All Things Chill

I headed over to the Ferry Building (in, at, around or near) the Embarcadero early this morning to find some fresh produce. Sadly, I think I got there way too early for the farmers to set up their tents, but I did manage to score a delicious breakfast sammich from a local purveyor with their own brand of applewood smoked bacon. MmMMMmMMmMMmMMm. That with a fresh tea from Peet’s Coffee made an excellent accompaniment to the view of the Bay Bridge.

Disappointed, I made my way over to the local Safeway that I spotted last week with Jos. I wasn’t about to leave without SOMETHING to show for it. Hee hee. I picked up some veggies, cheap steaks, chicken thighs, as well as a few bottles of beer and trek’d home. When I got back to my apartment, I made an afternoon meal to-go to hopefully last me throughout the day.

I figure that I spend about $7 and up on bad street food, so I wanted to make something of equal value (sans labor of course). So I took a $3 steak, $2 box of couscous and a few more dollars of veggies and got to work. I rubbed freshly cracked pepper and salt into the meat and quickly seared it in a very VERY hot pan for about 2 minutes on each side. While the steak was resting… I added soy sauce to the remnants of the pan and let it reduce. When the liquid was cut in half, I took the pan off the heat and added cold, whole butter to round it out.

I then julienned a red onion and cucumber and placed it in a bowl. I also minced some cilantro and cut 1/2 a cucumber as well as a spring (green) onion on the bias (angle). When all the ingredients were in the bowl, I added plenty of salt, rice wine vinegar, freshly cracked pepper and some pineapple preserves that I substituted for sugar.

That’s about it. What you see above is the final product:

Pan-seared ribeye steak with a soy sauce reduction over a bed of cous cous served with a fresh cucumber/pineapple salad.

Don’t worry, this isn’t a serving for one… even though it *could* be. Hee hee.

I promise I’ll share.

~Spec

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 28th, 2006 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Cheap [and GOOD] Eats, Cooking Culture, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.