Another non-recipe recipe, aren’t you excited? This is, bar none, my absolute favorite side dish for steaks. I have mentioned my Mother here before, and she is the one who taught me this dish, but I don’t think I have mentioned my Father. Dad is not much for cooking, he has a couple of specialties and requires a sous chef when doing anything complex – but man-o-man can he grill a steak. I don’t know if it is on the Y chromosome but I did not inherit the talent. My family’s cut of choice is the Rib Eye and there is minimal gussying up of the meat but it turns out divine.
Once you have that slab of meat on your plate you don’t want to mess it up with anything too fancy, and that is where onions and mushrooms come in.
The Non-Recipe for Mushroom and Onions:
The Hardware: skillet, spoon, maybe a lid
Method:
Slice up a couple of onions – how much depends on how much you wanna make. (See, not a recipe)
Heat up some vegetable oil in a large skillet and toss in your onions. Stir frequently until they soften nicely.
Add in a couple of boxes of fresh sliced mushrooms, you want a fairly equal proportion of onions to mushrooms. (Still not a recipe)
Salt lightly to encourage release of liquid and continue stirring every so often. Add oil if it seems like you need it.
Add a couple of spoon-fulls of chopped garlic – to taste (nyah, nyah, nah-nah)
Cook until everything is all nice and caramelized. The mushrooms should have shrunk by between 1/2 & 2/3 their original size, come to think of it – so have the onions. If you want to hurry things along you can cover with a lid once there is a goodly bit of liquid. Add salt and pepper to taste, if you want to be totally decadent you can cook it in butter.
You serve this with your steak and spear a bit of onion & mushroom with every bite of steak. Better than any sauce that exists.
But that isn’t the subject of this post now is it? See, I made something tonight with the leftovers that is going to encourage me to make mushrooms & onions just so I can have the leftovers to make this:
Have you ever craved leftovers?
Leftover mushrooms & onions + ~1/4 C tomato sauce (2 frozen cubes from my Foray into India) + shake of Italian Herb Blend + Salt & Pepper + Spaghetti = Delicious! Just enough tomato to bind it together a bit and I added in some of the pasta cooking water to loosen the mix. I mean really, it was so much better than I expected it to be.
Are there any dishes that you make that you think you might anticipate the leftovers more than the meal itself?
Robbing Peter 