Beef steak, potato, mushroom, spaghetti,

This is a regular steak intended to be simply seared, I think, but it's tough and I don't like it. 

I'm getting per tic ular lately. 

And I did want a lot of starchy things with it that all by themselves would turn ordinary beef broth into a thick spectacular sauce covering everything. 

One of the tricks we cook-types pull all the time, and you can do it too, is to build up flavors in a pan. 

Or a pot. 

The steak has a dry rub on it and vacuum packed for a full day. A lot of that spice is left behind in this pan. But even if the steak wasn't dry rubbed first it would still leave behind  charred bits in the pan and those nasty little black bits are intense flavor packets that dissolve in liquid impart flavor. 

The steak is removed and treated as a separate thing.

Then more flavors are built up in the pan beginning with butter and additional fennel, salt and pepper. 

Okay, now the tricky part. You have a pile of spices in hot oil that burn very quickly so it's doused with wine followed immediately with another liquid, in this case commercial beef broth in a carton not pictured. This point is something that's encountered almost every day, the transition from starting flavor-building with small amount of oil then flooding it with a larger amount of liquid. It's a bit dramatic there because often it's the point where something thickens instantly and turns into a sauce, but not now. Today the starch will slough off the potatoes, slough off the rice, and slough off the pasta as the liquid boils, and that's a lot of sloughing, the thin commercial broth will become quite thick and flavorful. 

Then the vegetables

garlic

onion

potato which will cook in broth and impart starch

mushrooms

I decided extemporaneously to add rice which will absorb a lot of liquid and impart starch.

Angel hair pasta which absorbs liquid and imparts starch. 

These additional starchy elements, potato, rice and pasta, all cook for different lengths of time. The rice will take 35 minutes. Potatoes are variable depending on size of cut. Pasta is variable depending on choice of noodle, angel hair pasta is fast, just a few minutes. So, these three are staged with the other vegetable elements. 

This is the same thing as sukiyaki -- can you see it? can you see it? -- except totally different. Stew, where elements are kept separate. 

I wonder how that practice of keeping things separate for sukiyaki came about anyway. It must have been a shogun or somebody whose sense of aesthetics demanded it, felt the elements all jumbled too chaotic, or maybe a chopsticks thing. I like it. When you see it all jumbled up you go, "Gaaawl what a mess."