Fabulous Faux Beefsteak Budapest Style

So I was talking to Kenny the other day and he asked me what I was going to make for dinner – and I visioned these little chicken skewers, with a salad on the side, and some potatoes (which then lead to an argument of course, because he said I should make a gratin, but meh… I don’t like gratin that much.)

Then, the next thing I know is that it’s 7.30 PM again, and I am still caught up in Excel-hell and by the time I’d get out, the stores will have closed. This would have been okay, except I missed one ingredient to the chicken skewers, and that was the chicken.

So I packed up and ran to the baby-Coop around the corner (I call it baby because of its size and because it’s obviously a convenience store, rather than a standard grocery store.) And… they had no chicken. They had turkey, which is something that I stopped eating since about a year ago, when a vein hidden inside a slice of turkey breast started spraying blood all over my plate. It was a rather enlightening experience that taught me well – either don’t look at your plate when you eat turkey, or don’t eat turkey. So, obviously the skewers were crossed off the list, but I still had the other ingredients that I desperately wanted to use – mushrooms, onions, bacon, etc. so I had to think of a different solution, and a different type of meat.

They had pork chop steaks à la minuit (which means they’re sliced so thin that you can see through them) – and the same with beef, but then I saw that they had nice rump steaks available. Yuri loves steak, and I remembered that I still had some leftover peas in the fridge (our freezer is currently in such a catastrophic state that I prefer not to put anything in it.. not like it would fit in due to the amount of ice that had already cumulated in it.) And then it dawned on me… Budapest style, baby, all the way!

Well, fake Budapest style, really. For those of you who don’t know, the original recipe takes a nice juicy tenderloin steak, and puts a “Hungarian Lecsó” based stew on top of it. It will contain bacon, onions, peppers, tomatoes (that’s what lecsó is) – and on top of that you’ll have mushrooms, peas and goose liver. So the food I cooked was faux for several reasons:

1. I had insufficient amount of peppers at home and they take too long to cook (for my taste anyway) so I skipped them
   
2. No goose liver (apologies, foie gras!) – I’m also not a huge fan, and Yuri gags by the thought of liver, not to mention by the smell of it.
   
3. I used rump steak and not tenderloin
   
4. The side dish was not French fries

I think it’s a real culinary experience to go and try Beefsteak Budapest style in Budapest restaurants, because you can be almost certain that you will not get what you’re supposed to. For one, people are too cheap to use tenderloin for it, they just sell whatever else they can find that can be sold as tenderloin, and secondly, you have a 99% probability that you’ll get chicken liver instead of foie gras. Because the two are totally comparable, am I right? :) I love it when the staff thinks that you’re too stupid to notice the rather obvious difference between the two.

However, there are the rare occasions when you do get what you paid for. I had my best Budapest steak in a restaurant quite a few years ago. It was quite a classy place, which since then has unfortunately closed, and work took me there for a business dinner. I remember that I was very surprised when I bit into the liver and realised that they didn’t try to screw me over for once. I also remember that my boss (his nationality and other characteristics concealed, of course) ate off the clients’ plates (he’d either try a bite of their starter, or finish whatever they couldn’t eat anymore.) The rest of us (including the clients) were sitting and staring with our jaws dropped, it was unbelievable.

He made another interesting choice that evening – he ordered ketchup to his steak. I could see the look of sheer disgust on the waiter’s face as he carried out the order, and needless to say, I was quite surprised myself that something like that could happen. :p It kind of reminded me of the story a friend of mine told when a girlfriend of his ordered ketchup in a French restaurant alongside her duck breast, and the waiter told her to go to the fish and chips shop around the corner if she wants to humiliate her dinner like that. :)

But anyway, back to the matter at hand. I quickly chopped up the mushrooms and the onions, sliced the bacon and shortly thereafter, pretty much everything was in the pan. I was contemplating whether I should put any spices in the mix (like marjoram,) but a simple salt + black pepper combo did the job. I added the peas and I was happy happy joy joy that I was soon to be finished, but then I looked to my right and noticed the two kilos of ripe tomatoes that I had bought earlier on in the week for tomato sauce to be made, and said to myself, ahhh, what the hell, I’ll just do it. I peeled 3 tomatoes quickly (yes, this does mean that I didn’t put them into boiling water for 3 minutes to save myself some time, you convenient people,) chopped them, and off they were to faux-sauce land! I guess this explains why the tomatoes are nowhere to be seen in the picture showing the ingredients, but hey.. what can I say. It so happens that I improvise from time to time, and by the time it came to that, I couldn’t restore the rest of the ingredients in raw form just to take a picture with the tomatoes. Tough luck!

Here are the ingredients:

• 2 slices of rump steak
• 200 g mushrooms
• 200 g peas
• 50 g bacon
• 2 mid-sized onions
• 3 mid-sized tomatoes
• 8 small carrots
• 4 small potatoes
• salt, ground black pepper, oil, rosemary
  

As a bonus, here are some pictures of the stew (or ragout, if you like) being made. Mind the artisan skilled photography!

I just realised that I made absolutely no mention of the side dish, I only explained what all it was not going to be. I chose roast potatoes (Amandines are the best for this in my opinion) and roast carrots. Once again, easy method – peel carrots, wash potatoes (oh my God, do not ever peel Amandines – not ever!!) chop chop, into the pan, oil + a bit of water + salt (and in my case fresh rosemary) on top, into the oven at 235 degrees, shut the oven door and you can forget about them for the next 30 minutes, which is when you open the oven door, take the pan out and cheer, because your side dish is ready to serve. :)

So basically, with my stew ready and the potatoes / carrots in the oven, all I had to do was to grill the steaks. Yuri likes his medium (or medium-rare, but I’m sure he’s going to correct me if the latter is not true) and I like mine close to well done, but not well done enough for the meat to lose its juiciness. Well, I would like to report that I actually did a perfect job on Yuri’s steak, it was just the way he liked it (he told me at the end that it was a bit tough, but that also could have been because the meat wasn’t perfect in the first place and because he usually eats pretty slowly, so towards the end, the meat was totally cold.) – and as far as mine is concerned, since I was so busy taking pictures of the result on Yuri’s plate, that the steaks entered the super well done category. It was still okay though, I’ll just make sure to not burn it next time.

Here is the end result (eventually, the triangle-shaped plate will be boring, then I’ll buy some new ones :p) – I think it turned out to be much nicer than I had originally thought.

On a side note – it seems this week is beef week in my house – I have approximately a kilo and a half of beef waiting for me to process it one way or another. This should be interesting… :)