Penne with Beef and Arugula

When I feel particularly uninspired, I head to Food Network.com. It’s really great and now it’s set up to where you can put in pretty much any ingredient you have lying around and don’t feel inspired about either. BAM! Just like that you have 10,000 recipes and ideas about what to do with that jar of kimchi that’s been hanging around in your fridge for the past two years. Try it. You will like it.

So I stumbled on this recipe when looking for good picnic food. At first I didn’t get why this recipe came up under the keyword “picnic,” but once I made it, I was quite impressed and I understood this particular recipe would have come up under many keywords like, “a ton of people,” “lazy,” “leftovers for days,” and “good at all temperatures.” So here is the super recipe: Penne with Beef and Arugula.

Some things you should know about it and adjustments I would make:

If you are going to be making this for 6-8 people, I would get 2 lbs of NY. A pound only got us 4 servings of steak because I like steak and lots of it.

DO NOT cook this steak for 7 minutes. I cooked the steak in my French oven only  couple of minutes on each side. Make sure the steak has been sitting at room temperature for at least a half an hour before cooking to get it to cook nicely. If you are worried about pathogens in your steak, all I have to say is, “man up” and salt the outside generously. Salting while resting should take care of any little critters lurking on the outside of your steak. You also want to cook the steak a little rarer than your taste because if you are adding it directly to the pasta when it’s hot, the pasta could over cook your steak. To avoid this, instead of assembling everything like the recipe says, I kept everything separate. I put the arugula on the plates, put the dressed pasta on top of that and then presented the nice slices of steak over the top.

To pack away for lunch the next day, leave everything separate. The arugula, the pasta, and the steak all in separate containers in the fridge. Combine all again for your next mid-day meal, or heat back up, or leave at room temp. It’s the perfect lunch-box treat. Enjoy! I did! (For days….)

Tools. Every One of Us

There is a correlation between a utensil and what it demands to be cooked. I have discovered this about myself. That I love cooking tools. A tool demands to be used, just like your mom….haha. Anyways, I’ve discovered that I have a passion to be demanded upon by tools (just like your mom. Okay, okay, I can’t help myself!). So I bought a LeCreuset Five Quart French Oven. It demands a stew. I have never made a stew because I grew up thinking it was a waste of time. My mom (God love her) made horrible stew. She was not blessed with the stew gene as she was blessed with the pie and cake and whatever-else-she-decided-to-cook-besides-gravy-gene. In short, my mom could cook anything besides soup and gravy. But I was graced with the stew and soup gene, because every soup I’ve ever come up with has come up freakin’ awesome. I actually don’t attribute that to genes, but to tools. I bought a LeCruset soup pot and it demanded that I make a Southwest style quick black bean soup in it. My partner (Jesse) and his Mexican friend, Luis, almost lit a candle in memory of the occasion. I had the opportunity to upgrade to a five-quart French oven over Christmas, it called to me in the grocery store to make a stew using a quality meat. I find quality meat is something of a novelty these days with American corn and hormone fed everything—even our dogs—I don’t recommend the “Halal Market on San Pab.” So I choose a deli sausage in a casing and proceed to make a stew out of it with some barley, alphabet pasta, and some lentils. It is amazing. I got a Kitchen-Aid 450 watt five-quart professional mixer and I hate to take it out of the box in fear of being demanded to bake at the exclusion of everything else. So my point to all of this is, whether it be a homely wooden spoon with a “France” stamp on the handle or a $500 piece of baking equipment, be careful—they will dictate your kitchen, not you.

New Blog

Okay, so I’ve done a little soul searching and decided that I wasn’t all that happy with my previous blogs and I would like this to be a strictly food blog. So the next time I’m super inspired, I’m going to blog about it. Weather it be restaurant, cookies I just baked (the only think I like to do as much as drink absinthe is bake) or some amazing (amazingly good or bad) food thing that I happened to cross paths with. I will leave you with a small quip:

I think I saw the most rediculous food item ever in the most ridiculous catalog ever–Micheal Chiarello’s Napa Style. It is chocolate covered parmigiano reggiano. The ad boasts that it is very hard to find. How about because cheese dipped in chocolate is the most fattening combination on the planet and no European alive would be caught eating it. I know that the salt and chocolate thing is on a rampage, but geeze, next thing I know I’ll be asked to put ganache on my salt lick popcorn instead of synthetic butter at the movies. What’s worse is that they are selling this salty, fattening crap for $38 for nine pieces. Are you kidding? Do you know how much time it would take me to dip chunks of cheese in chocolate? About 3 minutes–but that’s three minutes too long to make crap. I would rather spent three minutes of my time making something my friends won’t immediately spit in my face. So watch out for shitty food being hocked at you as a fancy gift for your friends–Micheal Chiarello obviously hates your friends.