Steak Dinner

People are always asking me cooking questions: how much to make, how long to cook it, etc.  This is all well and good until they ask me about cooking meat. I may know a little more than the average person about cooking meat, but that is mostly because of a cooking-methods class I took (so many years ago by now!).  I almost never cook plain meat, like, for example, a steak.

As far as I can remember, I have eaten five beef steaks in my life.  There may have been one or two more, but I'm not positive.  The first was at a Girl Scout camp thing when I was maybe 10 or 11.  The second was when I was dating Evan, and we had surf and turf at a restaurant for a business Christmas party.  The third was a steak dinner I made for Evan when he visited me (that steak was way overcooked!).  The fourth was when Zach and I had a free meal/night at a hotel for a Christmas present from brother and sister-in-law.  And this brings us to the fifth and most recent.

We went to Zach's grandparents' "farm" (aka "cabin" (house) and tons of land), and they were getting ready to grill some steaks when it was time for us to leave.  They sent two frozen steaks along with us, and a few days later, we had our fancy dinner.

Medium-rare (let's be honest, they turned out to be medium) steak with mushrooms and onions, baked sweet potato with cinnamon butter, and roasted asparagus.  And a frond of dill for decoration.

Zach's brother has been learning the art of vinification and had given us two bottles of "amber red" recently.

Jeremiah wine!

One must (obviously) follow a steak dinner with dessert.  We had cheesecake and decaf coffee.

Served on our fancy Turkish tea set

 The cheesecake was far from homemade, alas.  Zach wanted cheesecake on our vacation, and the only spring-form pan I have is huge.  We realized it would be cheaper (and less caloric) to buy a small one instead of make a huge one.  We put homemade rhubarb preserves on top, so I guess it's slightly homemade.  And you can't ignore those amazing homemade chocolate swirls on the plate.  Nothing says fancy like chocolate swirls!

So, there's the story of our steak dinner.  I'm going to try to mix some new meals in with the old ones, so that I'm not always looking at ancient, blurry photos, trying to guess what we were eating back in the day (there are a lot of meals that involve whole wheat pasta and spinach salads.  A lot.).