Macaroni and cheese

With cold London broil. 

These packages are noticed in large boxes by what would be a discount end of an import aisle. The area has oddly mixed norteamericano influences on labeled brands manufactured in Mexico, apparently, while marketed back in the United States, if not produced here, to satisfy a mostly if not entirely immigrant target market. Coca Cola for example made with cane sugar and different than what we've become accustomed, and sold here in the U.S. in very small historic size bottles at a premium price of imported products. It says on this package in English made from durum wheat and that is a crop of northern United States and of Canada, cold climate with short summers, not of Central America. This very well could be produced here. They caught my eye because they looked like Ramen noodle packages and they're sold for 35¢. I think they are cute so I bought 3. 

A whole dollar worth.

"Hey, look at this." I half expected the woman to ignore me. Who speaks to strangers at the grocery like this, with an imperative no less?  Later I would speak to another woman gathering green beans, she gave me the idea to buy them, they look good. Her head was wrapped tightly in a scarf and she wore long gray heavy for summer unrevealing frumpy clothing. She smiled and responded mildly and her husband, I presume, moved directly straight in from near distance, like an arrow, ping, disrupting our incipient harmless confab. "DO NOT SPEAK TO MAN" the tacit command. Religious proscription no doubt.

What a fuck'n bummer. 

But this woman in dairy, a random black woman who happened to be there, the only person around, joined me in discussion of the remarkable discount on cheese. Both of us could not understand it. Asiago. Most confusing. It's good to look at these discounts. Their reasoning is odd. They must move things. Nothing can linger. It's all customer driven. Customers rejected this cheese for some reason, usually bad reasoning. Asiago. Reason alone to at least try it. I have plenty of cheese already, but c'mon, who can resist this weird serendipitous discount? Carpe caseum, seize the cheese. I bought three. What the heck. After all that friendly cheerful cheese-related discussion the random woman chose not to buy any.

What a minor bummer. 

Ready and waiting, the last thing added to sauce when it's finished off the heat.

Sauce: 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon flour.

Salt and pepper, of course, goes without saying, but there I just said it so apparently it does not go without saying. 

When you see this it looks like magic. It does. My buds are amazed seeing it. "Thank you for showing that," I've been told repeatedly like I'm some sort of magical chef or something. I'm not.  

Sometimes a sauce like this is done in two stages whisked off the heat. First an alcohol of some sort, to sludge, reduced a few seconds. 

Boiled down until a new sludge is formed and the remaining liquid whatever it is, whisked in to full boiling. It goes very fast and changes forms stunningly at hand while whisking, it looks a hopeless mess then looks too thin to use then as it reaches boiling temperature thickens right there in seconds. With cheese flavoring and thickening further, clogging it up off the heat. 

Nutmeg the last thing scraped on after plating, or last thing scraped into the sauce.

London broil, jacket potato

London broil to the faraway towns with the mustard smeared on whole grain and brown, London broil with with Rosemary pine smelling of forest and chopped very fine with zest of one lemon stripped to the pith high level flavors that shouldn't go with London broil don't look at us the standard dry rubs taste too much like rust, London broil. 

Denver broil, actually. 

The show tonight. 

Beans and beef

Polenta, London broil, peach coulis

These are the things I'd like to punch cornmeal with, pow, right in the face. 

Leftover London broil

Cold so it stays pink

So there is a curious intrigue of hot and cold

Peach coulis is a peach dropped into a blender

London broil

This is not a thing claimed in London. We made that up. 

Kind of sad looking in the package isn't it? This sort of thing scares me a little bit. I would feel more comfortable with a live fire outdoor grill but for now the broiler must do. 

:-(

Got it on sale! Almost half price, so that's something. I mean, come on, how can you go wrong? 

You could go wrong but it wouldn't be such a catastrophe. 

Two capsicums, one is a paprika for smoke the other for capsaicin heat.

Get this. I heard a well-known celebrity chef, prettiest little thing with the perkiest little breasts, she shows them all the time, they alway make sure to set up cleavage camera angles and carefully select cleavage wardrobe, those things are always thought out, so yes, perky attractive breasts and everybody knows it. But I digress, she described cumin as not very spicy but that it adds "warmth."

And I thought what an odd way to describe cumin. Okay. Not that helpful, partially accurate, cumin is actually quite strong. 

Then a moment later described cinnamon as "adding warmth."

So that it. That's what you get. According to her descriptions both cumin and cinnamon add warmth and that is all there is to say about both of them. Interchangeable apparently.

I added brown sugar because I like doing that. 

All of that spice is for the surface. There are three flavors, the dry rub on the surface, the meaty beefy goodness from within, it is a very flavorful cut, and an herb sauce on top of the plated portions.  

It's almost an herb pesto minus hard cheese, and pecans instead of pine nuts. 

The flavors are outstanding. Four amazing flavors, count them, four. I didn't want to quit, and guess what, I don't have to.

If you were served such a meal as this you'd be going, "What, what, what, no waitwaitwait, what? Can this be? Do such things happen? Do people really live like this?"  

I made too much salad dressing and then thought I could use a potato so I zapped one and included it to soak up some of the dressing, and man, is that ever wonderful. It's basically a honey mustard vinaigrette. 

So there's the wonderful vinaigrette, the splendid mint and cilantro pesto, an amazing dry rub coating with all the pop-all-over-your-mouth flavors, and finally full-on beef.

Edit: This is so obvious I didn't mention it. This is considered an inexpensive and tough cut. It is cooked quickly either broiled close to the burner or over coals. Its saving grace is its flavor, among the best of all. To deal with the toughness of the muscle, the piece is sliced very thinly across the grain so each slice will be 100% extremely short muscle fibers that veritably fall apart. The long fibers of the muscle are cut so that they all become short. There are no long fibers left. Clever, eh? They figured this out a long time ago. They also figured out if you slice at an oblique angle then each individual slice will be broader but still the shortest fibers possible, the obliquer the better, so the best of all possibilities from a flavorful tough flat piece of bovoid muscle. Better living through situationally aware expert Ninja slicing.