December 5, 2011 Dinner – Steak with mushroom sauce and Baked Delicata Squash.

December 5, 2011  Dinner – Steak with mushroom sauce and Baked Delicata Squash.

We are now back into our normal mode of menu planning and cooking, which is to cook three or four simple elements in a meal; a meat, a green vegetable, a starch or carbohydrate and sometimes a sauce for the meat.

Suzette and I talked during the day and I asked if steak was okay for dinner.  When she said yes, I thawed out a thick cut rib eye steak (Costco $5.99 lb.).  When she got home I was still working and had to go to the bank and the post office, so she started baking the delicate squash I had bought the other day at the Coop ($1.25 lb).  Suzette, halved the delicata and stuffed each half with butter and chopped onion and pecans and then baked it at 350°F for     minutes.

When I returned home the squash was baking in the oven. I asked if Suzette wanted to add the leftover sautéed turnips to the mushrooms and she said, “Yes”.  So, I took a package of mushrooms and the PPI turnips sautéed in onion and thyme (from December 3, 2011 dinner) out of the fridge and grabbed two shallots and two cloves of garlic and sliced and diced all of those ingredients and threw them into a non-stick skillet with about one tablespoon of butter and one tablespoon of grape seed oil, because I wanted the mushroom sauce to retain a more woodsy mushroom flavor and olive oil would interfere with that flavor. 

Then I stemmed and put twelve stalks of asparagus in the steamer with some water and turned on the heat.  While I tossed the mushroom mixture and the old turnips in the skillet over medium high heat; Suzette began sautéing the steak in a cast iron skillet (no grilling tonight because of the below 32°. temperature).  After about five minutes, when the mushrooms began to soften and take on color as they absorbed some of the grease, I added about two tablespoons of Amontillado sherry to the skillet and covered the skillet with the wok cover to let the mixture soften and steam in the sherry atmosphere.  After a few more minutes Suzette reduced the heat under the mushrooms and turned off the heat under the asparagus, removed the baked delicate squash from the oven, and tested the steak for doneness. 

The steak was still deeply red in the center and it needed another minute or two, so I went to the basement and grabbed the bottle of Carneros Creek Pinot Noir Reserve 2007 that I had bought at Trader Joes’s the other day for $7.99 and opened it and poured a small sip for each of us in wine glasses.  We agreed that the wine was still somewhat tight and musty.  I suggested that I decant the wine, but Suzette said she only wanted to drink one glass and suggested filling the glasses with as much as we would drink for dinner so the wine would open up sitting in the glass and then corking the bottle, which I did.  I set the glasses with about 8 ounces each of wine on the table.  With squash and turnips, we decided on no bread.  So in another minute or two we cut of the heat on the mushroom mixture and I cut the steak in halves and Suzette cut the delicata halves in half. We plated up by putting the mushroom and turnip mixture on the steak and placing a one-fourth wedge of delicate squash and 6 asparagus on each of our plates.

The Carneros Creek 2007 turned out to be clean, without pronounced additives, and opened up after a few minutes and tasted like a 100% full bodied Pinot Noir should, so it is the winner of the under $10 pinot award this week.  Thanks Trader Joe’s.

The star of the meal for me was the mushroom mixture with its three onions (brown, shallot and garlic).  The mixture of those three onion family members with the sherry and the mushrooms with a hint of thyme from the PPI turnip dish had a really a special flavor profile and I was happy that I had decided not to go out to the garden to pick additional thyme.  The mushrooms and sherry merged with the butter to make a unified flavor that was dominant.  The onions and turnips created a secondary textural note and flavor. In this case the “less is more” principle worked beautifully. The sauce was moist, so it clung to the pieces of steak to make a lovely combination of flavors.  I fetl like I have achieved a successful technique for cooking mushrooms.  Usually I do not cover the mushrooms and they dry out and become wrinkled and tough and do not develop into a moist sauce that they developed tonight, so in the future I will always add a cooking wine and cover mushrooms, if I want a mushroom sauce for steak.

The Delicata Squash was tender and naturally sweet, so I was glad Suzette had not added sugar.  Again another example of “less is more”.  The onions and toasted pecans added flavor and a crunchy texture to the delicately soft squash. 

Bon Apètit