September: Steakhouse Night
I sat down to eat breakfast on Wednesday morning in the same chair I sit in every morning, something snapped underneath me, and I held onto the side of the table with both hands — willing myself not to fall and my coffee not to spill as my every morning chair collapsed. Then our toilet started leaking Noah's ark levels of water on the bathroom floor. Then work took a turn for the worst. And that is the week we had leading up to Saturday's steak night.
When I started reading the September issue of Bon Appetit, I learned that Alison Roman has a new cookbook coming out. It is a compendium of dinner party menus. Basically the cookbook I hoped someone would ask me to write after they came across this blog, that I have not promoted at all, and for which I did not create any of the recipes (so it’s possible that it was a long shot). She shared one of her menus in this issue of the magazine, and I decided I might as well just give in — it also featured a martini bar AND a baked potato bar, so there was that.
I never cook meat. I mean, I sometimes make meatballs, or use ground pork in a stir-fry, but I never make a steak or a roast...I can't even come up with other words that are like that. So I didn't really think through what it would mean to make prime rib for 10, financially or emotionally. But off we went. I called the serious Italian butcher earlier in the week to pre-order the meat, having no clue if FreshDirect would have it and wanting to make sure it was the best. I stumbled over the pronunciation of chine bone (thinking it might have been a misspelling for chin?) and fought mercilessly against the butcher's suggestion that he pre-cut the meat off the bone, but tie it back together for me. And when I admitted I'd never made this recipe before, he replied "oh, I know."
This is when I realized that if you feed people steak, they will be happy.
On Saturday morning, Nick went to pick up the meat, promising to return friends with all of the "paysans." (Plus cocktail onions, more gelato, and more creme fraiche). And I got to work on a tarte tatin. Nick made at least 3 more trips (paper towels, sparkling water, ice, the gelato). Truly, I spent all day cooking, but it was so worth it. The meat came out perfectly, the creamed greens were incredible, the potato bar a huge hit, the salad no one ate but me delicious, and the martinis potent :) (upon the guidance of our beverage manager and consigliere, I switched the recipe and went 2/3 gin, 1/3 vermouth instead of 50/50, and I kept the mix in the freezer all day so it was super cold when our guests arrived. And because our consigliere insisted, I also kept the martini glasses (a random assortment of our shorter glasses) in the fridge. While it was nice to have the cocktail onions, a word to the wise, no one will use them...or the lemon peels. And everyone at our party drank their martinis dirty.
Can you spot me amongst these well-fed guests?
