Xmas beef feast (part 1)

Almost steak

I spent five days last week visiting my mother in Cornwall. I had hoped to pay a visit to St.Ives beef but sadly they had run out of meat in the lead up to Christmas. I did a google search to find an alternative farm and stumbled across a website called Cornish Kobe. Mum and I ventured up to their farm in Fentonadle in North Cornwall but unfortunately the owner, Darren Pluess, was nowhere to be found. We left a note with one of his neighbours and received a message from him later apologizing and informing us they too had run out of beef, or rather they had run out of beer to feed the beef!

It was an interesting trip nevertheless and I had a nosey round the farm and met a few of the cows. If in the new year Darren manages to get his hands on some beer I’ll place an order and see how the Kobe fares.

Despite my unsuccessful attempt at buying some beef from source, I did however get my hands on some beef later that day. My mums boyfriend Bob picked up a 1.5 kilo cut of sirloin from Kingsley Village, a shopping centre with a fantastic food hall stuffed full of local Cornish produce and other fine products and ingredients from around the world. Definitely worth a visit if you are in the area.

Sirloins roasting on an open fire

My mum has an Aga cooker, which is great for many things but not so good for cooking steaks. Instead we fashioned our own flame grill using a grate from the barbecue and their wood burning heater. This was an awesome idea. Not only was it great fun cooking the the steaks but they tasted absolutely delicious as a result. I find cooking steaks over a naked flame gives them a flavour that you cannot replicate in a pan or under a conventional grill. It gives them a char-grilled taste and texture and releases more flavour from the fats.

I’ve got a fireplace in my home in London so I’m going to look into installing one myself!

It looked bigger in real life

We served the healthy sized steaks with a simple salad and some roasted new potatoes with a bottle of Rioja.

Delicious.

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

A smelly side-order

My mother is staying at the moment and she suggested that she buy me three ribs of beef for my Christmas present, which I said was a splendid idea. My wife Tillie said that this would be fine providing that she also bought me a colinic irrigation as well, to which my mother replied “what’s that then, a vegetable?”.