A couple of great recipes

Krista and I have started enjoying the fruits (or vegis) from our garden and I have started cooking again. This week I had two goals. 1. Buy and cook some AMAZING rib-eye steaks and 2. make some AMAZING fresh salsa from home-grown ingredients. After the last couple of days I can say I did both.

The rib-eyes started with a trip to Frontier Meats out on 200. This is a little butcher shop that cuts meat to order. When I arrived on Saturday, there was a line out the door. I went inside and found that the line was to enter the back room where a team of about 6 or 7 guys were cutting meat straight off the carcass. Luckily, I was able to get what I want from the coolers: Two 1 1/2" thick rib-eyes and 2 pounds of sausage. The deal was amazing. The beautiful Angus steaks were over $1/lb. cheaper than the low quality rib-eye at Wal-Mart. We ate the sausage last night and were really impressed. For dinner tonight, I cooked the steaks roughly according to a Food Network recipe featured by "Good Eats." The recipe is pretty simple. Salt and Pepper both sides of the steaks. I modified the recipe and added paprika to the mix. The key to amazing steaks is in the cooking technique applied. You preheat a cast iron skillet in the oven at ~500 F. Add 1-2 tbsp of oil and place on a hot burner set at high. Immediately add the steak and leave for 30 seconds. Flip and leave for another 30 seconds. After time is up, move into the oven immediately and cook for 2 minutes and again flip. Cook for 2 minutes more. This will give a beautiful medium rare. Rest when done. Add 30 to 60 seconds per side for medium. This recipe gives a great seared surface and the steak is incredibly juicy. We served it with rice, steamed fresh-from-the-garden green beans and snow peas, and we topped the steak with fresh home-made salsa.

The home-made salsa was made the night before and is an amalgamation of several recipes I saw online. I don't have any real measurements because I kind of threw it together, but here is my best guess. First, wash, split and de-seed 4 tomatoes. All you want is the meat and skin, get rid of the seeds and membranes inside. Dice the tomatoes. Finely chop and add the leaves of one small pack of cilantro (no stems). Dice half an onion and add. I added about 2 tbsp of minced garlic from a jar (easier than keeping fresh garlic). I then removed most of the seeds from 1 jalapeno pepper (from the garden) and diced the pepper. Finally, I squeezed the juice from three limes (probably will do 2 next time) and added a pinch of salt. Mix it all together and let it sit in the fridge overnight to blend the flavors and you have a great fresh salsa. This is a fairly chunky, low juice salsa and is not cooked so it does not last forever. We love it so much that we have eaten it with just about everything for the last two days. It is quick to make and really good.

All-in-all I am quite proud of myself. It has been a very successful couple of days in the kitchen. Soon our tomatoes will ripen and I will have a pile of jalapeno and cayenne peppers from the garden that will make it even more special and delicious. Can't wait.