She was a traditional Midwestern cook, nothing too labor intensive, substantial food, eaten in the dining room. One of the meals I remember her serving us was steak and twice-baked potatoes. I was entranced by the swirls on top of those potatoes, like icing on a vegetable. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized those were frozen, prefilled and heated in the oven. Even that discovery failed to take away the charm of those memories.
A friend of mine taught me how to make twice-baked potatoes from scratch and although they lack the piped whirls of the frozen variety, they’re just as yummy. We prepared them with a tea-smoked steak (inspired by Fine Cooking Magazine’s latest issue) and had a great meat-and-potatoes dinner.
The potatoes begin with baked russets and a white sauce.
1TB butter
1 TB flour
1 cup hot milk (microwaved is easiest)
Heat the butter until it’s melted, add the flour and cook for about 1 minute until the mixture is bubbling, add the hot milk in a stream and continue stirring for another 3 minutes until it’s thick and bubbling. Remove from heat. Stir in 2 TB of shredded cheese.
This is the fun part: scoop out the insides of the baked potatoes without breaking the skins, mix the insides into the white sauce then refill the skins.
When you’re ready, they go into the oven to bake, with a little cheese sprinkled on top if you like.
The steak was marinated and grilled in the usual manner, but we put a foil packet of equal parts raw rice, brown sugar, loose tea and 2 TB chai seasonings on the grate below the meat.
When it started to smoke, we added the meat and voila: tea smoked steaks.
They were fantastic. We’ll be experimenting with that technique again.
No comments:
Post a Comment