I have a friend who will always order steak when eating out – that of course when a steak is an option. She is knowledgeable and appreciates good food and isn’t one of those people good beef is wasted on – because they will have it incinerated. Still, she doesn’t always get what she wants because many places clearly don’t know how to cook a good steak. It often comes overcooked and if it's cooked rare, it may arrive cold.
Good quality of meat notwithstanding, there are a few key things I’ve learnt to get right over the years. Once you know what to do, you won’t always need to pay over twenty quid for a steak because you’ll cook one at home, bought from the butcher’s at about a third of the price.
So get yourself a nice, marbled 8 ounce per person of fillet steak, or beef tenderloin as known elsewhere, and cook the perfect fillet steak one night this week. Triple cooked chips a bit too much for a weeknight? Just make some garlic mushrooms to go with the meat in that case.
Another steak possibility is a big fat one to share: get a 10 oz. rib-eye for the blue cheese steak, or a sizeable sirloin for steak and grilled vegetable salad.
That will be this week’s steak-out. For a meatless dish, the lentils, mushroom and red peppers combo could be a good option. Don’t let the dried lentils in the ingredients list put you off: lentils also come ready-cooked in a pouch in supermarkets so with those, start from step three of the recipe.
For a weeknight fish dish, you could do salmon with oyster sauce. Sticky mackerel is another suggestion and you can hardly go wrong with mackerel: healthy, sustainable and hard to overcook.
The cake of the week could be the classic pound cake. And if you’d like something a little bit, but not much more fancy, how about the cinnamon swirl marble cake? Exactly – what a good idea indeed.