Ribeye Cap
Until it cools off, I am going to be lucky to get one post up each week. Between my work on Harmony Boards, driving around town with deliveries and family commitments, I have zero energy or desire to cook. That’s the greatest thing about living alone, you don’t have to cook if you don’t want to!
With that in mind, I haven’t cooked for weeks, so I had to go back nearly two months to Father’s Day to dig up this recipe and photos.
Of course, there was a Father’s Day Harmony Board. I kept light and fairly healthy since steak was on the menu.
I wasn’t certain what I was going to make for Father’s Day dinner until I went to Costco and saw the special Father’s Day Roadshow they had in the meat section. It was there that I found this beautiful U.S.D.A. Prime cut of meat.
To be honest, I’d never seen or heard of a Beef Ribeye Cap Steak before but it looked beautiful and impressive, so I snatched it right up.
The helpful and kind butcher told me it was his favorite cut and recommended that I grill it over medium-high direct heat for about 7 minutes for this thickness. “Thank you, will do!”
Remember: Be sure to always rest meat before cutting. Especially when using it in a salad like this was. Resting the meat gives time for the juices to get back into the meat. You will lose less juice when you cut it and when you eat it the meat will be juicier and tastier. If you cut it too soon, the juices, which will look like blood, will flow out and that is not a nice look on a salad!
[Read more →]July 30, 2019 11 Comments
the avocado dilemma
Ripe avocados were an incredible challenge to find in Quebec. On the day we arrived, Monday the 13th, we went to the grocery store directly from the airport. We bought 8 avocados and they were rock hard. Kim also bought 3 bananas.
Did you know that the way to speed up the ripening of an avocado is to put it in a brown paper bag with a banana?
Yep, ripe bananas release ethylene, the hormone that triggers ripening in mature fruit, so placing one in a closed paper bag with your under-ripe avocados will speed up the process.
At least it does in AZ, not so much in Canada. When I left on Tuesday morning, (8/21) those darn avocados were still hard as rocks!
Thankfully, we went to the farmer’s market in Ottawa mid-week and found 6 ripe avocados. I used 2 of them for this recipe and the other four in the guacamole I posted yesterday. Unfortunately, I forgot to pick up purple leaf lettuce, so please use your imagination and pretend it’s there, mixed in the butter lettuce.
August 24, 2018 1 Comment
BLT-Salad Skewers
It’s not always practical to serve a salad. For instance, at a cocktail party or any occasion where guests will be standing. These colorful and flavor-packed little salad skewers come to the rescue! They are a nice alternative to the standard crudités platter.
You’ll be using a knife to cut iceberg lettuce. There is an old wives’ tale that warns that using a knife on lettuce will cause the cut edges to quickly turn brown. This is not true. Not if you are using the lettuce within a day or so. All torn or cut lettuce leaves will eventually turn brown, under the same scientific theory that causes an apple or avocado to turn brown after cutting.
Even though you cut the lettuce well ahead of time for this recipe there is no fear of the edges turning brown because the cut pieces are held in ice water to keep them crisp and free of any browning.*
Even so, you’ll see that I do use a hard plastic knife especially made for lettuce. It’s one of the many tools crowding my kitchen drawers and cupboards that former students have given me. I have it, so I use it, but it is in no way a necessity.
*It is important to cut and assemble the lettuce portion of the skewers well ahead of time, not only to crisp the lettuce but because this step of the recipe, although extremely simple, is time-consuming and it is the last thing you’ll want to do at the last minute.
February 13, 2016 1 Comment
can’t we just get along?!?
Soup and salad… the two of the most versatile parts of any meal. Or complete meals all by themselves. I’ve previously mentioned my deep admiration for soup. My husband, Dave, on the other hand, has those same feelings for salad. Given the choice, he would take salad over soup about 90% of the time. I’ll take soup over salad 99.9% of the time when it is under 100 degrees here in sunny AZ. But once the thermostat hits the century mark, I turn my back on my favorite child. I feel like a traitor. And considering that it reaches 100 degrees an average of 106 days a year here, that’s nearly a third of the year I give up on my beloved soup. So I need a backup plan!
Currently, on this blog, I have 13 soups and only 10 true salads. What do I consider a “true” salad? One that has lettuce or greens as the primary player; not just a tart on a bed of greens used to “fancy it up” or a salad with fruit only, or quinoa laying on a little bit of spinach. But a Real Salad with lettuce! So soup is currently winning the war, I mean the race! Unfortunately, salad is gaining ground with this entry, and with the dog days of summer only a couple of months away… I need to make more soup!
February 11, 2010 4 Comments
sriracha (rooster) sauce
In my January 9, 2010 blog post, I spoke of the wonders of sriracha sauce and provided a link to a Bon Appétit article. If you haven’t had a chance to read the article yet, please go back to that post and do so. Chef Stuart Brioza provided a recipe for chicken lettuce wraps with the article. We had them over the weekend and… WOW! I made a couple of very minor changes; for instance – like everyone I know, I love the P.F. Chang’s lettuce wraps with crispy-crunchy iceberg lettuce, so I used iceberg instead of the romaine called for by Chef Brioza. One thing I would not dream of changing is the sauce, in fact, I am going to keep this sauce on hand, and have it with everything I eat! Really, it’s just that good!
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January 20, 2010 3 Comments