Meat on a Stick

Overdue

It's been several months since I last posted about my culinary endeavors. There are a couple reasons for that. It takes some planning to take pictures of the ingredients and the cooking process. And I often don't make the effort to plan ahead or take the time to photograph stuff. So part of it is that I'm just lazy, but also, not very many things seem particularly noteworthy.

That said, I have had a few cooking adventures that are noteworthy that I intend to share. Going in chronological order would just make too much sense, so I'll start with the dish I made just yesterday and we'll just see what happens from there.

Meat on a Stick

For some reason, I love the idea of meat on a stick. Maybe it's a subconscious appreciation for the rustic manly nature of no-fluff eating. But then again, I kind of undermined that by plating it all pretty like. Well, whatever the reason, I like it. So that was my inspiration for this dish.

So here's the menu: 

Jamaican Jerk Beef Skewers

Cole Slaw

Mashed Potatoes

Emily and I invited some friends over, so I jumped at the opportunity to do something cool for dinner. I perused my Saveur magazines for recipes for a couple unfruitful hours before I finally came across a Jamaican Jerk Chicken recipe. I didn't feel like getting whole chickens like the recipe called for, so I decided to adapt it for beef.

Meat

Tri-tip hunk of meat.

First, I went to the store to get some beef. I wasn't exactly sure what cut to get. Sirloin and flank steaks seemed a little expensive, and chuck seemed too cheap, and I needed something that was easy to cut into strips for the skewers. Safeway happened to have big untrimmed cuts of tri-tip steak, so I decided to go for that. 

All trimmed up. 

After careful trimming of the fat and any membranous stuff I could see, I set about cutting the meat into strips.

Unequal strips. Still tasty.

The hard part about this cut is that it is not very consistently shaped. I made do and resigned myself to various sized pieces of meat. 

Mud? Brownies? No, marinade!

Then the marinade. The original recipe from Saveur was for 2 whole chickens, so I scaled it down to 2/3 of the original recipe (like 1/2 a cup of sugar instead of 3/4). As I added the ingredients together and mixed it up, it resulted in something that looked more like browny mix than anything else. 

I dropped the meat into the marinade and left all in a bag over night. Then I just skewered them up, and after everything else was prepped (see below), I threw them on a hot grill for about 2 minutes on each side.

In retrospect, the 1/2 cup of allspice was a bit much. I figured that would be the case going into it, but thought I'd go ahead and give it a shot. But as a fall-back against super-spiced meat, I shaped the rest of the meal to be able to balance it out. (Also, I modified the recipe below to reflect what I would do next time, rather than exactly what I did this time.)

Taters

I decided to do mashed potatoes as a nice mellow base and balance for the meat. Plus, mashed potatoes may be one of my very favorite foods in the entire world. It wasn't anything particularly special: about 8 small russets, boiled, and mashed by hand with some heavy cream, butter, salt, and garlic powder. But the result is absolutely amazing. The starchiness of the russets made them a little bit lighter and fluffier than yukon golds that I've used before. But then again, I haven't met a plate of mashed potatoes that I haven't loved. So any way you slice it (or mash it, haha!) potatoes+cream is a recipe for awesome.

Slaw

The bigger challenge that I laid upon myself was coming up with a homemade cole slaw recipe. As I was staring hopelessly at the produce aisle in the grocery store, I was trying to rack my brain to come up with some way of making cole slaw something other than mayo mush. My first idea was to use some of the unique Asian root veggies that are regular staples here in Hawaii. So in addition to the ol' purple and green cabbage and carrots, I added daikon. I say that very casually now, but that's only because I stood there and looked it up on Wikipedia at the store. Before yesterday I had no idea that it was a kind of radish, or anything else about it.

I got this picture from another website, but mine looked a lot like this.

Once I started chopping my vegetables, I gave the daikon a taste. It was pretty mild and quite fresh, kind of like a carrot. Then the spice kicked in. Whoa! Where did that come from? It kind of reminded me of a mild horseradish/wasabi kind of spice. It didn't linger too long, but a big bite of that stuff would have been a bit uncomfortable. Overall, I was happy with my choice and thought it would add a nice bit of variety to my cole slaw. 

Again, I failed to photograph this myself, so I had to steal.
But it looked kind of like this. Pretty, isn't it?

As far as prep goes, I cut my heads of cabbage into quarters and cut thin slices (about 1/16"-1/8"wide) until I had a big handful each of purple and green (about 3 cups each). If I was better at using the awesome mandolin slicer I got for Christmas, I would have used it for the daikon and carrots to julienne them. But I'm not, and I chose not to use this meal as a practice session. So I just use a knife and cut them into little slivers of crunchiness. Then I just tossed all that in a colander with a little salt to get it wilting and macerating, loosing its excess water into the bowl underneath the colander for about an hour.

Next was the sauce for the slaw. I didn't want to go to heavy-handed on the mayonnaise. That's just boring and gross. But I did want to have a bit of creaminess to temper both the daikon and the spiced meat. So I just used half a cup of mayo to start, added some rice wine vinegar (to go with the daikon Asian theme), a little mustard to add some depth, and then pineapple juice for an element of sweetness. I was pleasantly surprised that it tasted pretty good at that point, but just to touch it up further, I added a dash of dried ginger and some garlic powder. All in all, it turned out pretty darn nice. 

Finish

To plate, I just trimmed the bamboo skewers so that they fit better on the plate, and criss-crossed them on a base of mashed potatoes topped with the cole slaw. And for garnish, I cut some strips of green onion which curled beautifully on top.

Recipes

Jamaican Jerk Beef Skewers

Based on a recipe from Saveur magazine

Serves 6-8

Wet Rub/Marinade

1/2 cup light brown sugar

1/2 cup scallions

1/2 cup peanut or canola oil

1/4 cup ground black pepper

1/4 cup kosher salt

1/4 minced ginger

1/4 cup soy sauce

1/4 cup (about 6-8 cloves) garlic, minced

2 tbsp lime juice

2 tbsp allspice

1 tbsp dried thyme

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp freshly grated (or ground) nutmeg

1/2 tsp ground cloves

2 habañero chiles, stemmed and minced (or 1 tsp ground ceyenne or chipotle pepper)

Skewers

4 lbs beef (tri-tip, sirloin, flank, skirt, or other cut)*, trimmed and cut into approximately 6"x1"x1/2" strips

15-20 skewers for grilling

Directions

Combine all the ingredients for the rub (sugar, scallions, oil, black pepper, salt, ginger, soy sauce, garlic, lime juice, allspice, thyme, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and chiles) in a large zip-top bag. Add the strips of beef to the bag to thoroughly coat with the marinade. Let it marinate in the refrigerator for at least 3 hours or overnight. 

If you use bamboo or other wood skewers, soak them for at least 30 minutes to minimize charring and burning on the grill. After marinating, remove the meat from the bag and skewer each strip. Preheat the grill on high to get the grates nice and hot, then turn down to low heat. Cook the meat about 2 minutes on each side (more or less depending on the thickness of the cut). Remove from the grill, and serve hot. 

Pineapple Daikon Slaw

Serves 6

Sauce

1/2 cup mayonnaise

3 tablespoons rice wine vinegar

1/4 pineapple juice

1 tbsp dijon mustard

1 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp garlic powder

1/4 cup parsley chopped

Veggies

3 cups purple cabbage thinly sliced 

3 cups green cabbage thinly sliced 

1/2 cup daikon julienned (more if you like a little extra spiciness)

1/2 cup carrots julienned

Directions

Slice and julienne the vegetables and put them in a colander inside another bowl. Sprinkle them with salt and mix. Let the mixture sit and wilt for about an hour, then discard the excess water that gathers in the bowl. Pat the vegetables dry with a paper towel to minimize excess water.

Add about 3/4 of the sauce to the vegetables and mix; add the rest of the sauce if you like it a little wetter. Cover and refrigerate for 1 hour, or up to 1 day in advance.