It’s almost more enjoyable to do it than to eat it
Publicado em , por Pedro Couto e Santos
It was time to celebrate Dee’s birthday.
So, what shall we do? Since her parents had been here for dinner on the 8th, and they’re always out for the weekend anyway, we decided to invite my parents, sister and grandparents for lunch.
I made a simple but delicious steak dish, which goes like this: start by putting some spinach on a skillet just enough time to soften them, then put them on the bottom of a deep oven dish.
Next, you lightly fry the steaks, which should be very thin and also not very large. Fry them only until they change colour and then begin putting them on the dish, vertically (or at least, as vertical as you can). Put one steak in the dish, followed by a slice of cheese, then another steak and a slice of ham. Continue to alternate steak/cheese/steak/ham, until you run out of dish, out of steak or both.
Now, in the remaining butter from frying the steaks mix some mustard, more or less is up to you. Mix it in by stirring quite vigorously, otherwise it will not blend. Quickly add two packs of fresh cream (400 ml) and mix that in until the cream is yellowed by the mustard. Add a teaspoon of corn flower, previously melted in a bit of water and a bit of wine, Madeira wine is my favorite, but I’ve used white wine and it’s also very good. Let the sauce cook for a while until it thickens just a bit.
Now put the sauce over the steaks on the oven dish, making sure everything is nice and saucy. Finally, cover the whole thing with a layer of cheese slices, then a layer of ham (in little rolls) and sprinkle with grated Mozzarella or Parmigianno. Bake in the oven for about 20 minutes, until it’s nice and roasted on top.
Eat.
Everyone did and it was delicious. My family left and we rested for a while… because at night we had more people coming over!
Around 7 pm I started to prepare dinner. It was going to be a chinese dinner. I marinated the sliced beef in soy and oyster sauce with garlic for thirty minutes and soaked the dried chinese mushrooms in hot water for 45 minutes.
Well… the rest became to hectic to describe… for about 3 hours I would not leave the kitchen, slicing onions and green peppers, frying chicken, prawns and beef, cooking rice noodles and coating food in high calorie sauces of all kinds; only near 10 o’clock at night did I manage to finally have everything done and everybody ready to eat.
It was quite good and everyone seemed to like it or fake very well. I think it went almost perfect, although I would have cooked the chicken some more and added salt to all the dishes which had none.
At the end of the night I gave Dee my actual birthday present: a flatbed colour scanner, which I suppose she loved.
Not bad, we had a great time, although the words “we should do this more often” don’t really cross my mind right now… at least not two meals totaling four different dishes in one day… :)
