This weekend we celebrated being married over two decades, 22 years to be precise with a few years of shacking up before that. Couldn’t do it on the day we got married, but we did a bit later with tasty foods, part of the problems and benefits from working in a retail meat department. Oh, I got a new camera too so hopefully you’ll notice that the pictures are a bit better.
I came out of the grocery with quite a haul. One half-pound beef tenderloin steak, a bag of sea scallops, a stick of dried Spanish chorizo, fresh asparagus and a chocolate cake.
The appetizer was a recipe I swiped from Nigella Lawson, frizzling small 1/8” thick slices of the chorizo to render fat to fry the scallops. A very nice tapas. I would have thought the sausage to be too strong for the seafood but they work very well together.
The beef tenderloin was done as we usually do steak, in a cast iron skillet, to a nice medium rare. I also made béarnaise sauce at the request of my husband who loves it. A great recipe for this is from the Joy of Cooking. It’s simple and made in a blender.
The asparagus was roasted in the oven (recipe here). They were also eaten with the béarnaise sauce. You also can see them cooked, sharing the plate with the steak….and a cat hair. 
With this we had our second to last bottle of wine from the Finger Lakes vacation. The McGregor Highland Red, a nice peppery red blend.
After being sated by all of this, the cake became breakfast for the next morning. 🙂
I’d also like to mention two snack foods here too. Wegmans has a very tasty Buffalo Blue Cheese ruffled potato chip. For those who aren’t from the states, we have a tendency to put fried chicken wings in a vinegar pepper sauce and then dunk them into blue cheese dressing. The other snack is Utz’s cheese balls, a puff of deep fried batter with bright orange cheese powder on them. They are utterly junk food, but are so tasty. They are better than other cheese balls because they have butter (aka milkfat) in them. Get them in the barrel, you’ll want that many.
That’s all. Eat well!
Club Schadenfreude 
I’ve developed a wonderful technique to cheaper cuts: pounding the crap out of it with the small cast iron frying pan, cutting into finger sized bits. Spice mixture of Kansas City Steak seasoning crushed up, paprika, ground red pepper, salt, galic powder, ground black pepper, flour and a little olive oil and the beef and shake it up in a bag. Pan fry in the big cast iron pan.
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Sounds excellent. I am always amazed how much pounding a cut of meat makes it so much better. Do you have this with anything in particular?
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So far I’ve used it as the core element of stew, but I can’t help but have a few bits before before putting the rest into the slow cooker.
The pounding and the mortar and pestle crushing of the spice can get a bit tedious unless you put on some music to be angry by, like Skinny Puppy or the like.
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heh, yep. It sounds like it would be good dipped in peanut sauce.
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Peanut sauce? With Beef? Espicially rather well seasoned beef? I like it on Chicken, particularly a quick and dirty Saytay by blending A-1 and Peanut butter and then grill it. right on a strip of chicken as an appetizer. However, I just can’t imagine peanut combining with beef well.
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well, i’d eat peanut sauce on just about anything. But it’s just fine on spicy beef in my experience.
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