Beer Battered Steak

Side note: the British really seam to love my blog. Here's to you, ol' chaps.

    Anyway, back in 'merica, I decided it was time I beer batter some steaks. This is a technique that I've perfected over many a camp fire, but was unsure how to adapt it to the stove-top.
    First and foremost, one must consider their choice of beer. It is important to use something definitively hoppy, but at the same time, do you really want to waist an IPA just for the sake of cooking up some steak? Probably not. Really, the best possible thing to use is Dogfish Head's 90 minute IPA. It has a hop-ish, but almost thin taste, that coats and complements the meat quite well. If budget is your concern, but you still want something that will bring out taste when cooked, the answer has been keeping Americans drunk since 1936. I am speaking, of course, of the cheep, dorm-room classic: Budweiser.

Never the wiser than to choose a Budweiser so that none of your pennies could go to waste.
And though it is thicker than most beers, and bitter, at least you'll be able to stomach the taste.

    Ah, Budweiser. The king of the cheep beers. You know it's classy because in 2011 the can bought a bow tie.

P.S. People of Budweiser - you just got some free advertising, but let it be known, that I like the old logo better.

    The art of battering a steak in bear is virtually nonexistent. If you're by a camp-fire in the open woods, you don't have much of a choice but to slap your meat down on a flat skillet - the metal grate will not do - and occasionally poor some out for the homies right onto your meat. Flip frequently to get the most even coating, and make sure you are poring beer on either end of the steak.
    Those of us beer battering at home have a little more flexibility. The first thing you'll want to do is season your steaks with a little bit of salt and a whole lot of pepper. Next, fill up about 1/4 of a 16 oz beer - (that's 4 ounces for you math whizzes) - in a glass container with the meat.  make sure beer was spread along the top as well as soaking up in the bottom and sides of the meat. Put a top on the container and let it sit for a half hour, occasionally poring more beer over the top of the meets.

   
    After the meat is appropriately seasoned under the influence, it is time to fry those suckers up. Heat up a skillet to medium heat and slap down some meat. Poor the excess batter-beer into the pan to preserve the juices. Also, this means that so long as you keep the heat low, you won't have to use any non-stick spray. The beer should provide a liquid layer between the meat and the pan to prevent it from sticking, but, if it gets to hot, the beer will burn between the meat and the pan and do just the opposite.
    I wanted my steaks to have a bit of a kick, so I chopped up some Baby Bell Peppers and dipped each slice in Cholula's hot sauce. Cholula's is an old classic, and pretty much goes with everything. With the peppers dabbed in more pepper, I threw them down on the skillet to cook with my meat.

Also, though they were not in my arsenal this particular night, I hear diced Porta Bella mushrooms make an excellent addition.

   But, alas, one cannot simply have steak with peppers and pepper sauce for diner. This is not a well-balanced life style. So, in an effort to class things up a bit, I made couscous.  Specifically, I made these couscous:

    Near East is a good brand. I forget how long it took, but any idiot can prepare a box. Boil some water, add couscous, stir occasionally for X amount of time. maybe 20 minutes. 

    Once again, the picture of the full meal suffered due to the quality of my phone's internal camera. So don't judge to harshly, I assure you that both my brother and I were very satisfied with both the cook and flavor of the meet. 

   

   Mmm Mmm, Good! This meal goes especially well with, you guessed it, Budweiser, or another, higher-quality beer. Join me next time when I'll make a Philly Cheese Steak Wit Wiz; and remember - if Denzel can land a plane drunk you can cook a steak.  I leave you, people of England, with this:

-EM

   

Taco Tuesday

   

      In the interest of Journalistic integrity, it must be mentioned that I did not make the Tacos on this Tuesday. I maintain that I made them on a Tuesday, about two weeks ago, thereby justifying the title of this post. Anyway, here's what I remember of what happened:
     The Taco is by far the most extensive project I have undertaken in my cooking. This is not to say that the full meal was particularly difficult in experiment, but that it consisted of many different things; more things than I had yet to cook at once.
     The full meal required preparation of rice, beans, meat, and guacamole - none of which, except for the frying of the meat, was a task to which I felt particularly attune. At many times while cooking, I felt very panicked and housewiferous. I can now claim to understand that sense of baseless frenzy, like the pit of the stomach in free-fall, that accompanies the multi-task of huswifery.
     It took a good 30 minutes of situating before I could begin to cook. When, at last, I thought I had all the ingredients readily available at my disposal, I started on the rice. The special brand of yellow rice I had bought came in a little square box and was easily prepared in boiling water with a pinch of salt and a teaspoon of olive oil. After the water had boiled and the rice, plus seasoning packet, had been added, a lid was placed on the pot and it was left to sit for 25 minutes.
      I now had to complete the rest of my work within the confines of the clock. Of course, there was no real need to be as punctuational; the rice, upon completion, could have been easily kept warm in my ultra-modern, 21st century kitchen by a number of different means. However, I engaged the challenge of the clock, regardless, as one of those inexplicable wants of human competitiveness.
     While the rice sat, broiling in warm water, I started on the meat. I had purchased skirt stake. This would prove to be the easiest part of the final creation. I utilized what I had already learned of cooking meats in research for my previous blog posts: like a pro, I lathered it in a concoction of mostly olive oil, as well as hefty doses of salt and pepper. At the last moment, I squeezed two genetically enlarged cloves of garlic through my faulty garlic press, on either end of the meat.
      Feeling like the skirt was properly seasoned, I sprayed a pan with some pam and slapped down the hunk of flesh, pouring the remaining seasoning for frying, into the pan.

     Notice the olive-oil/garlic muck

     The rice:

     I now had pots and pans cooking food-stuffs and taking up residence on two of the four burners in my kitchen when I decided it was time to set about filling the others.  With still some 25 minutes on the clock, I went to work on the beans.

     Before using that powerful enigma, the can opener, I cut up some green pepper with half a cup of diced onions, a few cloves of poorly pressed garlic, and half a teaspoon of basil. I threw the resulting amalgam into a pan coated with a chief's staple ingredient: extra virgin olive oil, a teaspoon full.

    3-5 minutes later, I added 2 and 3/4 cups of water. After bringing the mixture to a boil, I added the canned beans. Unfortunately, this being a first-time endeavorer, I poured the entire contents of the can into my pot. For those of you unversed, as I was, in the nature of canned goods, it may or may not come as a surprise that the product was preserved by an aquatic bean juice for freshness. Unthinkingly, I poured the whole mixture, anemic bean-water and all, into my pot. The result, though unpleasant, was not beyond fixing.

         10 minutes later, the beans were put through a colander so as to relieve them of the brownish muck

     Now, all that remained was the guacamole. I had never made guac before, but am a longtime admirer, and felt I knew what I had to do. I sliced and pitted two avocados, mashing them together with a wooden tool, the kind used for cracking nuts, the shape of which was a spheroid I cannot define.

     I then squeezed the juice from two halves of a lime, through an aptly-named citrus juicer, into my avocado mush, which, though previously left implied, was in a standard size bowl.

    Next came the addition of salt and ground paprika to taste, which for my taste was a plentiful amount. Then things got spicy; I added a whole lot of hot sauce, enough to leave the taster with a kick of an aftertaste, but not enough to overwhelm the citrus. In since adaptations, I have added flakes of ground pepper to enhance the sensation.

     Throughout all of this, the meat, which had been cooking upon its burner, had to be moved from the heat of the stove to the preserving warmth of the oven. Despite this miscalculation, I considered my race with the clock to have been a victory as rice, beans and guac were all finished around the same time, leaving me only to fill a bowl of sour creme, and one of salsa, after the alloted 30 minutes.

Here is the rice and the guacamole:

      Some of you may now be shaming my previous use of "standard size bowl" to describe the vessel of my guacamole. I should have been more clear. What I meant was, standard for the demand of guacamole, for even with a bowl this size there is never enough guac. 

Here are the beans, which I assure you, looked better in real life:

The meat, diced and ready to be served:

And, at last, the dinner table - made complete with festive plates:

      

           

      At this time, reader, I owe you an apology for the confusion you surely experience at the beginning of this post. Let me clarify, that when I began writing this post it was a Tuesday, though it is now Thursday. It appears the tacos have effected my work ethic.  Next time: beer battered steak

-EM