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.).

Pancake Toss at P. Graham Dunn

This is the last food-related picture on my phone.  Now I just need to start a blog for pictures of Maggie :o)

When many of us Faths were at Grandma and Grandpa's for Thanksgiving, there was a $1 All-You-Can-Eat-Catch-Your-Own-Pancake breakfast.

You go in, pay your dollar, and get a plate.  And then they start tossing pancakes at you!  The ones that fall on the ground get scooped up and fed to pigs later.

Then you go through a buffet line to get sausage links, butter, syrup (and blueberry syrup), orange juice, and coffee.  Oh man, I drank a lot of coffee and ate way too many pancakes.  And we did this two days in a row.  I don't usually have blood sugar issues, but a few hours after these pancakes, I thought I was going to die!

Food Photo "Mystery"

I found this food picture on my phone and couldn't remember what it was for:

I looked at it more closely.  Okay, what is in this picture...some sort of fresh salsa, maybe a mango salsa.....rice and beans....coffee....why is there a cup of coffee at the stove?

Aha, this must have been taken to make Nathanael come over.  My brother will come over to our house if there are rice and beans and/or coffee.  End of story.  He forgets that Zach will make him do work.  All he remembers is the food and the coffee.