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….)