Sliced strip steak with brown rice

Beef Strogenuf Stroginoff Stroginov damnit * checks * Stroganoff. 

Once when I was a little bitty kid knee-high to a grasshopper, I was at my friends house and his parents had a bunch of cookbooks in their bookcase. So I looked up beef Stroganoff in three cookbooks and compared them, The NYT, The Joy of Cooking, and Betty Crocker. 

The NYT listed extensive ingredients and overly complicated technique. It involved browning onions then removing and discarding them. The idea was to attain residual onion flavor in the pan but to avoid having actual onions in the dish, which I found ridiculous because I like onions. Betty Crocker was the most simple and involved a can of soup, I think. It seemed cheesy. One recipe called for serving over noodles, another over rice and I forget what the third was served over. None of them called for mushrooms, which seemed odd. The only thing they had in common was the use of sour cream which I promptly forgot to include in my version. So I spooned the sour cream on top of the piles on each plate to cover up for my mistake and pretended I meant to do that all along, and was proclaimed a prodigy by all I served. 

The conclusion I drew from that experience was to do whatever I wanted and then claim it, just get some sour cream in there. I could have put oysters and figs in it  then carried on like some kind of crackpot savant.

I would have used noodles tonight, but I had pasta yesterday, and two days in a row is a bit much, innit.

I seasoned this way more than I would were it not to suit only myself. See? I can take it!

Look how preposterously over seasoned this is ↓. My tongue is like totally stimulated. It's just my favorite things. I included fennel seed too, ground to a powder, because that's my temporary new thing. I wanted it go ZING, POW, WHAM, ZAP, KaBLAM!

* black pepper

* mixed chile pepper flakes

* coriander

* fennel seed ground to a fine powder

* rosemary ground to a powder

The rosemary I have is old, so I used a lot. I bought a package of fresh rosemary but I didn't get to it in time and it turned black so I tossed it.  :-(   That'll teach me a lesson, about I don't know what, maybe freezing it or something. It's like three bucks just completely wasted, and that shows poor management. 

The onions and the steak were cooked separately because I didn't want them to interfere with each other.

Now for the lovely mess left in the pan. A non non-stick pan, that is a sticking pan, was used here on purpose. A scant teaspoon of butter and flour are added but not more seasoning --because what? -- do you think I'm insane? 

The liquid here is Marsala and about 1/2 cup of  commercial beef broth. I considered using water, and there was also lemon that was calling out to me but I ignored it. So next time, who knows what the sauce will taste like exactly. 

ARTS !

Finally it's all brought together; sauce, sour cream, onion and beef.

A little sump'in sump'in I remembered from the NYT recipe. The glorious flavor of tamarind. 

The brown rice was rather carelessly pressure-cooked for 35 minutes mostly on the second notch, which is high. The pressure-cooker manual suggests the first notch for rice but they do not mention brown rice, which is different. It absorbs less water and it takes longer to cook. 

1 cup brown rice

1 +1/2 cups water

1/4 teaspoon salt