofta Kebabs

Helluva weekend.

Took in a Dodgers game, hit the Getty, and got some stuff done around the house. It was both productive and fun, which is the best kind of weekend.

Sunday afternoon, it’s time to think about dinner. I want to do something a little out of my normal routine.

I’ve been considering doing kebabs for a while. And I don’t remember how the idea got into my head, but I’ve been wanting to do kofta kebabs, specifically. I think I had them in a restaurant at some point in the vague, detail-deficient past. I enjoyed them, and I certainly have no shortage of ground beef.

Kofta kebabs are essentially balls of spiced ground beef or lamb (usually lamb), grilled on a kebab skewer. I want to do them up with a little tzatziki sauce and maybe a little feta. The recipe I’m roughly basing this on is here.

The tzatziki sauce will take the longest by a fair margin, so I start with that. Grate a cucumber, pinch of salt, and let it chill in a bowl for a half hour or so to jettison some of the water in the plant. All that water will mess up the creamy loveliness of the sauce.

Seeded...

...and grated.

On to other things. Beef, grated onion, parsley, and spices go into a bowl, as does a clove of garlic, smashed with a little salt.

Meat properly spiced, I pause to consider. The recipe calls for chilling the beef for a period of time to let the spices mingle, but also, I believe, to firm up the fats so the little kofta balls will stay kofta balls. Time is at a premium for me right now, so I won’t be chilling them very long. I’d like some insurance.

So I break an egg into the meat. That should help bind the meat together. Other recipes call for it, this one doesn’t, but an egg certainly won’t hurt anything.

Right. Meat’s chilling, back to the tzatziki. I drain the cuke, add into the Greek yogurt (which is considerably thicker than common whole milk yogurt, so don’t try to sub straight across), a little salt, extra-virgin olive oil, lemon juice, another garlic-smashed-with-salt dose, and mint. Into the fridge with it.

Nothing left to do but wait.

"That's the box where Deliciousness lives..."

Thirty minutes later, I’m grilling.

They're like Rockettes.

Thirty five minutes later, I’m done.

I pull the tzatziki, toss out some feta and grill some pita for a few seconds. To the table.

Plating, and we’re golden.

Literally, golden. Check out that magic hour.

Verdict? Not bad. Not a show-stopper by any means, but not a tragedy. And we had plenty of leftovers, so I’m going to be doing this for lunch all next week.

Everything was a touch salty for my tastes. I think I know why.

I believe this meal fell afoul of some technical difficulties on my part. Remember the garlic crushed with salt into a coarse paste? That salt acts as an abrasive to the garlic, ripping up cell walls and letting all the garlicky goodness permeate its surroundings. I used that technique for both the meat and the tzatziki. Plus I added some salt, as per the recipe. Plus I added feta, which carries its own not-insignificant sodium load. As a result, I believe the meat itself became a touch oversalted, then the tzatziki and feta compounded the problem.

If I were to make it again in the future, I’d probably cut the salt by at least twenty five percent. Further, and perhaps more importantly, I wouldn’t abrade the garlic with salt. I’d just chop/smash/mangle the heck out of it. I think the benefit from abrading the garlic is offset by the danger of over-salting the dish.

For lunches this week, I’ll ditch the feta and possibly the sauce. Hell, I may even remake the tzatziki, since it’s so easy.

EDIT: I checked the reviews of this recipe on the Foodtv website. The overwhelming majority of the reviewers say this dish was too salty. I concur. It isn’t just me. Dial it back. Dial it way back.

The Wife Says: Six thumbs up out of ten. Too salty.

I’m gonna get a glass of water.

Welcome!

I bought a cow. Now I’m cooking it.

This is one man’s attempt to make the best use of an entire cow that he possibly can. I hope to make the best dishes I’m able, share them with friends, and learn a thing or two in the process.

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Thanks for stopping by.

Round – Emerald Stir Fry

Saturday morning! Is there anything better?

I mean, really. It’s a beautiful sunny day in city that’s full of them.  Let’s make the most of it.

First things first. Haircut. I look like Australopithecus.

Post-shearing, I’m alone in an empty house. Wife and son have scampered off to our local Temple of Unpleasantness.

Maybe I can put lunch in front of them when they get home.

We’ve recently received a shipment of veggies from L.O.V.E. Delivery, so I have a ton of options. A quick peek in The Freezer, and a package of “fajita/stirfry beef” is staring me in the face. Works for me. I’ve been wanting to make a stirfry for a while.  My wok hasn’t been used in ages, and it’s starting to get despondent.

My Google Fu yields this. It’s just about perfect.

I set the stirfry package to thaw in water, with a trickle from the tap giving me a little convection current to speed the process. I hate to do it, as we’re in a drought and living like fremen, so I kill the trickle before it’s fully thawed.

The meat. I check my Cut/Wrap sheet, and my stirfry meat is bottom round. After de-packaging, this becomes apparent. It’s pre-sliced by the butcher and ready to rock. Frankly, it looks a lot like my jerky did before I cured it.

Time to cook. The mise:

This recipe uses a sweet Japanese wine called mirin that I’ve never used before. I’m intrigued.

I enjoy sake. I wonder what this stuff’s like?

It's like that.

Don’t try this at home. It’s crazy sweet.

I build the sauce base out of mirin, o.j., soy sauce, brown rice vinegar, red pepper and water. Broccoli and edamame are prepped and standing by (note to self: use frozen, already-shelled edamame next time. Shelling this much edamame is a pain). Beef’s ready. Oil and aromatics (just garlic) ready to go in first.

Stirfry is like a train (choo choo, not wedding dress). Everything’s living in the same cooking vessel, so you have to manage your workflow pretty carefully to make sure nothing burns and everything gets done at the same time. The prep is very nearly as important as the actual time spent in front of the wok. Proper preparation prevents piss-poor performance.

I light the fire under the wok. Oil in. Minutes later I flick a little water in there, and it does the happy dance. Beef in, and the train pulls away from the station.

Beef has some color on it, but I don’t want to cook it all the way yet, otherwise it’ll either be overdone when the veggies are finished, or it’ll be cold. Out it comes, and onto a plate. Little more oil. Minced garlic in.

I smell garlic. In go the edamame and broccoli. The recipe calls for some other greenery, but I didn’t use it because a) I didn’t have them, and b) I don’t wanna. Stir, stir, stir.

Veggies are a little soft. In goes my sauce (which I mixed beforehand and had standing by. You can’t add individual liquids sequentially in a stifry, or they’ll evaporate at different rates. Also, it takes forever. Prep!)

I let the sauce reduce a little, then add some cornstarch-in-water to help it thicken, and follow up by adding the beef back in to finish cooking.

I have a moment to breathe, so I take a photo.

I cook another few minutes. The beef is done and everything looks great, except I have way too much sauce, and it’s way too runny. Probably because I omitted approximately half my veggies. That’s cool. I have a friend who can fix this, and his name is cornstarch.

Soon, all is right with the world.

But soft! What sound through yonder back door breaks? It is the garage door opener. And my wife and son are back from the dreaded mall.

Just in time for lunch.

I also had brown rice going on a back burner. Did I mention that?

Verdict: We really enjoyed it. It was really bright and lovely, and the sauce complemented but didn’t overpower the beef. Add in the edamame and it’s a protein bonanza, which is fantastic if you’re trying to build muscle mass (which I’m not, and furthermore find hilarious) or just like edamame (which I do). Also, broccoli is a bona fide superfood. For example, a half cup of broccoli has more Vitamin C than an orange. Your mama was right, broccoli is crazy good for you.

It was a relatively quick, healthy meal, and pretty easy to do provided you prep well. We’re gonna do something like this again.

And now, a new feature – The Wife Says. No, I’m not trying to get all Of Mice And Men on you, but my lovely wife is a bit twitchy about me plastering her name all over the interwebs.

Anyway, it’s easy for me to say everything I make is fabulous, so I’m introducing a slightly less biased opinion. Hence the new feature.

And The Wife Says: Seven stars out of ten. She enjoyed the meal. It was a solid outing in the stirfry realm, and something she thinks I could definitely master if I did it more. She ate leftovers. That’s something.

Next up: kofta kebabs.

Round – Chicken Fried Steak

Sunday afternoon. I think to myself, “Man. I’d really like a salad.”

Quick poke around the fridge. Not so much in the way of salad material. Some romaine hearts. A couple of veggies in the crisper that haven’t yet evolved into sentience, but nothing that really goes together. Hm. I guess I’ll just do a super-simple salad and knock together a quick vinaigrette to make it a little special.

Alright, so my salad can be a side salad. That raises other questions for dinner, since I can’t make that a standalone dish. I need a main course.

Let’s poke around in the freezer. Meh.

Let’s poke around in The Freezer.

I pull out a piece labeled “tenderized round steak.” I used some top round in jerky a couple of weeks ago, and it turned out really well. I saw these steaks back then, and they piqued my interest. Plus, I still haven’t used the new Jaccard I picked up the other day.

Let’s do Chicken Fried Steak.

This dish reminds me of home. I developed a fondness for it waiting tables at a pancake house in Kansas. It’s the perfect end to a long night of trying not to get your ponytailed ass knocked to the ground by a throng of drunken faux-cowboys. Good times.

For this one, I’m going back to Alton Brown.

The mise:

I warm the oven to 250. How do I know?

Hey, look! I'm not an idiot anymore!

No more trips to Chucktown for me.

The two round steaks are thawed and ready. I dredge them with seasoned flour. The “tenderized” on the label was no joke. These things have been thoroughly perforated.

But I wanna use my new, pretty Jaccard, so give them another once-over.

le jaccard

At this point I can almost see daylight through them, so I’m calling them sufficiently tenderized. I don’t want them to look like a meat doily on the plate.

I let the steaks sit for a few so the crust can cement to the meat. Meanwhile, I heat up a little canola in a stockpot (my frying pan isn’t big enough) and stare off into middle distance.

Basil's supervising.

She has flour on her flank. Not fussed about it

At this point, I start to think about the other veggies I have laying around. I just picked up some white onions. I don’t think they’d do well on my side salad, though. What else? I have a lot more canola oil, because we were running out…

Where’s my mandoline?

It slices! It dices!

Steaks go into a little hot, shimmery oil. Long enough to get some Golden Brown and Delicious on, then a flip.

Onions go into a lot of hot, shimmery oil. Long enough to get some Golden Brown and Delicious on, then a rescue.

Everything goes into gently warm – and accurately measured – oven.

Did I mention I'm not an idiot anymore?

Steaks done – into oven. Onion rings done – into oven.

Gravy time. I have too much cooking oil in the pan, so I siphon a little off. In goes some flour to make a little roux (while whisking). Then a quick deglaze with chicken broth (while whisking), add milk and thyme and cook it down (while whisking).  Pause to admire my work (while whiskeying).

Everything’s ready. We plate up, and I snap a shot with the focus-challenged remnants of The Great Camerageddon of ’09.

One of these things is not like the other.

Therein lies a problem. How am I supposed to keep gravy from getting on my lettuce?

That's how.

Denuded of vegetation, dinner’s ready.

Simpler times, indeed.

Verdict? If you like Chicken Fried Steak, this is better than most of those you’ll get in a restaurant. Plus, you know where it comes from. There’s no What-The-Hell-Am-I-Eating? mystery about this meat.

I enjoyed this dish, and it was a big hit with my son, who doesn’t generally dig meat. That said, I think I could have needled it a little more (despite my butcher’s prep), and probably fried it a little longer.

As a side note, if you dig onion rings, think very hard about making them at home. They’re not difficult, and they’re shockingly good. You just need a lot of oil and good temperature control.

In all, a great way to end a weekend.

Though I never did get that salad.

Eye Round – Roast

I bet you thought I was going to let the rest of that eye round go to waste, didn’t you?

This is Year of the Cow, not Year of Some Of The Cow.

After my (phee phi) pho phun, I had a half an eye round roast left. It weighed about a pound.

I needed to do something with it.

A lot of my dishes here have been dinner-y meals. But with this, I wanted to do something lunch-y. Something I could whip up in a hurry.

So Friday when I got home from work, I pulled out my eye round. I rubbed it with canola oil, salt and pepper, seared it for two minutes a side, then dropped it into a Ziploc bag with a handful of bruised sage, some rosemary sprigs, and something like a half a bottle of Merlot. Then I chucked it into the fridge and forgot about it while I wandered off with the rest of the wine.

Next afternoon, I emptied the content of said bag into a dutch oven, lidded up, and parked it in the oven at three hundred degrees before wandering off to do something or other.

When my new – wonderful! – meat thermometer chirped at me, I pulled my dutch oven and stashed the whole thing in the fridge. Back to my distractions.

Sunday morn, I put the dutch oven back on the fire, warmed the meat, then pulled it and reduced the liquid to a nice little sauce.

My wife had whipped up some sandwich bread the day before. A little swiss, some of my thinly sliced eye round, and bingo. With a little red wine reduction sauce for dipping.

Lunch

Verdict: It turned out well. It was a nice little roast beef sandwich, but it wasn’t a showstopper. We’ll keep the rest and slice it for lunch sandwiches next week.

The roast was a little dry. I take this to be partly my fault – I think more liquid during the braise and the reheat would have benefited the dish. In addition, the piece just dries out easily. There’s no fat on it to preserve moisture. Further, I think slicing it even thinner would really benefit this particular cut. I need to pick up a full-blown slicer. I love my chef’s knife, but it’s not able to slice this meat as thinly as I’d like.

The sauce really helped the sandwiches. We kept it on the side and treated it like a french dip. It was hearty and earthy… slightly sharp with the wine and the sage.

My wife’s bread, as usual, was a high point.

Next up, chicken fried steak.

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