A Pan Prepared Pepper-Pebbled Pound

Okay look, I admit it. We cooked some Quartus and I forgot to update. I'm fixing it now, all right? Maybe we can just move past this.

Back in the day, we used to love ourselves some steak au poivre. It was one of our favorite dishes to make, and is wicked easy since it comes from this Better Homes and Garden recipe book I got after I graduated from college. But we hadn't made it in a while, so I busted out that book and cooked us up a NY Strip.

Turns out? Au poivre more like ghettau poivre, amirite?

Now, this looks tasty. And that ramekin you see there is full of the au poivre sauce. The problem is, it was just... meh. It wasn't bad, but what happened was that we started making Alton Brown's recipe, and he has a side of bleu cheese pan sauce that is absolutely to die for. So it's one of those "we could make this, but it turns out we'd pretty much rather have that other thing every time" cases.

Also, the au poivre sauce was a little ghetto. I mean I had to make it with beef bullion... The meat, though, was splendid. Best NY strip I've had in a long while.

Those potatoes you see there, though, are most tasty. We had them at a restaurant somewhere where they were called "bistro potatoes". This seems like a highly dubious name to me, but they are in fact pretty tasty:

• Take a potato. Slice it thin. Yukon Golds work best.
• Spread on some olive oil.
• Salt, oregano, savory, garlic powder, pepper. Maybe a little chili powder if you swing that way.
• Broil 'em til they're done.

Back in '10, these things won the American Culinary Lovers' Association Award for Best Use of a Toaster Oven. True story.

So that's it! That's our most recent Quartus meal.

Well... okay, look. It's true that technically we had another meal that I suppose you could say I overlooked, if you want to be pedantic. But is that really how we want this relationship to go? Accusations and hatred? I didn't think so.

It was this:

Man I need to work on my photography. Because this photo does not begin to accurately reflect how much I loved this burger. A while ago I asked my homepersons on G+ for burger recipes, but ultimately I figured since I loved his steak recipe so much, I might as well try Alton's burger recipe.

After I tried his steak recipe, I pretty much won't order steak at a restaurant anymore. What's the point? I can make a better one at home now. It turns out the same is true of his burger recipe.

I refer, of course, to the Burger of the Gods:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/burger-of-the-gods-recipe/index.html

So that's it! That's all our Quartus adventures since our last update.

Except for the tacos we just ate tonight. But, you know... tacos. I figure you've seen tacos.

Short ribs!

Last night I made four pounds of short ribs using a recipe I found in Bon Appetit a while ago:

http://www.bonappetit.com/recipes/2011/10/red-wine-braised-short-ribs

I love short ribs, and how can you go wrong when the recipe calls for an entire bottle of red wine? This is a good weekend recipe because, though it's not difficult, it takes a while -- you simmer the ribs in wine on the stove for about half an hour (pictured below), and then they go in the oven for 2-2.5 hours

I'd made this recipe once before, using some short ribs I picked up at Whole Foods. It was really good, but the ribs were extremely fatty and there ended up being not all that much meat. Happy to report that the fat-to-meat ratio was not an issue this time around. We ate the ribs over mashed potatoes, but I think I'm going to try them over polenta next time. Also, getting the excess fat out of the sauce would be way easier if I had a gravy separator. If you do as the recipe instructs and "spoon fat from the surface of the sauce," you will be hovering over the sauce with a spoon for a really long time. Trust me on this one.