Author: Jo

Marinated Top Sirloin (Part 2) + Garlic Mashed Potatoes and Green Beans

Well, I took a 30 minute power nap on the couch after I finished my last post and while my meat finished marinating.  It was nice, but too short.  Steve woke me up with “Food time, Baby?”  The first words out of my mouth were, “Can you make dinner tonight?”  Ha!  Like that would ever happen.  Steve is good at alot of things, but cooking is just not one of them.  He has surprisingly produced some good eats off the grill, but that’s about his only culinary skill.  I was just so exhausted after 3 full days of gardening that my body did not want to get up from it’s horizontal position on the couch, let alone make dinner AND take pictures during the entire process.  But since I didn’t want to disappoint you all after my last post PROMISING that I would return with the rest of the recipe, I sucked it up and finished what I started.

I’m not going to post these pictures in the order that I took them, because that would just be too confusing since I was making everything at the same time.  So I’ll just keep everything in their own groups and you can determine the timing of everything if you make it all at the same time like I did.

While your grill is heating up, cut up some red skinned baby potatoes.  Don’t you think that red skinned potatoes look like apples when they’re cut up?  Dang it, now I feel like eating an apple.

Put them in a large saucepan and cover with water, then bring to a boil.

When they are tender enough to break apart easily with a fork, drain them and place back into sauce pan.

Mash with a potato masher.

Heat up some milk.  Don’t you like my Brasil (Brazil) mug?  I got it while on a missions trip to Brazil in the summer of 2006.

Add milk in small increments.  You don’t want to add too much, or your potatoes will be soupy.  Remember that you can always add more, but once it’s in you can’t take it out.  Mash milk and potatoes together.

Melt some butter and pour into the potatoes.  Yum.  Butter.

Add some salt and pepper to taste, then grate a clove of garlic over a microplane.  Watch your fingers, you don’t want to grate those!  I learned the hard way.

If you’re feeling really dangerous, add a handful of cheese.  I was clearly feeling dangerous.  Mash it all together.  The hot potatoes will melt the cheese and it’ll all be nice and ooy gooy.

While the potatoes are cooking, prepare your green beans.  Green beans were finally on sale at the grocery store, so I helped myself to some. 🙂

Cut off and discard the ends of the beans.

Blanche the beans for a few minutes in boiling water.

Meanwhile, cut up half of an onion.  If you make small slices one way, then turn and slice the other way you’ll minimize your chopping time and probably your tears as well.

I always have tears pouring down my cheeks while chopping onions.  Normally I have to stop at least 3 times while chopping to wipe my eyes.  Oh how it burns!  It’s a really pretty sight when I’m wearing mascara too.  All kinds of makeup running down my face!  Attractive.

Finely chop some garlic too.  Because onions and garlic love each other.

Throw them both into a pan over medium heat.

Once the onions and garlic have caramelized a bit, drain the green beans and toss together in the pan.  Add salt and pepper.

Heat your grill to medium high heat.

Take your beautiful steaks out of the fridge and bring them out to the grill.  It was dark by the time I grilled these, so I had to use flash on my camera, which I hate doing.  So I apologize if the quality of these photos aren’t as good as the others.  That’s just the nature of the beast.

Depending on how you want your steak cooked you can adjust the timing, but we like our steaks medium, so I grilled these for about 5 minutes on each side.

Look at those beauties!  Oh, and if you’re wondering why there are now suddenly 3 pieces of meat instead of 2 like in my last post, that is because after I had finished placing the meat in the fridge to marinate, Steve decided that he might want an extra piece of steak, so I added it to the marinade and just didn’t tell you about it.  I’m sneaky like that.  And guess what……Steve ate BOTH pieces plus 2 helpings of mashed potatoes and a helping of green beans.  He was a member of the Clean Plate Club 2 times tonight!  Impressive!

What a well rounded meal!  Oh and in case you’re wondering what is in the ramekin, it’s the meat marinade that I strained, added a little water to, and boiled for several minutes to kill any bacteria left over from the raw meat.

Makes a great dipping sauce!  Make this meal.  You won’t be sorry, as evidence of Steve’s double Clean Plate Club. 🙂

Top Sirloin Marinade (Part 1)

Steve and I went to the grocery store today with the sole purpose of picking up some heavy duty trash bags for our demulchification yard project and a case or 2 of bottled water.  As always, when we got there it turned into a full blown grocery store endeavor, where I realized how much we were actually out of. 

“I need to get some fresh veggies, we’re out of bread, you still have cereal at home but no milk, so we should probably get that as well.  Hey, how about some steak?!”

So that is how I came across this meal tonight.  I found this marinade recipe on The Pioneer Woman’s blog, but I tweaked a couple things.  As I type, my meat is marinating in the fridge as it should be.  Normally, I don’t think about the marinade until about 30 min before we’re supposed to eat, so my marinades usually don’t get to soak into the meat like they’re supposed to.  Luckily today I thought ahead!

Here’s what you’ll need:

1/2 cup soy sauce

1/2 cup cooking sherry

3 tbsp honey

2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

2 tsp sesame oil

1/2 tsp red pepper flakes

3 cloves garlic

steak of your choice (I used top sirloin….obviously since the title of this post is “Top Sirloin Marinade”)

Start by pouring your soy sauce into a dish that is big enough to house your meat and the marinade.

Pour in the cooking sherry.

Here’s what it looks like for those of you who have never cooked with it before.  You can find it on the vinegar aisle of your grocery store.

Pour in your honey, and if you get some on your fingers, feel free to lick it off.  I won’t tell. 🙂

Next comes the sesame oil.  This is the same ingredient we used for the Teriyaki Chicken & Pineapple Bowls a few days ago.  Give it a good whiff when you open it.  Smells so good!

It’s hard to have a steak marinade without some Worcestershire sauce, so go ahead and throw that on in there.

Add the red pepper flakes for some heat.

I like to grate my garlic on a microplane, but if you don’t have one, feel free to chop it up very finely.

It collects nicely on the back of the microplane while you grate it on top.  If you are a lover of garlic, feel free to add more if you’d like.

Tap your microplane against the rim of the bowl and watch the garlic plop in.

Whisk everything together so it’s fully combined.

Set your steaks in the dish.

Then flip them around on both sides so that they are nicely coated with the marinade.

Cover and pop in the fridge for 2-3 hours.

My meat is still marinating as I type this, so after I finish cooking (and eating) dinner, I will post the second part of this recipe which will include some mashed potatoes and green beans.  Stay tuned!

First Mow of the Season

Steve mowed our lawn today!  The first mow of the spring season.  Living in California my entire life, until 2 years ago, I never knew that you didn’t have to mow your lawn all year round.  From what I think I remember, you normally have to mow your lawn in the winter in California.  Or at least, I can remember being woken up every Wednesday around 7:30am from the gardeners mowing our large backyard.  We had an abnormally large backyard for the San Fernando Valley.  Almost an acre to be exact.  You can’t get a yard that size anymore.  Luckily my dad bought the land in the 80’s, when land was still relatively inexpensive, and built our family home.

Over here in Tennessee, you don’t mow your lawn in the winter.  How convenient!  The grass just doesn’t grow when it gets to a certain temperature (a temperature it never gets to in CA).  I’m sure many people who don’t live in sunny CA are rolling their eyes and thinking “Duh, where have you been?”  Well….in CA, that’s where!  I’m just learning about the different seasons over here in the South where there actually ARE seasons.  Ahh snow, how I love thee!  Autumn, you are gorgeous too!

Our grass was getting pretty long.  I picked up the dog poop yesterday and could barely see it through the forest of grass!  And let me tell you, the dog poop is usually not hard to miss with our beasts of dogs!  It’s like picking up human poop out there!  Sorry if that was a little bit too much information.  It’s just that I hadn’t done it in a couple weeks and I was pretty much up to my eyeballs in poop.  It was not a pretty situation….nor a pleasant smelling one either.

Steve loves our riding lawn mower.  Sometimes I like to mow the lawn too, since that thing is just so fun to drive, and I have to put up a pretty good fight for Steve to let me take the reins….or wheel as it were.  (By the way, those brown patches on the right are courtesy of our dogs.  They enjoy relieving themselves in the perimeter of our patio, which completely killed the grass there, and it’s now completely hard, compacted dirt.  We’re contemplating if we should just leave it until we try to sell the house, or if we should put sod in and try to fence off the area until it has grown in.  Suggestions?)

We even got a free pressure washer with our mower when we bought it!  That has really come in handy since we have dogs with muddy feet that like to stain our concrete brownish red from the clay dirt on their paws.

We actually got an upgraded pressure washer because they were out of the one that was supposed to come with the mower.  Score!  That reminds me, I really need to pressure wash the patio before Elizabeth’s bridal shower next month.  Put that on the “To Do” list.

This is courtesy of Camelot this morning.  I had the dirt and Miracle Grow mixture all nice and leveled out yesterday in my raised vegetable/flower bed, and this morning, after leaving Camelot alone in the backyard for a couple hours, I found this lovely sight.  At least I hadn’t planted the seeds yet!  Then I would have probably been alot more upset.  Luckily this is an easy fix.  We’ll be getting a little fence to go around the vegetable garden so this won’t happen again.  Camelot usually doesn’t jump small fences (or baby gates) unless there’s a thunderstorm and he’s trying to get to us because he’s scared.  The little pansy.

Look at this boy.  He doesn’t exactly scream “ferocious” with this face.  He likes to put on a mean front if you’re a stranger ringing our doorbell, but inside he’s just a pansy boy.  Your secret is out, Camelot!

I installed these stone tiles that lead to our hose today.  We still have to put either mulch or gravel in between them, but at least part of it is done.  It always gets so muddy back there, and it’s such a hassle trying to get the hose out, so hopefully this will help.

I also dug out several of our dead bushes in the front (Steve helped) and raked the old mulch into piles that have yet to be disposed of.  See, we didn’t have any heavy duty trash bags to dump it into so we just had to leave it there over night until we could get said trash bags.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!  My beautiful peonies will go in this large spot in the front.  I can’t wait until they start blooming!

Another accomplishment today was putting the bricks and top soil around each of the two trees in our front yard.  I think it looks so much better than before!  Unfortunately I didn’t take any before pictures, but just imagine that those bricks aren’t there and that the roots are sticking out of the ground.  We still have to put some mulch on top of the soil, but it already looks 100x better than it did.

Did I mention that I love spring?  Look at these blossoms!  Gorgeous!

I love when the earth comes back to life after a long flowerless winter!

I think this deserves to be framed.  God’s creation is so pretty!

This tree is a thorn in my side……except in the early spring when it looks like this.

Oh glory, if only it could look like this all year round!  Except during the spring, this tree is exceptionally ugly!  It hardly produces any leaves, and the branches hang downwards like a frown.  We were planning on ripping it out and planting some rose bushes or something with a little more color, but then I saw the blossoms.  Oh how these blossoms nurture my soul!  I’m sure in a couple months I’ll want to rip it out again, but for right now, it’s just so pretty to look at.