What We Eat When We Eat Alone - Deborah Madison [35]
But Cliff is no stranger to a steak. “I’ll do a pan-seared marinated tri-tip soaked in a two-week-old not-so-great bottle of red wine that I couldn’t bring myself to throw out,” he says. “Gotta pat dry the steak before searing it, of course. I’ll have it with spinach cooked in cream and with chive butter. I always make compound butters with leftover herbs. You know how you buy a little package of tarragon or chives, and then it just sits in the fridge? This way you extend its life.”
How many of us have watched two dollars’ worth of chives gradually yellow, then wither away just because we didn’t get around to figuring out what to do with them beyond the dictates of a single recipe? What a waste! Especially when cooking for one. If you don’t happen to have an herb garden—and most people don’t, sad to say—fresh herbs other than parsley and cilantro can get pretty pricey. Herb butter lets you use every leaf and repays you with its flavor later. It will be used and loved. And it’s not only good on the steak, but on potatoes, in soups, and with vegetables of all kinds.
Although simplicity is one of the advantages of choosing a steak, chop, or hamburger for dinner, some men go for more complex doings. John, the bartender at Lola’s, a Cuban restaurant that enjoyed far too brief a stay in Santa Fe, inspired another meat dish. Over a mojito, Patrick extracted a recipe from him that is our most complicated one by far, but eminently doable and worth doing, though perhaps for a party rather than a meal alone, unless, like John, you plan to eat off of it all week. The recipe is for a stuffed, rolled flank steak, pierced with toothpicks or bound with twine, then grilled.
“I like my mother’s cooking,” John says. “She’s Hungarian and my father’s Italian. I always buy fresh and love to cook on the grill. When it comes to a flank steak, marinate it,” he says. “Just use an Italian vinaigrette. Then make mushroom duxelles.”
Responding to Patrick’s blank look, he adds, “Basically, you take mushrooms and chop them up fine, squeeze all the water out, then sauté them in butter with scallions.”
So far, so good.
“Then I grate Swiss cheese, crumble bacon, about eight strips, get parsley, and put it all in the center of the flank steak. You roll it up, wrap it like a football, put toothpicks through it, and grill.”
He makes it sound easy, and it definitely sounds easier than his other favorite dish, another stuffed meat concoction, only this time one involving a chicken. It’s an impressive one, and it’s even more impressive to think that John would cook this just for himself. We suspect that he may not be telling the truth.
“Carefully strip all the skin off the chicken,” he begins. “Take off all the meat. Throw away the bones and stuff the chicken meat in the Cuisinart. Add ham and pistachios and blend. Also buy two chicken breasts. Cut them into big pieces and throw them into the mix. Then put it all back in the chicken skin. Make a little sack out of it, take cheesecloth, soak it in melted butter, then wrap the whole thing up like an Italian cheese that looks like a pumpkin.”
This required a napkin note, a diagram.
“Then you bake it until a meat thermometer reads ‘chicken is done.’” And so are you, we imagine.
The director of his own theater company turns to jerked pork when he’s on his own. “Marinate a pork tenderloin in jerk sauce from the store,” John Flax says, “then grill it. You’re supposed to serve it with plantains, but I eat it with baked acorn squash and greens, either collard, mustard, or beet greens, and sometimes a combo of all three.”
This sounds like an eminently doable meal too, even with the plantains. But they could be the final straw for many a single man. Meat, greens, and squash are already an impressive showing.
Jerk sauce provides a solution for another man who douses chicken with it. “I’ll marinate a bunch of chicken breasts in jarred jerk sauce, then pan-fry them in any oil,” he says. “You make some rice along with