Last Friday I was perusing Chuck's Gumbo Pages for something to cook over the weekend. Many of his recipes require quite a list of ingredients, some of which are out of season here. Such as Crawfish (that's pronounced CRAW fish, not Cray). That was okay because I stumbled upon his recipe for Round Steak & Gravy with Onions. It sounded rich, hearty and something I could tackle without spending all day in the kitchen. But what caught me was the opening paragraph;
"This is Cajun food at its simplest. You've probably never heard of this dish, nor are you likely to see it on a menu or in a cookbook. However, as Cajun cook and food writer Marcelle Bienvenu said, it's almost certain that if you asked any native of southwest Louisiana "who lives along Bayou Lafourche or Bayou Têche or on the prairies near Ville Platte or Crowley about this dish, he would confess that round steak in gravy is one of his favorites.""
I found this to be really cool.
A dish that you wouldn't find anywhere, neat.
Here's what you're looking at:
1 two-pound round steak, not too thick, with the round bone with the marrow in the middle
3 large onions, sliced
2 bell peppers, chopped
Few pinches sugar
1 cup beef stock or water
Salt, cayenne and freshly ground black pepper, to taste.
White rice
Cubing up the steak into 3/4" pieces was simple enough. The next step was to season well with salt and cayenne. This too is easy, don't you think? Sure. But as you know, adding salt to pretty much any food stuff will cause your food to spew moisture. And it did. Go see.
Take a look in the dutch oven on the back burner, that is where I started to brown the meat. That dutch was HOT baby, no low simmer here. Very quickly it was clear I was going to end up boiling my meat, not searing it to a blackened color, even with the pinch of sugar.
How to get that moisture out without boiling the meat? I reached for my solid copper fry pan, put the meat in there and seared it.
As you can see, the copper fry pan was able to get the moisture out of the pan and sear the meat. I would think a cast iron fry pan may have been able to do the same, but I wasn't going to wait 7 minutes to heat the darned thing up! I was cooking this on Friday and my wife was due home soon. This meal had to move along.
When I make this again, and I will, I won't be adding salt until later. The finished meat was a bit dry for me, still damned tasty, but dryish.
At this point add your 3 large onions. I sliced them into long slender half moon pieces, pretty. Then diced up the 2 bell peppers. Since I ain't hip to the flavor of simmered green ones, I used an orange and red pepper. Along with the mustard color of the dutch oven, the dish looked VERY 1973. Chuck likes about 1 cup beef broth. That didn't seem to be enough for me, given we had 2 lbs of meat and 3 onions, so I added at least 2 cups if not a tad more.
I've noticed over the last few recipes I've done from Chuck's recipes that he likes his heat high and his cook times low. So that's what I did and got this recipe in on time, 1 hour. HA !!!
Yes, it was as good as it looks. It was tough not messing with this recipe. It's so simple and straight forward you want to add wine, creme fraiche or a bay leaf or two. And I may do this in the future, but you must try it this way the first time. It has an excellent, uncomplicated, rich gravy to it that would be quite different if made another way.
Here is the direct link to Round Steak with
Gravy and Onions
Ya know, with 2 lbs of beef and all I was expecting some decent leftovers. Man, there really isn't enough left but for a snack.
DANG !!!
And, snarf, it's gone!!!
I like the idea of nudity for getting our hits up. So expect some live family nudity soon!
This was a "hell-of-a-good" recipe. There was nothing left but an empty pot. My poor hubby was hoping for some leftovers to take in his lunch!
AWESOME RECIPE!!!
Hey Beverly,
You're most certainly welcome!
Biggles