Livening-up a steak dinner

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Yesterday it was my turn to cook, and since I have not been feeling so good I was looking for an easy meal to do. Jane said she fancied a steak so that’s what we had – except that I didn’t want the meal to be too plain, so I made one or two extra bits and pieces. Here are our two Sirloin steaks, marinating with garlic and black pepper.

No chips this time, but a great big fluffy Jacket Potato (i.e. one baked in its skin), and a very special salad made entirely from home-grown ingredients – this salad:

It contains lettuce, radicchio, endive, rocket, leaf celery, landcress, chervil, mustard, chicory, mizuna and probably a few other things I have forgotten to mention. I think this one really does qualify as “Mesclun”!

To go with it I made some Hazelnut mayonnaise.

Jane showed me how to make this. It’s really easy (when you know how), but utterly delicious. It uses a whole egg, half a teaspoon of white wine vinegar and a 50:50 mix of light olive oil and hazelnut oil, all combined into a smooth creamy texture by dribbling the oil into the other ingredients through the slowly-revolving blades of a food-processor. Many people think that making mayonnaise is very difficult, but I can reassure you that made this way it is definitely not!

The final enhancement for the salad was these crunchy croutons, which I made with stale bread doused with olive oil, sprinkled with salt and pepper and cooked in the oven at a high temperature for about 15 minutes until golden. They add a very different texture dimension to a salad.

Whenever we eat steak we try to have a bottle of this particular wine – a St.Chinian from Chateau La Dournie. It is a much lighter wine than many people would choose to serve with steak, but it suits us exactly.

Incidentally, the only place in the UK where I know you can buy this wine retail-fashion is Majestic, though the place we first encountered it was in the restaurant chain called Cote. We like it so much I once contacted the vineyard directly to ask where I could buy it! Unfortunately none of our supermarkets stock it.

So here are the results:

I think you will agree that all this was a sight better than just opening a tin of spaghetti hoops….

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