Recipe Goal

Still have nine new recipes to go - and one week to do them.  Poor Brent.  I tried three new ones for dinner last night and two the night before.  The two the night before were actually not bad at all:  Crock Pot Chicken Fried Steak so tender it fell apart at the shadow of a fork, and Sunshine Carrots which had a slight orange sweet buttery sauce.  Definitely going to do that sometime for a family dinner.

Last night it was Steak au Poivre, Curried Broccoli Casserole, and roasted potatoes.  Sounds wonderful, don't you think?

Well, here's how NOT to do new recipes:

First of all I love curry, but Brent is not as familiar with it as I am, since I get my curry fixes at lunchtime at work.  So when the recipe called for 1/2 to 1 tsp of the great flavor, I voted for 1/2.  I think it would have been better with more.  And the recipe included carrots.  Would have been better just as broccoli.  Of the three recipes I tried, though, it was probably the best.  And it was not very good.  That's the sad part.

Ok, on to roasted potatoes.  Probably would have been good, but I halved the recipe for just Brent and me.  But realized after I mixed the seasonings with the oil that I had 1 1/2 timed them.  I scooped as much out as much of the seasoning as I could (instead of just adding more oil and only using half of it) and tossed the potatoes in the rest - but it was still too much.  Oh, and it called for onion powder and garlic salt, right?  But I only had onion salt and garlic powder.  Isn't that a safe switch?????  (Brent did eat the potatoes, in spite of it, though, so I guess they weren't a total failure.)

And then the Steak.  I.e., how to ruin a perfectly good piece of rib eye steak:
First of all, it wasn't a perfectly good piece of steak.  It had been hiding in my freezer for a year and a half, and I'm learning that frozen steak is not a good food storage item.  So I needed something to kind of disguise that freezer taste meat gets when it's been in too long.  I've never ever even heard of Steak au Poivre before.  This morning I find out that it's just a fancy name for Pepper Steak.

Right.  So it calls for cracked pepper rubbed into the steak on both sides.  But Brent doesn't like cracked pepper like I do, so I just used regular pepper and not much at that.  Then you fry it in butter until it's cooked the way you like it.  Only I don't like fried steak.  Steak is made to be grilled or broiled, but fried??  In butter?

Well, I did follow the recipe there.  I fried the steak.  Removed it from the pan and went to make the sauce with the drippings:   First of all the recipe called for Brandy but said you could use beef broth instead.  So I opted for the beef broth, but couldn't find one can of that on my shelves.  I did have chicken stuff, though.  Bouillon, lots and lots of bouillon, a whole Costco-sized bottle, full, of the foil wrapped squares as well as another Costco-sized bottle of the loose kind you just measure out with a spoon.  Plus cans of Chicken stock in my pantry.  So instead of beef broth, I added a big spoon full of the bouillon, because that was easiest.

And I really thought I had a bottle of Dijon mustard in the fridge, but three bottles of cracked mustard and two of honey mustard, but none of Dijon.  I substituted the cracked mustard.   Added the heavy cream (which I actually had) and went on my way making a luscious  smelling sauce for my fried steak.

Not all things that smell luscious are.  Can you say "salty"?????   as in SALTY.   I dumped out half of it, added more cream and it was still too salty.  That and salty potatoes and gaggy curried broccoli ...
well, if Brent tells you he really doesn't care for my efforts to add variety to our diet, just ask him about cabbage rice soup.   (He left the sauce off his steak by the way, only I noticed he did grab the salt shaker for it ... something he never, ever does.)

Nine more recipes to go before next Saturday ...