steak and stout

Super awesome Steak and Potatoes

/ Dave S. Koster / 2 Comments

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A few years ago, which my belt insists was far too long ago, my family staged an intervention on my blood-pressure and Cholesterol. For a good long while after that, I exercised a lot and cut 90% of the red meat out of my diet. Hell, I cut out 100% of beer and even got close to being able to run a half-marathon. It was awesome. I felt good, my clothes fit nicely and I had lots of energy. Of course, what I didn’t have was much time. Fast forward to today, I killed my gym membership because I couldn’t make time to get down there and am struggling to get my ass out of the chair and, if nothing else, keep my weight from getting even worse.

The one change I made that I’m holding pretty well too is the near complete elimination of red meats and far more careful intake of unhealthy foods. I’ve been slipping on he unhealthy food front, but I’m holding firm on red-meat. Of course, this is super easy to do when I walk into the grocery store and peruse the meat section. I just can’t justify spending $20 for a meal of red meat. I mean, hell, who can afford that shit? (If you happen to be one of those people, I don’t want to hear it.)

Anyhow, when we do eat steak, I generally don’t, except for Christmas dinner, in which I eat a 4oz portion. I even get turkey burger when we grill in the summer. It’s seems pretty unfair for my family to have to adhere to the same standards of food intake because they don’t have problems with high-blood pressure. That’s sort of a ‘me’ issue. A good work around thus far that minimizes my intake of red-meat, reduces the cost of red, meat AND gets my family a tasty steak and potatoes meal, PLUS (and this is the real bonus) It’s a one pan meal ONE PAN. One pan means less dishes, which, you know, my wife gets stuck with most of the time, but you know, I’m looking out for her too.

What you need:

  • 4-8 Potatoes, depending on size. I like the smaller Yukon gold, you’ll want to use upward of 8 of them.
  • 1 – 1 ¼lb Steak chopped into cubes
  • 2 Tbsp fresh Parsley
  • ½ Large yellow onion, diced
  • ¼ tsp dill weed
  • 4Tbsp olive oil (or 2 Tbsp olive oil 2Tbsp lard)
  • 1/2Tsp Salt
  • Pepper to taste
  • 2Tsp Worcestershire sauce
  • 1/8 C. Red wine
  • 1 12-oz bottle Stout beer
  • 1 8oz package sliced mushrooms
  • Montreal steak seasoning (it’s got salt, pepper, dill seeds, and some other stuff in it.)

Directions

Rub the Montreal steak seasoning into the diced meat and brown in a well-seasoned 14” iron skillet with 2 Tbsp of olive oil or 2 Tbsp lard. Pull the meat off the skillet and set aside.

Dice the potatoes into relatively small pieces, roughly ½” or smaller. This will help them cook faster. Put them into a large covered bowl with onions, 2 tbsp oil, salt, pepper, and the dill. Mix well and put into the Iron skillet. Cook until the onions start to get a bit translucent. Add the Beer, red wine, Worcestershire sauce. Allow that to bubble off and once it’s cooking well again, add in the rest of the ingredients. Cook until the potatoes are soft, but not mushy, and the sauce has thickened into a gravy.

Irish Stout Pie

/ Dave S. Koster / 1 Comment

*This article first appeared in the 8/24/2016 edition of The Seward Journal Newspaper*img_1462

This week was one of those weeks. You know, the sort of week where a
bottle of cheap wine and carton of ice-cream is not only a perfectly
acceptable meal choice, it’s the perfect ratio of comfort-food to
energy expended. As much as the kiddos would have loved cartons of
ice-cream for dinner, it would have resulted in my week having gone
from pretty bad, to epically bad. Needless to day, dinners consisted
largely of emptying cans and boxes into pots and declaring it dinner.
The only comforting thing about that was the fact I didn’t have to do
much more than grunt at the stove for a minute. A much more preferable
meal for any one of those days would have been an Irish stout steak
pie. Real comfort food.

This recipe is brought to you by a conglomeration of things found on
allrecipies.com. You can even find the base recipe out there, if you
want to see how they did it. While this recipe isn’t the most
difficult thing you could knock together, it does take several hours
to prepare and cook, so be ready for that. I had fully intended to
tweak it to improve the outcome and validate what I’m about to put
down here, but the tweaks are all about delivery, the flavor is fine.

Filling ingredients:

2Lbs round steak or stew meat, cut into 1/2” cubes and floured with 1 Tbsp flour

3oz Lard (You can, of course, use shortening, but the lard has much
better flavor)

1/2lb bacon – chopped into small pieces.

3 large diced yellow onions

1 sm. pkg. of fresh mushrooms

1 1/2 C. Irish Stout

1 Tbsp chopped fresh Parsley

handful dried cranberries

1 tsp. dark brown sugar

Pie Crust (or just use store-bought or your favorite pot-pie crust) ingredients:

1 C. Lard

1 tsp salt

3 C. all-purpose flour

1 cup chilled water

Directions

Pre-heat oven to 325F

Put the lard and bacon into a large skillet over medium heat until the
lard melts – at this point, drop in the floured steak cubes and cook
until brown. Transfer this into a 13×9 casserole dish. Cook onions and
mushrooms in the same skillet until the onions are brown and mushrooms
tender. Add the onions and mushrooms to the steak and bacon mix. Stir
in the Irish stout, parsley, cranberries and brown sugar into the mix.
Cover and bake in the oven for about 2 1/2 hours.

If you’re going to make the crust from scratch, now would be the time
to whip up the dough. I’ve doubled the recipe, and that should be
enough, but if you find it doesn’t quite work, make more using the
same proportions described above.

Mix the flour and lard with a pastry blender until crumbly. Do not add
all of the water! add a little more than half of the water and mix by
hand. Continue adding water until the dough holds together. At this
point, I like to separate the dough into balls, cover and refrigerate
them for a bit so they roll out easier and stick less. In this case,
you’ll be making the bottom and top for 2 9” pies.

Remove the casserole dish from the oven and increase the temperature
to 400F. If the gravy doesn’t thicken after the bake, use flour or
corn starch to finish it up. I recommend flour as corn starch can make
the texture of your filling a little slimy.

On a floured surface, roll-out the bottoms for your pies and line your
two 9” pie-pans with them. Bake in the oven until lightly brown.
Remove from the oven and add the filling then cover with another layer
of rolled-out dough. Put the pies back into the oven until golden
brown, about 10-15 minutes.