Strip steak, mashed potato, big green egg

A strip steak is grilled outdoors.

Old leftover baked potatoes are smashed.

One cup gravy is whipped out on the stovetop.

After reading several pages on lighting techniques, the conclusion is drawn that the Big Green Egg is no different in this respect than any other grill except perhaps a little easier. The BGE is wheeled outside for its second trial.  The process of getting the wood coals glowing and the oven chamber heating up to maximum takes about eight minutes. 

A strip steak is thawed and brought to room temperature. The steak is placed on the grill when BGE's oven chamber attains and maintains a temperature 650℉/345℃ . I notice it will not go higher. I investigate based on the BGE FAQs read last night. Upon inspection, I notice that when the lower vent is wide open then 1/2 of the window is blocked on the inside by a vertical clay barrier. This tells me that the gap in the lower fire box is not properly aligned with the outer vent door. This must be corrected by first removing the upper grill where items are cooked, then removing the remaining charcoals, then removing the smaller grill that holds the charcoals, in order to reach the inner circular ceramics that comprise the fire box and then rotate that assembly so that the vents align properly. This will provide full air flow. But what a mess! That's the plan. Even so, 650℉/345℃ is an admirable oven temperatures indeed. But it can be even hotter. 

The steak was overcooked. I'm good at this sort of thing, and even I overcooked the steak and not by neglect either. I was going on the intuition I've developed by just flat being ace at this sort of thing and now I have to make allowances for outrageous heat containment. 

True story. I went camping with a small group to a spot outside of Boulder Colorado. I took a bunch of stuff in coolers to experience a more refined outdoor living than the usual campout crap. Wine, wine glasses, service ware etc. I didn't use 3/4 the stuff I took up, but I was ready for anything. I was about 22 years old and not exactly like my roughneck friends. 

Up there the next day my acquaintances were cooking the life out of a pack of hotdogs on a makeshift grill. They had wood sticks underneath on fire and they were cooking the hotdogs over flames. I sat there and watched the hotdogs spit and sputter, their juices drain into the flames causing the whole thing to flare. Being the mad little arsonists they were, only flames would satisfy. They apparently didn't realize the hotdogs were already cooked and needed only to be heated over glowing embers, not flames. They persisted pushing around their hotdogs, poking them with sticks, moving them around until they blackened completely by extreme Vulcan torrefaction. I watched amused, and a bit dismayed, observing them destroy their meal. Finally I couldn't hold out any longer so I formulated a phrase that I thought suitably understated, "I think your hotdogs might be done."  They ignored me, of course, and kept right on killing the already cremated. Finally they ended their sadism and found they couldn't possibly eat the result. 

When the upper daisywheel on the BGE is closed and the lower vent also entirely closed, then the coals are suffocated almost immediately and the oven temperature drops within minutes to 250℉/120℃ cool enough to roll back inside, but I left it outside anyway because nobody seemed to be around. 

The potatoes were more of those small potatoes leftover from a week ago. I'm impressed they're still useful. Glad not to waste them. They were heated for just a few minutes in the microwave then split open and scooped into a bowl. A tablespoon of butter along with 1/4 cup heavy cream was heated in another small bowl. S/P mixed all together and the potatoes roughly smashed with a fork

One tablespoon butter was heated in a pan along with 3/4 tablespoon A/P flour. S/P  and a teaspoon Madras curry, then one cup commercial chicken broth whisked to a flavorful gravy.  

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

Strip steak and scallops, corn with pecans and bacon

My schedule is completely bolloxed. I am not getting hungry during the day when I should be getting hungry and then suddenly feeling quite starved at the oddest hours late at night when reasonable people are gone to sleep. Today on my escapades I had food offered to me four separate times and I instinctively kindly refused each time. One fellow looked crestfallen. I deftly rescued the situation by telling him that if I started on his potato and cheese soup, which did indeed look delicious, I would eat the whole pot. The fellow grinned from ear to ear signaling I had delivered the perfect lie. 

I think that this is one of the chief differences between thin and fat people. Thin people eat when they're hungry and don't eat when they're not hungry. Fat people eat for any number of reasons, like because it's there. 

The steak up there↑is sliced and divided to show the inside. Obviously it wouldn't be plated that way for entertaining. I do these things here for you.

Surf and Turf if you're feeling cheeky, splash and moo if childish. 

The scallops were frozen. Both the steak and the scallops needed to come up to room temperature so they were covered with cling film. 

I hadn't anticipated wrapping scallops with bacon so a week ago this package of bacon was cut in half the way dear ol' mum used to do when she cooked so that the strips would fit in the pan she used. I asked her one time, "Please don't do that." 

"Why?" She inquired. 

"So I can have the joy and fun of long bacons, for once." 

She kindly obliged the request of a child, and that's my mum for you, she always understood the vital importance of fun. But here I had already cut the bacon, which I never usually do, and now I need them to be full length. This means trouble for wrapping the scallops. It will take two toothpicks each instead of just one if the strips cooperate at all. The bacon is cooked half way to give it a head start over the scallops which cook faster than bacon crisps. This is a handy thing to do with rumaki as well. In the case of rumaki you will want bacon in half strips since the circumference is half that of sea scallops. I intended to include a swipe of brown sugar on the bacon as you do with rumaki, and I brought out the brown sugar from the freezer for that purpose, but then I forgot about it and didn't notice until the bacon was already pinned to the scallops with their toothpicks, so I left them unsweetened and they were less delicious because of that. And all that goes to show you not to cut your bacon in half because it can cause you to forget the brown sugar. 

Rest teim. 

Not shown: Frozen sweet corn combined with whole pecans and ricotta, s/p, heated through, and that's all. Originally, I was thinking of mixing spinach with it, but decided not to act on that impulse. 

This concludes the strip steak and scallop dinner. 

What follows properly belongs to a future post. These pictures are included now because I want to show how we food-obsessed blokes who make most our own meals do things. I will need a baguette tomorrow, at least I think I will need one, and so because I prefer to age dough overnight for an ever so slight country-loaf effect and for the magic that slowness imparts, the dough is started tonight. The dough will proceed in slow motion overnight and achieve peak activity by morning whereupon the dough will be stretched, the yeast cells within redistributed by that stretching and so re-enlivened by propinquity to like-minded pervy horny little yeasties of corresponding type, and the loaf proofed again briefly left in peace encouraging that microscopic orgy, and then abruptly baked killing all at once those nefarious little bastards. 

So the larger copies of these pictures will appear again tomorrow. 

Strip steak

This is an ordinary strip steak with a salad. 

It turned out to be two strips, not one. You know what? I'm getting a little tired of being faked out like this all the time. It's not a big deal, but I don't like it when a thing is package to appear as a simple single steak and upon opening the package it turns out to be two thinner strips pushed together to look like one wide one. Like a plain old ordinary NY strip steak, except it's not, it's two goofy thin steaks. Is it too much to ask for straightforward responsible packaging? It's enough to drive me off to more reliable meat-sources.