This steak takes little more than 25 minutes in preparation and cooking combined, yet the flavors rival any past steak we’ve eaten. The steak itself is seared to lock in flavors and juices, then the other cast of characters sneak into play: chopped up garlic, de-sprigged rosemary, and smooth red wine all added into your pan for deglazing. Our steak came from Wags Livestock out of Laramie, Wyoming. Someday it’ll come from Meadow Ranch, Rawlins, WY. But for now, they’re doing a pretty bang up job of raising grassfed cows and we’re buying from them.

This recipe has become a number one promoter of our to-be herb garden (hurry, hurry, faster, faster, plant those herbs!). How can I possibly have to run to the store to find “packaged in plastic” sprigs of organic rosemary? Silly. Down right ridiculous. I would like to transplant our Michigan gardens directly into these rocky mountain grounds we find ourselves on. I can’t wait for the days that we are able to return to plucking and picking thyme, tarragon, sage, and rosemary from our backyard on fanciful cooking whims. Wait. We don’t have a backyard. And wait. Do antelope, elk and deer like herbs? How about rattlesnakes? Oh boy.

We ate this steak with a quickly sauteed cabbage, butter, dill combo, cooked together with salt and water. We could mop up the braising juices and garlic with the cabbage. It was perfect.

Thanks to Nourished Kitchen for being such an inspiring place to find whole and healthy recipes like this one!

Wine Braised Steak with Rosemary and Garlic

1 16-ounce 100% grass-fed beef steak
unrefined sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
2 tablespoons butter or clarified butter
4 to 6 garlic cloves, chopped fine
1 branch fresh rosemary, plus more to garnish
1 cup red wine, any will do

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Generously season the steak with unrefined sea salt and freshly ground black pepper as it suits you.
3. Heat two tablespoons butter or clarified butter in a cast-iron skillet over a very hot flame.
4. Sear the steak in the hot fat about one minute on each side.
5. Remove the skillet from the heat, add garlic and fresh rosemary needles.
6. Deglaze the skillet with red wine.
7. Place the skillet in an oven preheated to 300 degrees Fahrenheit for about ten minutes, longer if you prefer well-done steaks and less if you prefer a rare steak.
8. serve with pan juices, garnished with additional rosemary.

YIELD: about 4 servings.

TIME: about 10 minutes (preparation), 10 to 20 minutes (cook time)

Home cured, home made, home cooked corned beef.

Check it out, people. It takes days to cure before cooking. And it is that time of year. It’s a good sign that it’s finally corned beef and stout season. Longer days are already here and warmer days supposedly are slipping around the corner. I also love the theory behind this roast, soaking the meat in a brine solution with stout beer and pickling spices, the house filling with complicated smells as it cooks. Yet it’s so easy to put the whole thing together on the stove and forget about it- welcome to my week. Ahh… forget about it.

The recipe, from epicurious.com:
Homemade Irish Corned Beef and Vegetables

Oh baby, pat that rump. Rub that salt and pepper into that tender roast.
Sounds so seductive, so ooh la la like. But eugh yuk, I hate that part.
And I would do it all over again, tossing my groans and shrieks frivolously out to the nonexistent members of my pity party.

Have I told you about Culinate before? It’s a great site, culinate.com, that comes to us from Portland. I haven’t even begun to explore all the nooks and crannies of their pages. But they have many attainable recipes out there, all free and accessible to all us free people! I usually prefer to dream my meals from under my feather comforter, eventually taking to the kitchen in a flurry, whipping out all the things that need to be used; things I am down-right irritated with, sick of, or items about to go bad. Other times, though, there’s nothing better than perusing blogs and sites like culinate that allow me to find inspiration for particular dishes, developing a list of ingredients that I can shop for on my way home from work. Yesterday before leaving work I found five recipes that I wanted to make and eat straight away. I finally narrowed the options to two. We ate at 11pm. Of course the two recipes I chose took 2 & 4 hours to make.

Let’s start with the recipe we actually did eat for dinner last night, and one that I will duplicate with some variation for the rest of my life. It was seductive, rich, so flavorful, and beautiful. The flavor is amazing, the ingredients are few. It’s quite simple and worth the wait. A normal person, though, would make this on a weekend, so that the hour of eating is reasonable and kind to your stomach.

The recipe calls for a 2 pound rump roast, cooking it in a wine, espresso, tomato based medley, at the astronomical temperature of 475 degrees for 3-4 hours. We used a 2 1/2 pound roast, so unfortunately the entire roast wasn’t submerged in braise. I think it would have been substantially more fork tender had we been able to cover the roast in liquid. Keep in mind that the liquid reduces as it cooks. I also prefer my pasta to be saucier than meatier, so we actually didn’t even use half of the meat in our sauce. Josh is more than okay with that- more meat to snack on throughout the week.

So here’s the recipe:

Sugo di Carne

4. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil and cook the pasta until al dente. Drain and toss with the meat sauce. Serve warm with freshly grated Parmesan cheese.

I always feel a little jumpy blogging about meat dishes, as though spirits of the beef will rise in my dreams and haunt me through my vegetarian friends (and I have a lot of those.) But I haven’t blogged in forever, and Josh made a really assuaging dinner so this just needs to happen. You need to hear about this over and again fabulous book, the marinade that you can use twice, and the absolutely brainy potato and horseradish cake. Josh swears the secret is in the rosemary we have bunched and hanging daintily on our kitchen wall, pounded with three cloves of garlic in a positively heavy and murderous cast iron mortar and pestle. I’m always a fan of a good recipe that incorporates red wine. This inevitably means that you buy one bottle for cooking with and one bottle to drink as you’re cooking and eating. Perhaps by the end of the meal you are a bit more smashed than you otherwise would be because you had two bottles of wine open; a true recipe for unabashed sleep and cozy moments around an otherwise imperfect day. This recipe comes yet again from a library borrowed cookbook, Jamie Oliver’s: Jamie’s Kitchen. The recipe is somewhat adapted and abbreviated.

I have no idea how big our roast was, but I do know that it was a rib roast not too hefty or huge. This should be generously seasoned and patted and prodded with salt & pepper (this would be the husband’s part, if not the whole meal, in my meager opinion.) Then with that mortar and pestle, don’t be shy, pound and press the rosemary and garlic together (1-3 cloves). Loosen this with some olive oil, more than you might think (up to 5TB) and rub into the beef (call for the husband or less queasy counterpoint again.)

Preheat oven to 450. Parboil (which means blanche) six or so medium waxy potatoes in boiling and salted water for about 5 minutes. Drain, transfer to bowl and coat with olive oil. Season well. Using a non-stick and greased cake pan or a nonstick metal frying pan, layer half the potatoes and then smother with 3TB (more or less depending on your tastebuds) of creamed horseradish. Then finish layering with other half of potatoes. Put aside for now.

Brown the beef on all sides in a snug-fitting roasting pan. Add garlic to pan and place beef on top. Place in oven with the pan of potatoes below. Cook for 20 minutes, then turn beef over, baste, and add 1/2 bottle of red wine and 1/4 cup butter. Remove the potato dish, place a clean towel carefully over the potatoes and apply pressure to compact potatoes into a tight cake. Replace in oven and cook for 15-20 more minutes.

After this time, remove and test roast. Cook to your desired temp, then allow roast to rest. Brown potatoes in oven about 5 more minutes if needed. Serve juice as an au jus, or cook to a gravy. We chose the au jus, and had plenty left to use for another dinner tonight.

In addition to this we had wild rice, a simple roasted squash, and endives we dipped into an equally simple and homemade vinagrette adapted from Nigella Lawson’s Feast, Food to Celebrate Life:
Use 1 tsp grainy mustard, 1 TB tahini, 3 TB extra virgin olive oil, 1 tsp sherry vinegar, few drops of honey, salt & pepper. Whir all these together and toss with the endives or just dip like we did; we are a wild and uncivilized pair. It was refreshingly raw and crunchy and bitter. Yum.

A note on the separated role of male as rubber, believe me, I am a fairly independent woman. All friends who knew me prior to Josh would probably say this was my most endearing and irritating quality. But I know my limitations, and rubbing, seducing, or pulverizing meat is one of them. Forgive me, readers, for assuming you may partake in a similar process of thought.

And just to mention tonight’s experiment, I roasted the other half of the roast we had bought, salt, pepper, thyme, savory, and oregano sprinkled and tossed on (Josh was in class and unavailable to assist in the rub down). This roast was cut in half length wise, and then half a large onion situated in between the two halves. Two pears were chopped, cores removed, and tossed in, and the remaining au jus of dinner past poured on the whole concoction. Another simple roasted squash and some short grain brown rice on the side made for a very balanced dinner. I was terrified when Josh came home and thought the pears to be potatoes. I realized that he was about to be shocked, and I felt terrible that he would be disappointed with finding that his chewing would result in fruit, not potato. Potatoes are, afterall, really all he needs in life. And these were pears. He was anything but disappointed. He loved them. They were beautifully tainted purple, as were the onions, from roasting in the red wine au jus.

I guess the idea of this second dinner could easily be transposed to tofu, pork, chicken, or potato cakes. But one reason the au jus was so good the second time around is that there were meaty juices that resulted from the original roasting. Pretty hard to make vegetarian. And not an ounce of disappointment to report.

Josh turns 29 this week, so this means it is celebrate josh week- at least in my world. It’s a busy month for him. He’s in the midst of curating the upcoming show at Gallery Project in Ann Arbor, planning the exhibition and creating the two pieces he will contribute. But he came home a little early last night to humor my week of celebration and partake in a thursday night birthday dinner. The dinner consisted of Seared Ribeye with Chimichurri Sauce that I found on a great food blog, and extremely scrumptious and rich scalloped potatoes. Our theme was parsley, one of those obscure flavors Josh isn’t terribly fond of, and porterhouse steaks cut thicker than my forearm. The parsley flavor was surprisingly a hit, savory and blended with multiple spices and extra raw garlic. Sometimes foods that are less appealing just need a bit of a makeover (like brussels sprouts, right dad?). To drink we had Red Snapper and a Cotes du Rhone wine. Delic.

And we split this chocolate guiness cupcake from Cake Nouveau for dessert.

A couple of months ago I met a photographer by the name of Marco Mancinelli at the Ann Arbor artist’s market. I bought this print yesterday from him for Josh’s birthday. Mother Teresa represents selflessness and real life to me. I love her starkness. The garb at her feet is what the nuns in Calcutta wore when Josh and I volunteered at Mother Teresa’s. Good memories and inspiration for life are enraptured in this photo.