Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Cooking: Steak, roast potatoes and roasted chilli cauliflower with gravy

After cooking over 50 steaks in my cooking life, I have yet to master how to tell how cooked they are. Every time I manage to overcook them, this time was no different. But only overcooked them slightly, by overcook I mean medium-well done instead of medium-rare.

However this time I focused mainly on roasting a cauliflower for the first time, sounds pretty odd. And TRYING to perfect roast potatoes.

Roast Potatoes:
Ingredients: potatoes chopped into the shape you want them to be. salt. water. olive oil.
Method: Place potatoes in boiling water and cook for about 10mins (if cut into bite sized pieces) or 15-20 if half/whole. Drain and shake pan like there's no tomorrow to rough up the sides to get super crunchy potatoes. Drizzle with oil and salt(normally hot oil to start the crunchy part forming but I find that too much of a hassle because I'm lazy). Mix well and spread onto a tray lined with FOIL. I find u end up with wet potatoes if you use baking paper, not sure why. Bake (180ish) until crunchy looking?/golden, 30 minutes or so?

Roasted Cauliflower
Ingredients: Head of cauliflower broken into florets with larger ones cut in half, coat with some oil. Place them onto a tray lined with FOIL (for the same reason as potatoes). Season with salt and chilli and roast for about 30 mins. DEAD SIMPLE. Roasting cauliflower seems be sweeter than boiling them.

Gravy:
Ingredients: Beef stock. Sliced mushrooms. Butter. tablespoon or two of flour
Method: Melt the butter in a saucepan, add flour and stir and cook for a few minutes. Add stock little by little, whisking well after each addition. Put in mushrooms and also any juice that has come out of the resting steak, this will give the gravy it's darker colour. Taste. Add black pepper if you want a black pepper gravy.

Steak is a dish I think everyone should master, because steak is yummmmmmyyyyyy as.

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