Saturday, December 21, 2013 – This week’s episode of cooking class was about pasta. I’ve actually taken this class before, and last time we had a recipe for sun-dried tomato pesto, which was awesome. So I set out to recreate it.
The ingredients are quite simple. The listed ingredients were sun-dried tomatoes, garlic, thyme, and lemon zest. But the real ingredients are sun-dried tomatoes and whatever herbs, spices, aromatics, and flavorings you’d like. Also, I dunno if there’s a difference between “sun-dried tomatoes” and “sun-ripened tomatoes”, but if there was I can’t figure it out.
One thing I would do differently though, is instead of just dumping the tomatoes straight from the jar into the food processor, I would dump them into a bowl, and put just the tomatoes in the food processor and leave the oil behind. That way, you have better control over the amount of oil. As it was, I just dumped in the whole jar (minus the actual jar) and there was way too much oil.
Fresh pesto. The food processor is good at slicing and dicing. Not sure if it was because I had too much oil, but maybe next time I might want to use the blender instead for a smoother pesto.
As it turns out, you can freeze pesto. The recommendation on teh intarwebs is to freeze pesto in an ice cube tray, then bag and tag. But I figured, if I’m eating pesto, I’m likely to use larger portions. So I ended up making a double batch and freezing half of it. (Someone remind me to eat pesto some time early next year.)
Now about that steak. I wanted to add a bit of protein to my meal, and I didn’t feel like doing chicken again, since I’ve done chicken a lot. And beef is easier to cook. (Mostly because it’s really hard to undercook good beef.)
So I was thinking seared steak, sliced up and laid out on top of the pasta for presentation (more about presentation later). A lot of people will tell you, if you’re slicing up beef, you should go with flank steak. But I don’t like flank steak. Not even when it’s cut against the grain. Of course, I’m also buying cheap flank steak at the supermarket, rather than the expensive stuff at the butcher. So I ask my steak-wielding friend, which is better for seared steak, cheap supermarket top loin (top loin being one of the better cuts of meet, arguably above ribeye and sirloin, but not as good as tenderloin, aka filet mignon), or expensive butch flank. The consensus was that the cut of meat was more important than the price (particularly since price isn’t always the best gauge of quality). So I snagged about 10oz of top loin from Safeway for a little over $4.
And I’m happy with the way it turned out.
While the meat is resting, the last step is to cook the pasta and finish the sauce. (And by finish, I mean add cream, seasonings, and warm it up so I’m not eating cold pesto.)
The recipe doesn’t say to do this, but my gut told me to add about half a cup of cream to make the sauce more awesome. If I were to do it again… I’d add a whole cup of cream to make it even more awesome! (That combined with using less oil should make it ideal.)
So all of that brings us back to the final dish.
To make the prettiest presentation, I sliced up the steak and fanned it over the pasta, and added a lemon slice. (And the lemon slice isn’t just for show. Used judiciously, a little bit of lemon juice can enhance the flavor.)
But there’s one thing lacking in the presentation. It’s the pasta sauce all over the side of the bowl. If I wanted top notch presentation, I should have tossed the pasta in a master bowl, then dish out individual servings, so the individual bowls would be immaculately clean. Still, the food is delicious. I’ll definitely add this dish to my playbook. Or whatever you call the standard list of things a person cooks.