Taking it easy in the kitchen: Steak Frites

Over the weekend I told Brian dinners were going to come down a notch. The extra weight of carrying this baby around all the time is starting to get to me, and long stretches in the kitchen belly up to the counter (literally) just aren't comfortable. I'm to the point where I look at my not pregnant friends and wonder if I will ever be that free and easy in my movement again. But that's not the point here. The point here is, I told Brian I was going to be taking it easy for meals, but then I went ahead and made steak frites with salad and homemade ice cream last night. And thank God I did, because that was one of the best home cooked meals we've had in a while, probably since I made mussels frites.

Here's the trick. I've figured it out. Cook from the cookbooks you love and trust. I love my food blogs and Pinterest and get tons of inspiration from them, but I would have to say my favorite cookbooks are Smitten Kitchen, by Deb Perelman and Screen Doors and Sweet Tea, by Martha Hall Foose. Our dinner lives improve dramatically when I cook from these books. I keep telling Brian I'm going to try to cook my way through these two, his response being "you should, I'd love that!"

The steak last night was a big 1.25lb porterhouse (on sale at the grocery store, no less!) topped with a blue cheese compound butter. If you've got SD&ST, it's called the Blue Cheese Porterhouse. Steak is something I'm wary of cooking at home, I'll admit. Even on sale, it's $8 a pound or so, and for $8 a pound I really don't want to eat tough steak. But I trusted Foose and followed her timing to the letter and ended up with a perfectly medium, tender steak, from my home oven no less! When your steak tastes like it came from a fantastic restaurant, all of sudden $8 a pound seems like a bargain. I only made one change: she calls for you to cook the steak on a broiler pan. If I have a broiler pan, I don't know where or what it is, so I used a cast iron skillet. It held up just fine under the broiler for 10 minutes. I can't rave about this recipe enough, I was so sad that a: I didn't have more steak and b: I've had this cookbook for FIVE years and this is first time I've tried this.

The frites I've already discussed here. They're from the Smitten Kitchen cookbook and the absolute easiest homemade fries. The ice cream is a buttermilk peach ice cream, also from Screen Doors and Sweet Tea. The salad was a usual in our house: baby greens topped with a fruit, a cheese and nuts- last night it was apples, blue cheese and walnuts.

I didn't take any photos because it's pitch black when we eat and nothing looks good in our dining room light, but I assure you, photographic evidence or not, the meal happened.