Looking for a steak recipe

"If you want to sell a steak, you can't just have the sizzle, you gotta have sauce." Don King

One of my New Year's resolutions was to cook at least one new dish from an actual recipe each week. But I have been failing miserably. I think I have perhaps done it twice up until now. So I changed the resolution slightly to cooking a 'special' meal for my husband on Fridays that includes one of these new recipe dishes. Maybe this will really make me do it. After all he might start asking where his 'special' meal is! And today is my first go at this - dessert is done - chocolate mousse - an oldie and a goodie. Now have I written about this before? I think not so it goes on to my list of potential subjects.

Because it was for my husband I asked him to at least nominate a vague category - a style, an ingredient, etc. And he suggested steak. Which is good because I did have some steak in the freezer waiting to be used and it's a bit special in this house. I don't consider myself to be much of a star with steak so we don't have it very often. I always overcook it, or it's too thin or too tough.

It couldn't be pepper steak. We have had that a few times, and so I started searching my cookbooks. Actually more difficult than I thought it would be. Most of the recipes I found - and really there weren't that many - were either just too too plain or too elaborate (Mini beef Wellingtons?) or marginally unappealing - with oysters (carpetbag), with foie gras or Roquefort. And, I had left my run too late to marinade it properly. It will only just be at room temperature by the time I cook it.

Then I found Delia's Entrecôte Hongroise and thought I had the solution. It looks pretty tempting

This was yesterday. I noted that I would need crème fraiche and shallots but thought that would be OK - I could get them today. I also thought I had the red pepper required but I don't and they are very expensive in the supermarkets, but nevertheless perhaps I could lash out. But I had completely forgetten that today is Good Friday and all the shops are closed. So then I started to wonder how I could substitute and improvise, but in the end I decided that this was defeating the purpose of the exercise and put it aside as a thought for another time. I have been tempted by this recipe before so maybe I will get to it some time.

I returned to all of my favourite cooks, and some of my less favourite cooks but nothing. Too Asian and trendy, or too elaborate, or I just didn't have the ingredients, having now realised that I had to work with what I had. Surprising how many wanted Vermouth.

So I resorted to the net, where there are thousands of choices of course.

Eventually I decided I was very tempted by this one from The recipe critic - Skillet garlic butter herb steak and potatoes. (Check it out - although the website is a bit annoying with pop up videos and things that are a bit tricky to get rid of.) Not very fancy but potentially one of those so simple but so delicious dishes that you will eat for evermore. However it featured quite a lot of butter - and potatoes - which my husband is not that keen on, so I decided against that too. Mind you we shall absolutely be having potatoes of some sort. Maybe not so buttery though. Then again it wasn't that much butter ...

But in the end I decided to go with Heston Blumenthal's perfect steak - as shown at the top of the page and featured on the SBS website. Simple - the only extras are some garlic, lemon and rosemary. No butter and it's even got shavings of parmesan on top which my husband loves.

And it doesn't sit on anything either. Lots of steak recipes did.

"Everybody has to put purées underneath everything now. It's like people think we need the steak, and then we need some baby food with it." Wolfgang Puck

In fact I was very tempted by a Jamie recipe with pesto - Grilled steak salad with pesto and crostini - until I saw that it was one of those dishes which indeed, sits on a purée - in this case, pesto. It could work though. But why put it underneath rather than on top? And David does like warm salads. Maybe I should rethink and go for that. No there's got to be something in this for me - selfish creature that I am - and you can't really have potatoes with this.

Choosing a recipe is really difficult. I have so many books to choose from that I forgot all about some of them - they may have had the perfect recipe. Maybe I should do something like my lucky dip thing and just do a blind pick, or a semi-blind pick - decide on a cook and/or a book and then do a blind pick.

But how very dilettante this all is. A pastime only for the well-off with nothing better and more worthy to do.

Now how shall I cook the potatoes?

POSTSCRIPT

Well I cooked the potatoes in the oven, cut into wedges, with a tiny bit of grated lemon rind, crushed garlic, chopped rosemary and olive oil - to keep the same flavours as the steak - and it was good.

The steak was also pretty good - maybe one of the best I have done. BUT. To my taste, because of the resting process it was a tad coldish for me. I like my food hot. And there was probably a bit too much lemon juice. I think I had less than he suggested, but then I had less oil too - as 120g of olive oil is a lot. And I think if I had used his quantity it would really have been too oily. It was a tiny bit oily anyway. And not sure why you needed to slice it really. Worth playing around with though. And the slight tase of rosemary shone through.

But I forgot about the shaved Parmesan on top!