Grilled Strip Steak

Week Six, Friday

This was probably the least successful of my meals and the most stressful cooking experience. It was still edible, but really frustrating. Before I started getting food from Fair Shares, the only meat I usually cooked was chicken. I'd used ground meat and I made steak a couple times. But I don't have that much experience with other meats.

This week, the meat choice was pork. I was able to trade it for something else, so I got an 8 oz. NY strip steak. This had a list value of $17, so it's an expensive cut of meat. (The 8 ounces was big enough for both of us to share.) I had such good luck with cooking chicken on my grill pan, I decided to cook the steak that way too.

I read up on it and followed the directions: I seasoned it and left it out of the fridge for an hour to come down to room temperature. I preheated the grill pan.

The instructions for the pan (which is really a panini press) say to cook everything on medium to medium-high heat and to brush olive oil on the pan after it has pre-heated. I found that medium-high makes the oil splatter, so I've been using medium. The grilled chicken turned out wonderful several times cooked this way.

The meat turned a gray color, never getting brown. Roy thought the blame went to using a grill pan, that there wasn't enough contact with the meat. He thought I should use a frying pan next time. I don't think so though, because the chicken turned out so well on it. Maybe it wasn't hot enough? Both sides got gray.

I also don't know how to use a meat thermometer. Roy mentioned to our neighbors that I was cooking a strip steak, and they told him that a meat thermometer is helpful with this. I recently bought an instant read thermometer, but this was the first time I've used it. The meat was only about an inch or so thick. The thermometer wouldn't stay upright by itself. I held it up, and it only registered to about 120 degrees. Should I have held it in longer? I wanted to stick it in the thickest part of the meat (towards one end) but Roy told me it would be better to stick it closer to the center.

I ended up cutting into the meat to see that it was gray most of the way through, with a little pink. I'd say it went from medium to medium well. I ate the less well done part.

All the while I was trying to cook the meat, I was also steaming broccoli for the first time. I had a steamer insert, but I only used it once before. That time didn't turn out well - all the water boiled away. This time, I couldn't get the water to boil.

This is a picture of my kitchen from the day we moved in. I don't know how well you can see it, but there's an air vent on the ceiling near the stove. When the AC is on, it blows air onto the stovetop and counter. Some days, we just turn the AC off when I'm cooking there. Too hot today. (We're also on the top floor of the building, so it gets hot up here.) Even with my big pot on the stove, the AC was pushing the gas flame around. And the little bit of water in the pot wouldn't boil. (This finally pushed me to do something. We bought a $1 air vent deflector at Home Depot on Saturday. I hope it works.)


And there was so much noise from the steak cooking, the TV on, the lid was on the pot, I couldn't tell if the water was boiling or not, so I had to keep taking the lid and steamer insert out to check. All this was going on while the steak was turning gray and the timer went off for the potatoes in the oven. I was freaking out.


I made a little cheese sauce for the broccoli by melting some cheddar cheese and butter. By the time we ate dinner, the meat was luke-warm and gray, the broccoli was okay but cooling, and the potatoes were fine. I made salads earlier, after I put the potatoes in the oven. I ate mine then, but Roy was exercising at the time. He ate his with dinner.

I used the following Fair Shares foods: strip steak, cheddar, broccoli, lettuce, radishes, scallions, olive oil.

I decided I'd feel a lot better after this meal if we had one of my favorite foods, movie theater popcorn. So we saw Princess Kaiulani at Plaza Frontenac and had some popcorn.

Lost Finale

Week Five, Sunday

I tried to make french toast for breakfast. I'd seen my dad make it when I was a kid, so it didn't seem like it would be that hard. I wanted to use some eggs and the apple syrup I got from Fair Shares a few weeks back. I wasn't all that happy with the results.

I made the batter using this recipe, except I used two whole eggs instead of one whole and two egg whites.


I used two slices of whole wheat bread, cut in half. These four half-slices soaked up all the egg mix. I wasn't expecting that.


I melted some butter in the frying pan before putting the bread in, but something went wrong. The bread stuck to the pan and made this mess. (This is why I'm calling this a disaster.)


I heated the apple syrup up in the microwave. It tasted good, but overwhelmed the bread. Everything was edible, but not as good as I'd get out.


This was a big night for us. Roy and I didn't watch Lost from the beginning. About a year or two ago, we borrowed season one from the library, and we got hooked. We caught up with the series just before this last season aired. I had a special dinner planned for the last episode.

Fettuccine Alfredo

Week Five, Thursday

The classic sauce to have with fettuccine is alfredo sauce. I never made it before, but I wanted to try it. I used this recipe which didn't look too hard. I bought shredded gruyere cheese. I found out that what's called "heavy cream" in the recipe is called "heavy whipping cream" on the packaging. The cashier at the grocery store told me they were the same thing. One thing I should have looked up, but thought I knew, was how much butter is in a quarter cup.

Two weeks ago, we got multiple bags of lettuce. There was one bag that I just didn't get to. Finally, I opened the bag and looked through it. The lettuce that still looked good was enough for four servings; I discarded the rest. I made Roy's salad with strawberries in place of tomatoes. He really liked it. Mine had a whole bunch of things from Fair Shares: scallions, radishes, mint, in addition to the lettuce and olive oil.


I had some veggies left over from last week, asparagus and mushrooms, so I cooked them to add into the sauce. I don't know if I really need to do this, but I made them separately, sauteeing the mushrooms in butter and grilling the asparagus. The mushrooms ended up being unnoticeable in the sauce, but the asparagus held up well and had a good crunch and flavor.

Since last night's grilled chicken turned out so well, I made it the same way this night.

And then there's the sauce. I didn't realize this for another day (I'm writing this on Friday night.) But I have to be honest here. For some reason, I thought a quarter cup of butter was a whole stick. So that's what I put in the sauce pan. Tonight's dinner also used some butter, and that's when I noticed the conversion factors on the butter wrapper. I'm not sure if what I made ended up being alfredo sauce. It didn't look thick enough, but it smelled like it should. I asked Roy to taste test it, and he loved it. The sauce left over on my plate looked like melted butter, and now I know why.

At least it isn't normally as fattening as I made mine. That is an eye opener, seeing all that butter, cream, and cheese. No wonder this dish was called a "heart attack on a plate". I have some of the sauce left over, but I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it.



This meal used the fettuccine, sundried tomato bread, mushrooms, asparagus, and some chopped scallions from Fair Shares.

Trout and Lamb (not together)

Week Three, Friday

Roy has done a lot of food preparation these last couple of days. We got some food from Fair Shares that he loves and I don't, so he's been making it for himself. Yesterday was strawberry shortcake, and today was grilled trout. He had the leftover kale and kresta pasta with it.


He was really happy with how it turned out.

Dinner was more stressful. The menu planning revolved around mint, which we got this week from Fair Shares. What could I make with mint? Lamb goes with mint, I'll buy some lamb. I found a couple recipes, here for a mint-tomato sauce and another for lamb kabobs and a marinade. (I didn't make the salsa verde.) I looked through cookbooks and read up on leg of lamb and roasted lamb this or that. When I got to the market, I chickened out and bought pre-assembled lamb kabobs.

I also made Greek roasted potatoes from my cookbook with the funniest cover "Help! My Apartment has a Kitchen!"


I was doing too much at once. The timer was going off to do something with the potatoes, I was putting together the marinade. The mint-tomato sauce was awful. I've disliked both things I've made with white wine vinegar so far. Either I don't know what I'm doing and how to fix it or I really don't like this stuff. I had to boil the potatoes for a little bit before putting them in the oven, and they were starting to fall apart when I transfered them to the baking dish.



The whole reason I made this meal was to have something that went with mint, and I didn't want to use this. I ended up tossing it. I even bought dijon mustard just for this recipe. In its place, I cut up some more mint and tomatoes, and added some things that I know I like: olive oil, salt, and pepper. We topped the kabobs with it.



I ended up not making a salad, because there wasn't time. I cooked the kabobs on my grill pan. A real grill would have been better. Some of the smaller chunks of lamb weren't touching the grill, so they weren't cooking. We ended up pulling them off the skewer and cooking them at the end.

It all ended up tasting good, but there was so much prep work. The potatoes took an hour in the oven, and I thought I'd have some free time while they were cooking, but I was busy the whole time.


Roy had strawberry shortcake again for dessert.

The First Night

Week One, Wednesday

Roy and I picked up the new food after work on Wednesday. I had already decided I wasn't going to try to cook something complete with it that night. The meat came frozen, and there was too little time to plan.

I made roasted chicken using the new olive oil. And I'd use the new brown rice, which I had never cooked before. Not real brown rice, anyway.

The brown rice.



I never cooked real brown rice before. I used this recipe from Alton Brown. It's rated easy, with 5-star user reviews. I halved the recipe, because I only wanted two servings.

Roy and I can't agree whether the rice was undercooked or overcooked. It picked up the flavor, but it was crunchy, like eating a seed. We got two pounds of rice, so I will try something different next time.

Minute rice to the rescue!


Of all our new food, we ate one roll (split between us) and I used some olive oil on the chicken.


Close up of the rice. I added roasted garlic, bell peppers, and onions to it. Roy called it un-fried rice.

I have to admit, I didn't get frazzled when I saw the rice didn't cook right. Even Roy noticed it. I think it's because the rice was in the oven, out of view, and I didn't see it until the time was done. If it were on the stove top, I'd be watching it and freaking out over what I should be doing to fix it. This time, the rice did its own thing, and I was able to cook something quickly as an alternative. Moral of the story: have a backup plan.

Everything tasted good, even if it didn't contain much of our new food.