Steak sausages!

Steak sausage

We had dinner with my sister & brother-in-law last week. They’d been raving about these beef sausages they bought from a local South African butcher – called St Marcus - and had promised to give us a sample for some time.

Ben cooked them up and served with the usual trimmings of baked potato and beans. They were delicious, although when cooked looked decidedly smaller than beforehand. Lack of meat is something that makes Ben quite an angry man and I could tell he was not best pleased.

I loved them though and will certainly be purchasing some steak sausages for myself very shortly.

Two-pronged beef injection

Hello mum

Last Friday was a very special ‘Friday night is steak night’. Let me tell you why.

Having read my review of his restaurant, the owner of the Grand Grill in Dubai very kindly sent me 1.8-kilos of his finest South African Fillet steak. Matt smuggled back the vacuumed packed cow in his suitcase risking life & limb and a £5000 HM Revenue & Customs fine to deliver it.

Combined with this my mother was visiting from Cornwall and brought four very sizable sirloins with her, which she picked up from a Cornish butcher in Kingsley Village.

Fortunately for my waistline I had the help of several other family members in consuming the 3-kilos of prime beef that had fortuitously landed on my doorstep. Joining the meat feast was my brother Ross and his wife Sarah, my sister Sally and her fiance Ben. And of course my meat-mule Matt.

There are some healthy appetites in my family but none more so than Ben’s. He regularly consumes two or  three portions in a single sitting and still leaves room for dessert. The boy can eat.

So when preparing the meal I had to put some serious thought into how much to cook up. Too little and I risked irritating the likes of Ben. Too much and I’d be eating beef & horseradish sandwiches for the week ahead (which might not have been a bad thing).

I opted for all four of the sirloins and three of the fillets. All the steaks weighed about 300g so I was cooking about 1.8-kilos in total.

A tale of two calves.

I grilled the sirloin on full blast for about four minutes on each side. As I’ve said previously, unless you are cooking sirloin on a naked flame, the best alternative is the oven grill. A decent griddle pan can do the trick but don’t consider frying sirloin as you won’t release the fats and the flavour will suffer as a result.

The fillet was cooked in a heavyweight griddle pan for five minutes on either side. The cuts were very thick but the quality was so good that they cooked through quickly – so this was plenty of time to get them to rare.

I served up the beef with a green leaf salad, new potatoes and runner beans.

We also drank our way through most of this month’s wine club delivery which included several bottles of the scrumptious Chateau Mayne Guyon 2005.

All in all a very pleasant evening. Must do that again soon.

Happy customers