Sarah sent revised plans, so the morning was filled with
New Jersey kitchen thoughts. Returning from yoga, with steak salad plans, I cooked the mysterious Harris Ranch steak in my cast iron pan. It was incredibly delicious and tender. And anonymous. I couldn't remember what it was called--only knowing it was an unfamiliar name. Surely I could figure this out. I called Harris Ranch for some steak identification work. At least I had a precise sense of butcher shop geography. The steak I chose had been resting in the case between the ground sirloin and the rib-eyes. "Did it look like a big piece of sushi?" asked the customer service representative. I hadn't made that association, but agreed that it did. "That's a bistro filet," she informed me. Yes, that row of bistro filets did resemble massive slabs of toro longing for giant beds of rice.
But, she explained, they are not tuna at all (I hadn't been fooled for a second). They are cut from the teres major muscle, and as I learned from my own research explained that bistro filets come from the teres major muscle, just off the cow's shoulder, and are also called
petite teres steaks, described as a cheaper (and perhaps tastier) alternative to filet mignon. This was all news to me.
In a day of many interruptions, lunch fell by the wayside. But by dinner time, I made and ate a salad of steak, chickpeas, tomatoes and avocados while listening to
Fresh Air Memorial for Doc Watson.
No comments:
Post a Comment