Grilled Skirt Steak Fajitas with a Dry Rub

So long time no talk, how are you guys all doing?  Dish is doing great and we have a big summer coming up.  I must say everyone is working harder this year to stay above last year, but so far we have been on track.  We are definately not growing like last year, but we are not contracting either.  I attribute this to some super fine work from my wife and employees.  

We are excited about the summer season starting up because as in the past we will be working with a group of local farmers to produce vegetables for us all summer…Tomatoes, greens, carrots, onions all fresh and local.  Distance traveled to our place = less than 50 miles.  EXCITING!

Our quest to serve better meats without antibiotics and hormones is continuing as well.  We are purchasing our ham, bacon, salami and turkey from a company that uses only free-range, chemical free, humanely raised animals.  Our eggs have been and will continue to be free-range along with our chicken products.  At this point, we are pretty much the only restaurant in Reno other than 4th Street Bistro offering this type of product on a daily basis.  In fact  I’ve started to make my own Italian sausage because I can’t find any in town that doesn’t come from factory farmed animals.  We are actually looking into raising Berkshire pigs later this year so we know exactly how the animals were treated.

The new restaurant location is coming along as well.  We are thinking the space will be ready sometime in the beginning of next year.  We can’t wait actually.  We are still turning down business because of the lack of production capacity at Dish right now.  We are between a rock and a hard place.  In fact we need to do more business to make my coming over from corporate america worth it, but we can only squeeze so much out of our current location.

Oh well, what to do?  How about make some Fajitas with skirt steak, grilled onions and bell peppers!  Super easy recipe, the onions and bell peppers took the longest, but they were worth it.

Dry Fajita Rub from Steven Raichlen

• 1/4 cup paprika
• 3 tablespoons coarse salt
• 2 tablespoons chili powder
• 2 tablespoons cracked black pepper
• 2 tablespoons garlic powder
• 1 1/2 tablespoons granulated sugar
• 1 tablespoon onion powder
• 1 tablespoon dried coriander
• 1 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice

Combine all ingredients and mix with your fingers or a fork.

Grilled Skirt Steak Fajitas (serves 4 to 6)

• 2 large onions, peeled and cut lengthwise into 6 wedges, leaving root ends intact
• 2 1/2 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 bell peppers, cut into 2 inch strips ( I used yellow ones)
• 2 lbs skirt steak
• 8 flour tortillas
• 1 cup fresh cilantro leaves
• Grated cheese, if you like
• Sour cream, again if you like
• Salsa
• Metal or wood skewers

Start your grill up and warm to medium-hot.  Apply rub to both sides of the skirt steak and allow to rest on your counter for 30 minutes.  Meanwhile thread onions and bell peppers onto skewers, then brush with olive oil.  Season with salt and pepper. Grill onions, turning occasionally, until tender, 16 to 20 minutes.  When just cool enough to handle, cut onions into 1-inch pieces and set on a platter.

Turn grill to high and let the temperature come up a bit.  Grill steak, turning once, 4 to 8 minutes total for medium-rare depending on the thickness of your steak.  Mine were very thin, maybe 1/4 inch max and I grilled them for 2 minutes on each side.

Transfer to cutting board, then let stand 5 minutes before cutting diagonally into thin slices against the grain of the meat.

While steak is standing, toast tortillas directly on grill rack, turning once, until puffed slightly and browned in spots. Serve steak, onions, peppers, cilantro and salsa all wrapped in tortillas.  We added cheese, salsa and sour cream ’cause we love it all so much!

Dirty Rice – Rice with Ground Beef

Not much of a story here.  No picture for that matter.  But I do have a really simple and really tasty recipe for rice and ground meat.  I’ve cooked this recipe three or four times now and I have to put it into my blog so I don’t forget it.

As for my life, business is going great.  We are having a wonderful April and May looks to be better.  We were just in the newspaper click here to read the story.

We are starting a Slow Food group in Reno, which is exciting.  We’ve had two meetings and have about 30 founding members.  Ready for prime time in a few months… still trying to get it all figured out.

As one side note, I’m still as crazy as before about humanely raised meats and our need to end factory farming animals in the world.   Swine flu is making more people aware and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Okay on to the recipe.  Inspired from 1080 recipes.  Love this book, it’s the Silver Spoon for Spain!

Dirty Rice (serves 4 to 6)

Ingredients:

• 4 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 onion, thinly sliced
• 1 red bell pepper, seeded and cut into strips
• 14.5 ounce can fire-roasted diced tomatoes (or use a few seeded tomatoes from your garden)
• 1 pound ground beef
• 1 teaspoon paprika
• 1 1/4 cups long-grain rice
• 2 1/4 cups boiling beef stock
• Kosher salt and pepper

Heat the oil in a heavy bottomed pan.  Add the onion and pepper and cook on medium until softened, about 8 minutes.  Stir occasionally.

Add the tomato and beef and cook, breaking up the meat with a wooden spoon until lightly browned.  About 5 minutes.

Add the paprika, season with salt and pepper and mix well.  Add the rice and cook stirring constantly for 2 minutes.

Pour in the boiling stock, cover, and simmer for 15 minutes, until rice is tender and the majority of the liquid has been absorbed.

Serve and devour!

No Knead Honey Whole Wheat Bread

We cut open the Applegate Farms, Oven Roasted Turkey Breast on Friday and the consensus was that it tasted like actual turkey and that is was awesome.  We sell a ton of turkey in the restaurant so I was really concerned that we might not like the new product.  With very few antibiotic-free, sustainable and humanely-raised options available in bulk packaging my quest for better meat could have been stopped dead cold.  Fortunately this is not the case!

We will crack open the ham and the salami this week, but I know they taste great because I have purchased them both at Whole Foods in retail packaging!  I can’t tell you how excited I am to be able to offer sustainable, hormone and antibiotic free, humanely-raised meats at Dish.  As far as I can tell there is not another sandwich place in a 200 mile radius doing anything like we are!

We were also excited because we are now using Niman Ranch bacon.  Niman Ranch, though Bill Niman is gone, still has one of the best hog raising standards in the country.  I’m happy to say we are taking a large amount of $$ out of the factory farmed animal side of things and this is only the beginning.

A couple of other notes to put out there.  HBO is running a new documentary called Death on a Factory Farm.  I suggest you take a look at it.  It starts next week

I’ve mentioned before an organization that labels products with the Certified Humane logo.  Here is their up-to-date listing of producers across the US with links to each company’s website!

Okay so on to bread.  I purchased the book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes per day last year and I love it.  We have made a ton of bread out of the book and the only time it didn’t turn out perfect was when I forgot how much flour I measured into the bucket and guessed wrong!

I would go out and buy this book if you like bread, you want to make your own and you don’t want to spend hours managing the process.  It’s incredibly easy and the results are great.  In fact when I made the honey whole wheat bread I took a loaf to work and all the employees thought it was great.  No easy task with a bunch of foodies!

So take a look at the below recipe, get the book to get all the exact details!

Oh and you can visit Zoe Francois’ (one of the authors of the book) blog to get more details – www.zoebakes.com

No Knead Honey Whole Wheat Bread- (makes 5 one-pound loaves)

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups lukewarm water
• 1 1/2 cups lukewarm milk
• 1 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt
• 1 1/2 tablespoons granulated yeast
• 1/2 cup honey
• 5 tablespoons neutral-flavored oil
• 6 2/3 cups whole wheat flour

Warm the water and milk to about 100 degrees. Add the yeast, honey, oil and the salt to the water in a 5 or 6 quart, resealable, lidded plastic food container.  You can pick these up at Resco or Smart and Final or other restaurant type food service places.

Now add all of the flour at once.  Mix with a wooden spoon, stand mixer with a dough hook, or a food processor fitted with a dough hook attachment.  You are done when everything is uniformly moist with no dry areas.  Should take no longer than a few minutes.

Cover with a lid, not airtight and allow to rise until it starts to flatten on the top or begins to collapse.  Should be about two hours.  Do not use mason jars with a lid or anything airtight…it could explode. Put the dough in the refrigerator overnight or for at least three hours.

I tried to make it in a loaf pan and didn’t put enough dough so experiment as you see fit.  I like the free-form loaves the best so I haven’t tried it again in the pan.

On baking day, prepare a pizza peel by sprinkling it liberally with cornmeal to prevent it from sticking when you slide it into the oven.

Sprinkle the surface of the refrigerated dough with flour. Pull up and cut off a grapefruit size piece of dough.  Hold the dough, flour your hands if you need to.  Gently stretch the surface of the dough around to the bottom on all four sides, rotating the ball a quarter turn as you go.  You are forming a round ball of dough. The bottom side will be a collection of bunched ends, but it will flatten out during baking. The top will be mostly smooth and cohesive.

Rest the loaf on the pizza peel for 1 hour and 40 minutes. Twenty minutes before you are ready to bake the loaf, preheat the oven to 350 degrees with a baking stone place on the middle rack and a empty metal roasting pan or broiler tray for holding water on the shelf below.

Dust the bread with flour and then slice about 1/8 of an inch slashes into the bread.  You can do them in any pattern you see fit.

After the 20-minute preheat, open the oven. Slide the bread onto the stone. Quickly pour 1 cup of hot water into the roasting pan or broiler tray, shut the door and bake for about 60 minutes until the crust is nicely browned and firm to the touch. Dot not open the oven or the steam will escape. The steam helps make the crust.

Allow to cool on a wire rack and then eat it!

Store the rest of the dough in your lidded, not airtight, container in the refrigerator up to 14 days!

Super Rad Pot Roast before spring

I’ve been busy to say the least.  Busy gaining weight, busy eating a ton of food… good and bad, busy trying to learn as much as I can about factory farming, busy trying to start a Slow Food chapter in Reno and busy trying to overhaul the kinds of meat products we are using at Dish.

Let me tell you, it is not easy to source humanely-raised, antibiotic-free, hormone-free meats.  My normal distributor doesn’t carry any of the brands I was looking for.  Well, wait, they do carry them, but the price is triple what we are paying now for ham, roast beef, turkey, bacon and salami.

So I moved on to our secondary distributor and called them.  They didn’t have anything!  Both of these companies are national and the leaders in their industry, but they carry very few organic and pretty much no humanely-raised options of any kind.  Blah… supply and demand I suppose!

I was starting to really get panicked until I thought of calling another company out of Sacramento that services Reno.  They came through… In fact today we received our first shipment of humanely-raised, antibiotic and hormone-free turkey, ham and salami as well as Niman Ranch applewood smoked bacon.  We also are now getting our eggs through  a farm that lets their chickens run around on natural ground with sunlight on their backs!

As for sourcing meats for my home, well that’s a bit more problematic.   None of the supermarkets in town carry anything on the pork side that is even close to humanely raised.  I’ve called quite a few places and have met with everything from laughs to surprise that I would want to buy humanely-raised meats.  What are you supposed to do?

We fortunately have a Whole Foods in town, so I have started to buy anything pork-related from them.  I’ve also looked up all the local farms within 100 miles and have contacted a few of them who raise beef and pigs.  Our plan is to visit each of them to see how they are raising their animals and then put together a group of people to purchase the meat!  I challenge you to do the same thing.  Yes it costs more, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I will just eat half as much meat as I did before!

So the good news is we are starting to make a difference.  Actually based on the amount of meat we use, I would say we are making a huge difference.

So on to Pot Roast.  I found this recipe in Gourmet Magazine a few months back and instantly had to make it.  It was super simple, but included a huge amount of caramelized onions.  Since I started cooking I’ve had quite a bit of a problem really caramelizing onions well.  Either I don’t cook them long enough or I burn the crap out of them.  So keep your eyes on them and don’t walk away for long!

This is the perfect weekend night dinner before the temperatures start heading into the 80s and 90s and a steaming pot of meat doesn’t sound so great!

Super Rad Pot Roast

Serves 6 to 8

Ingredients:

• 3 lb onions
• 1 – 5 pound, grass fed, boneless beef chuck roast, tied
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil, divided
• 2 Turkish bay leaves
• 2 (12-oz) bottles beer
  
• 2 tablespoons red-wine vinegar

Pat beef dry and season all over with 2 1/2 teaspoons salt and 1 teaspoon pepper. Heat 2 tablespoons oil in a wide 5- to 6-qt heavy pot over medium-high heat until it shimmers. Brown beef on all sides, about 15 minutes, then transfer to a plate.

Cook onions with bay leaves and 1 teaspoon salt in remaining tablespoon oil in pot, scraping up brown bits from bottom and stirring occasionally, until onions are well browned, about 25 to 35 minutes.  Add beer and vinegar to onions and bring to a boil, stirring and scraping up brown bits. Add beef and meat juices from plate and return to a boil.

Meanwhile, preheat oven to 350 degrees with rack in middle. Cut a round of parchment paper the diameter of the inside of pot (near the top).

Cover with parchment round and lid and braise in oven until meat is very tender when pierced in several places with a meat fork, about 4 1/2 hours.

Transfer beef to a cutting board and let stand, loosely covered, 20 minutes. Cut off string, then slice meat. Skim off fat from sauce and discard bay leaves.

Serve braised beef with onions and sauce and devour!

Humanely Raised Meats

Things have been going well for us at the restaurant and at home.  Business has still been strong so far this year and sales are up for the first two months over last year!  Hurray for that.

As for me, well I haven’t been working out, or blogging.  I have been cooking on and off and reading.  I just finished two books that have turned my whole life upside down.  The first, which was the start of it, is “Meat“, by Fearnley-Whittingstall and the other, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollen.

Both books were excellent.  But “Meat” was what started my new found desire to eat only humanely raised animals. If you are not aware, and you are probably not, 99% of all pigs in the United States are raised indoors, and for a large portion of their life, they are unable to turn around, root in the ground or do anything at all that resembles normal pig behavior.  Worse yet, pigs are one of the most intelligent animal species and are smarter than dogs and resemble the intelligence of a three-year-old child.

I’m not going to post the picture of what their confinement looks like, but if you are interested take a look by clicking here.

I’ve had a very hard time with this for the past three weeks.  I’ve always been interested in animal rights and have donated money to many charities, but over the past three weeks I’ve spent hours and hours reading about factory farming of animals in the United States and can tell you I have cried, been pissed off and overall just plain sick to my stomach.

So what have I done? Well first off I’m not buying meat for our home, nor will I have any meat in my home that comes from Factory Farms.  No more frozen pizza with pepperoni on it, no more ribs, bacon, chicken, etc. from the supermarket.

I’m buying all my meat from Whole Foods because they have the highest standards currently in any type of grocery store model, and I’m looking into purchasing a partial cow and partial pig for my home freezer.  I’m calling local farmers and visiting their farms to see how they take care of their animals.  We have always bought free-range organic eggs and I couldn’t imagine buying battery caged eggs.

As for the restaurant we have always used organic free-range eggs and I just tonight have sourced humanely raised deli ham meat, as well as bacon and salami.  This is where I will start and will expand from there.  Let me also say this is so important to me that I will personally be eating all of the increased cost for this humanely raised, antibiotic free meat.

I’ve been working very hard to understand all the ins and outs of organic meats as well as humanely raised meats so please share with me your experiences or questions.

Here are some resources if you are interested in finding out more about this:

Applegate Farms – Humanely raised meats

Niman Ranch – They started it all

Animal Welfare Approved – program and food labelthat promote the well-being of animals and the sustainability of humane family farms

Slow Food USA

Local Harvest – Get connected to a local farmer in your area

Eat Wild – Another site to find local farms

Farm Sanctuary – Non Profit Organization dedicated to saving animals

The Humane Society of the US

My Local and Humanely Raised Facebook page

So I will be back to posting recipes soon.  You might not see as many with meat as my plan will include spending much more for it, so I will enjoy it more and eat it less!

Thanks all!

Stuff to Come

Here is what I’ve been making.  I will get some recipes up soon.  Let me know what you would like to see first

Lasagna Bolognese

Whole Wheat No Knead Bread

Meatballs from A16 Cookbook

Pesto Tomato with Pasta – Taste better than it looks haha

Pot Roast with some awesome carmelized onions

And Short Ribs

Grilled Chicken Breast in Spiced Yogurt

I have no story tonight, nothing much to say.  I was at work for 12 hours today and wanted something quick and low-calorie.  I located this recipe on epicurious.com a few minutes before leaving the restaurant and made a few changes.  I found the taste to be very good, it was super easy to prepare and I would make it again.  It is nothing special or crazy, just a quick weeknight meal for the four of us.  Enjoy!

Sorry for the picture, I’m trying some new things and it didn’t work out as I would have liked.

Grilled Chicken Breast in Spiced Yogurt (serves six)

• 2 1/4 cups plain yogurt (preferably whole-milk)
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 1/2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 1 1/2  tablespoon chili powder
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1 teaspoon ground coriander
• 3/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
• 6 skinless boneless chicken breast halves

Whisk together one cup yogurt, two tablespoons oil, one tablespoon lemon juice, salt, and spices, then add chicken and turn until coated well. Marinate at room temperature 20 to 40 minutes. I marinated it for 20 minutes and would have liked to have left it for another 20 minutes so that the chicken could pick up a bit more flavor.

Prepare the grill for cooking, medium-high heat.  If using a gas grill, shoot for 400 degrees.

While the grill is heating, whisk together remaining 1 1/4 cups yogurt and 1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice and salt to taste.

Grill chicken (discard marinade), covered only if using gas grill, on lightly oiled grill rack, turning over at 7 minutes and then cooking for another 7 to 9 minutes.  The chicken is done when the internal temperature is 160 degrees.

Pork & Hominy Stew – Posole

Well, Well, Well. I’ve been having quite a few problems writing anything for the blog lately… as you can tell.  I’ve still been cooking and taking pictures, but I just don’t have much energy to write.

As many of you know, I’m not a good writer.  Not only does it take me forever to come up with something to write, but it takes me years to actually write it down.

I’m also a all-or-none person when it comes to my hobbies and I have problems focusing on more than a few things at a time.  In the past year it has worked out like this, in this order:

• Paintball and Exercising – good simple fun and I was in really good shape
• Cooking and Exercising – almost perfect, I was eating a ton of food and maintaining my weight
• Cooking and Blogging – the complete opposite.  I was eating and gaining weight
• Cooking and Photography – two very time consuming hobbies that require a lifetime to be great at
• Photography and Work – more work is necessary to pay for these hobbies

So where do we go from here?  I need to somehow find balance with all f this.  Paintball season starts in two months.  I’m really trying to improve my photography skills and I want to cook more.  Oh I need to exercise based on the fact I’ve gained half the weight back from last year already.  Last but not least, probably first, I need to start working on the new business opening, which is going to happen sooner than later.

To complicate things, I can’t just do something for fun.  More often than not I do something for the end result.  Being great, the best, perfect, better than others.  I’m always in search of knowledge, it could be researching World War II or reading about the Iraq war or many other things.  More times than not I pick a cooking subject or a recipe not to eat the food, but to learn the process, taste new foods or practice.  As I recently wrote on my facebook account, “I’m always reaching for something outside of my grasp”.

Any words of advice out there?

Oh and this recipe was great.  I had never tried Hominy before and I found this recipe in epicurious.com.  I didn’t really make any changes with the exception of adding a cornstarch slurry at the end to make it thicker.  It was one of the few almost perfect rated recipes I found on epicurious.com so give it a try!

Pork & Hominy Stew (serves 4)

• 1 1/2 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons chili powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
• 2 1/2 pounds boneless pork shoulder butt, cut into 2 1/2-inch pieces or boneless country pork spareribs, cut into 2-inch pieces
• 3 bacon slices, chopped
• 1 large onion, thinly sliced
• 1 cup diced smoked ham
• 1 medium carrot, peeled, chopped
• 6 large garlic cloves, chopped
• 2 poblano chilies,* seeded, cut into 2×1/4-inch strips
• 2 cups drained canned hominy (from two 15-ounce cans)
• 1 cup canned diced tomatoes in juice
• 1 cup beer
• 1 cup canned low-salt chicken broth
• 1 teaspoon dried marjoram
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro

Mix one and one half tablespoons of the chili powder the salt, and pepper in bowl. Rub spice mixture all over pork.

Saute bacon in large dutch oven or heavy bottomed pot over medium heat until crisp, about five minutes. Transfer the bacon to paper towels to drain. Working in batches, add pork to drippings in pot and saute until brown on all sides, about 10 minutes per batch. Using slotted spoon, transfer pork to bowl.

Reduce heat to medium. Add the onion, ham, carrot, and garlic to pot. Cover and cook five minutes, stirring occasionally and scraping up browned bits. Add the chilies and stir 1 minute.

Stir in the hominy, tomatoes with juices, beer, broth, marjoram, pork, and remaining two teaspoons chili powder and bring to boil. Reduce heat and cover and simmer until pork is very tender, about one to one and half hours.

Simmer stew uncovered until liquid is slightly reduced and thickened, about 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Transfer to bowl. Sprinkle with reserved bacon and cilantro.

Note: If you want a thicker sauce, which I did, I added a cornstarch slurry and then simmered for another 10 minutes.

Rice Pudding

I unfortunately didn’t take a picture of this one.  But it’s rice pudding, how can you go wrong.  I made this on New Year’s Eve and it was a huge success.  I only slightly modified it from the Ina Garten recipe I watched on Food Network that day.

This is not low calorie in any way, shape or form, but it’s worth it.  Next time you want a treat give this one a try.

Perfect Rice Pudding (serves 6)

3/4 cup white basmati rice
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
5 cups half-and-half
1/2 cup sugar
1 extra-large egg, beaten
1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

Combine the rice and salt with one and a half cups water in a medium heavy-bottomed saucepan. Bring it to a boil, stir once, and simmer, covered, on the lowest heat for 8 to 9 minutes, until most of the water is absorbed.

Stir in four cups of half-and-half and sugar and bring to a boil. Simmer uncovered for 25 minutes, until the rice is very soft. Stir often, particularly toward the end.

Slowly stir in the beaten egg and continue to cook for one minute. Off the heat, add the remaining cup of half-and-half, and the vanilla.  Stir well. Pour into a bowl, and place a piece of plastic wrap directly on top of the pudding to prevent a skin from forming.

Serve warm or chilled.

Grillades and Rice – YES

It’s winter and I’m craving braised foods, casseroles, soups and long-cooked meals.  Actually I’ve been craving this kind of food for months, but I was having a hard time getting the rest of my family to desire a long-cooked braised meat and potatoes when it was 90 degrees outside.  Well that’s not the problem any longer, it’s 30 to 40 degrees around here now.  Exciting!

The other exciting news is that I’m going to take my first college culinary class starting in January.  Most everything I’ve learned in my life, computer programming, photography, how to play golf or tennis has been through reading books, a ton of practice and trial and error.  By myself I can usually increase my skills to the level of advanced amateur pretty quickly, but when things start to get hard, I usually give up and move on to something else.

Well I’ve decided that I’m going to try and take my cooking and culinary knowledge to the next level.  At the same time I’m terrified of going back to college after 20 years.  I’m sure there will be a certain level of boredom at times since I do have pretty good knife skills and I do know how to cook but I really need to learn the basics.  I’m one of those people who often times skips the basics and this limits my abilities in the long run.

Well no pain no gain right?  I’ve been working at the restaurant for almost two years now and I’m cooking quite a few things.  It seems like this is going to be my long-term career so I better make sure I’m good at it. I also figure even if I spend the majority of my time on the business side of the restaurant, the more culinary knowledge I have the better off we are!

So on to Grillades… in Creole parlance, it means thinly sliced beef, sometime veal, braised in a roux-thickened stock and served over buttered grits.  We found a ton of rice in the pantry last month so I decided to serve them over rice instead. This recipe is from Molly Stevens’ book All About Braising, which I highly recommend.  I’ve cooked multiple recipes from this book and all are great!

The roux made from the peanut oil and flour in the drippings of the meat was out of control.  The braising liquid was awesome, thick and rich.  The meat was also perfect.  I will be making this again, over polenta/grits next time!

Grillades & Rice

Ingredients:

• 2 pounds of boneless beef steaks (chuck, flat iron or top round) about 1/2″ thick
• Kosher salt and ground black pepper
• 6 tablespoons of peanut oil
• 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1 large yellow onion, cut into 1/4″ dice
• 1 large green bell pepper, cored, seeded, and chopped into 3/8″ pieces
• 2 celery stalks, chopped into 3/8″ pieces
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme
• 2 tablespoons tomato paste
• 1/2 teaspoon cayenne, or to taste
• 1 teaspoon Hungarian paprika
• 2 cups beef or chicken stock

Slice the steaks crosswise into 2-inch-wide strips. Season all over with salt and pepper.  Using a meat mallet or the bottom of a small heavy saucepan, pound the strips to a 1/4-inch thickness.

Heat three tablespoons of the oil in a large deep heavy skillet or a Dutch oven (5 or 6 quarts) over medium-high heat.  Lift a strip of steak with tongs and lower just the tip into the hot fat – if it doesn’t sizzle immediately, wait another 20 to 30 seconds before trying again.  Once the fat is hot, add only as many strips of steak as will fit without crowding and sear them, flipping once, until mahogany-colored in spots and around the edges, two to three minutes per side.  Set aside on a large plate without stacking and continue searing the remaining steaks.

Once all the steak strips are browned, reduce the heat to medium-low and add the remaining 3 tablespoons oil to the skillet.  Add the flour and stir with a wooden spoon to make a smooth paste, which is known as a roux.  Expect to see black specks in the roux left from browning the meat; the roux itself will be dirty beige.  Continue to stir gently but continuously until the roux begins to glisten, about five minutes.

Stir in the onion, green pepper and celery until evenly coated with the roux.  Cook, still over medium-low, stirring often, until the vegetables begin to become limp and fragrant (you’ll smell the bell pepper most), about 20 minutes. The roux will darken from a dirty beige color to more like caramel, and the moisture released from the vegetables will help keep it from scorching.  Don’t stray far from the stove, through, when the roux and vegetables are cooking.  You have to be vigilant about stirring every few minutes so that nothing sticks or scorches.

Stir the garlic, thyme, tomato paste, paprika, cayenne and a healthy sprinkling of salt and pepper. Cook, stirring once or twice, for another three minutes. Slowly pour in the stock, stirring until smooth, increase the heat to medium and boil for a minute or two, stirring once twice, until the sauce thickens to the consistency of gravy.

Adjust the heat to low and wait for the sauce to slow to a quiet simmer.  Return the steak to the skillet, along with any juices that pooled on the plate, stir to combine the meat with the sauce and the vegetables, and cover tightly.  After about five minutes, check to see that the sauce is only simmering sluggishly – if it is too close to a boil, you’ll wind up with tough steak.  If necessary, lower the heat or place a heat diffuser beneath the pan.  Continue to braise, lifting the lid every 25 minutes or so to stir, until the steaks are fork-tender and the sauce is quite thick, about one hour.

During the last 45 minutes make the rice.

Remove the grillades from the heat and taste for salt, pepper and cayenne.  The sauce should be piquant.  Serve over the rice.