Summoning the fire department: lessons in cooking steak

It was just a normal night, no special occasion, but I decided that I wanted to cook a special meal for the Russian. We had never cooked steak before and I found a recipe that sounded amazing, so it was time to try something new.

The recipe is “Greek beef tenderloin in togas with Mediterranan orzo and Greek salad”.  Sounds fancy, right?! It is actually a Rachael Ray recipe, so it turned out to be surprisingly simple.  But in true Lady and the Russian form, we learned a lesson in how not to cook steak. We also learned that when a recipe calls for something to be used sparingly, we really should take notice.

There are many steps to putting the steaks and their “togas” together, but one of the first calls for cooking the meat for a couple of minutes in a pan in order to get a nice golden-brown crust on the outside before it gets dressed in it’s toga and put in the oven.

It specifically mentions to drizzle the steak sparingly with extra virgin olive oil before putting it in the pan.

Note: SPARINGLY.

So while I’m preparing the phyllo dough togas for the steak to go in, the Russian is prepping the meat. Except there was some confusion about what “sparingly” means, and instead the meat gets completely covered in oil.. and a little more goes into the screaming hot pan.

You can all pretty much guess what happens next.  The meat hits the pan and all of that oil quickly burns off into a massive amount of smoke.  So much smoke that we had to open all of the windows.. and the front door! So much smoke that the cat had to retreat to the bedroom, probably so she could breathe.

On a side note, I learned that my smoke alarm doesn’t work very well (or at all) because it never went off, despite the fact that the air was burning our eyes.  At least I know that if the fire department had come out I would have been able to feed them..

Once the smoke cleared we continued on with the dinner, and it all actually turned out to be very delicious (and very impressive looking)! Subsequently, the discussion between the Russian and myself at the dinner table that night was about our definition of “sparingly”.

As with all of our other cooking excursions, the great smoke-out of 2010 taught us another culinary lesson that we will not soon forget: When a recipe calls for something to be used sparingly, you really (really, really) should do as it says. Or you may be having to feed the fire department.

Check out my “recipes” tab for the recipe.

~ by ladywithafork on January 17, 2011.