so here's a wonderful dish, lifted mostly from the French Laundry Cookbook: pan roasted rib steak, pommes maxim and morel mushroom sauce. so here goes. first up, the sweet, beautiful ruby red tower blessed with marbling worth far more than that hard, inedible marble in caesar's palace. I'm talking about a rib cut, 2 1/2" thicks, marbled in fat that looks, gloriously, like this:
And that piece of love, so carefully crusted with coarse cracked black peppercorns and a veritable snowstorm of kosher flake salt, was magnificent. a 2 1/2" thick cut of love, PROPERLY SEASONED PEOPLE, that was ready to be treated to a lovely bath in boiling butter... You wanna see i suppose, how it looked roasting in the oven:
There it roasted, like a king bathing in an golden pool of butter, salt and pepper; and there it bathed being turned periodically, basted... over and over and over so that the roast became one with, infused by, the french cooking secret of butter, butter, butter. and you know what happened next??
We rocked the pommes maxxim - a couple of waxy potatoes gave their lives and were sliced thin, arranged in circular patterns to fit a saucepan and finally, like a great reward, were layered and doused with the sweetest of clarified butter. these lucky potatoes, their slices, fulfilled their destiny and baked together, melting and fusing, one layer after another golden layer, into the pommes maxim they were destined to be. and that was that.
Two quick additions, saucier in nature joined the fray: Bordelaise sauce, easy with the marriage of the proper mirepoix in a ruby splash of red wine, and the sauteed morel mushrooms, bought fresh at Whole Paycheck for way more than I'd care to admit. The morels, although delicious beyond compare, just weren't the purty, so the Bodelaise sauce is pictured here instead:
and finally, since i'm starving now, the finished product: a hunk of the pommes maxim, draped with the sauteed morel mushrooms, topped with slices of the beef, all swimming in a pool of the Bordelaise. enjoy...
