First Guy Night of the New Year + Video of Flame Searing Steaks!!!

Dad and I got together for Guy Night on January 9th. He brought the wine, I provided the steaks and potatoes and he also came through with a nice little bag of Royal Red Shrimps from the Gulf. Every year my folks go down to the Gulf of Mexico and pick up a cooler full of Royal Reds right from the dock, remove the heads and straight into the freezer. They are phenomenal. They have more flavor than your standard shrimps. So surf and turf (and spuds) it was.


Let's get to the ingredients for this meal. First off, a couple of fat New York Strips. Here they are coming up to room temp. Never cook cold steaks. I don't know the science behind it but I always cook my steaks at room temp:

Before I cooked them I wanted to try out the branding iron my 8 month old son got me for Christmas. I think my wonderful wife had something to do with helping him order it but I hear it was all his idea. And I must say it is really cool. At least when using a cut of meat big enough to accommodate the entire brand and these two bad boys did so nicely:

I was able to brand both without having to reheat the brand. Totally cool!!!

But before we get to the cooking of the steaks, including video of the searing both steaks, I should go over the sides. Two of the easiest sides you will ever make - Roasted Potatoes and Grilled Shrimps.

I took about five red potatoes and chopped them into similar sized chunks in order to ensure they cook evenly:

Then simply add some garlic, a good size pinch of salt, a few cranks of black pepper and drizzle in the veggie oil of your choice (in this case Olive Oil). If you want to add some herbs or red pepper flakes or anything else you feel like, go for it. For these I used some dried oregano. No reason other than the jar was the closest to me. If you want to use infused oils like garlic oil or hot pepper oil, that would work too. Here we have the potatoes with all the ingredients waiting for a spoon to mix the ingredients through:


I let the potatoes marinate in the oil/garlic/pepper/oregano for about 15 minutes. Then I preheated the oven to 400 and spread the potatoes out on a cookie sheet:


In the oven for 45 minutes at 400 and then about another five minutes under the broiler and we have nicely golden roasted potatoes:


As soon as I put the potatoes in the oven I lit the paper under my chimney starter while dad got to work on these beauties:


After he shelled and deveined the shrimps we were ready to dump the coals and throw our steaks on:



But first the wine. Again dad came through with an amazing wine. Dead Letter Office Shiraz:



With the coals dumped it was time to do some searing. Same story as all my other steaks. Two zone grilling with coals on one side and nothing on the other. Pour some oil, sear on the flames, rotate for the grill marks if you wish, pour more oil, flip over, repeat. Pull to the side to bake. Before we get to the video, let me show a valuable piece of equipment that I use every time I make steaks. It's a long bottle for oil that allows me to hold the base of the bottle and not burn myself when I pour the oil. Smaller bottles will put your hand right over where the flames are about to erupt from your grill. The wine bottle is there for size perspective:


***ALSO, BE VERY CAREFUL WHEN FLAME SEARING A STEAK, PARTICULARLY IN THE WIND. AVOID DOING SO AROUND WOOD OR SIDING. YOU MAY WANT TO KEEP SOMETHING NEARBY TO PUT OUT A FIRE SHOULD IT GET OUT OF CONTROL.

Now that that is out of the way back to the grillin. My dad likes his steak a little more done than I like mine so his went on first. Here is the video of the process. Forgive me for the low lighting, I am by no means any good with a camera for still or for video:



Flipped dad's over and repeated the process:



Here is a shot of this steak pulled off the heat and off to the side to be baked for a few minutes. How bout the cross hatching? This is not normally a priority for me, but I wanted to show how it is done:


Here is the other side with the Brand. Oh, how I love this new toy!!!


I baked Dad's steak for maybe 4-5 minutes before putting mine on. When mine bakes for a couple of minutes it will give Dad's about 6-7 minutes total baking time and thus a nice medium rare that he likes.

I noticed when doing Dad's steak that the oil poured on the fire that was upwind from the steak did not really have any impact on the steak as the wind blew it away from the steak. So when I did mine, I poured the oil in a tighter spot rather than in a large circle and put the steak on the grill a little upwind from where I poured the oil so the wind would blow the flames into the steak. This will make the oil last longer thus you will use less. You can see the oil lasted much longer in this vid:



I only showed the searing of one side of my steak. After three videos of the process I think you get the idea.

After baking mine a couple of minutes following the searing I pulled both off to rest:


Dad is a big fan of foiling the steaks while resting. I've never done it but we went with it this time. You don't need to seal it tight, it just helps retain some of the heat while resting as well as the moisture:


While the steaks were resting the shrimp went on. Since I was having so much fun with the flame searing I went ahead and flamed them as well. You can see that I am using a grill pan which will save me a lot of time instead of having to manage 15 or so shrimps at one time:


Time to bring this meal together. Here we have Dad's plated:

And here we have mine:


I suppose you want the money shot now. Well in this post you get two for the price of one. Here is Dad's:



And here is mine:



Total time from start to finish to make this meal, 60 minutes. Now on to the movie:


I almost forgot. Dad and I did it up right this time with a little dessert wine with the movie. Old Benson's Tawny Port. Here is a pic of this nectar of the gods!!!


I looked at this pic and it looks like Dad and I cracked a second bottle of wine. For those of you who are not familiar with Port, I feel another picture is necessary to get some perspective on what Port is all about:


That bottle is not a full size bottle and neither is the glass. But a pic with just the two of them looks like they are both normal size. One drinks port in 1.5-2 ounce increments. I like to explain Port with this analogy. Wine is to Port as Coffee is to Espresso. Port and Espresso are both more concentrated versions of wine and coffee, respectively. Port is thicker than wine and sweeter than wine. Incredible stuff.

Click here for the rest of the process

2008 New Year's Eve Feast - Lobsters, Prawns, and Escargot, OH MY!!

I realize I am the GrillinFool and this is a grilling website, but for NYE we did not grill anything. I did not pay for the lobsters and the man that did wanted them boiled. As I was eating my lobster for free, I obliged the man with the credit card. As someone who is cursed with an insatiable passion for seafood and stuck smack dab in the middle of the country I can't stress enough how much I enjoyed this meal. And yes, I was very worried I would screw up the cooking of the lobsters in my first attempt at this. It is so easy to do. I worried for nothing. Click the link below and see what I am talking about...


My menu planned on being lobsters, crab stuffed prawns, sauteed swiss chard, roasted red potatoes, cheesy potato biscuits, and clarified butter. As you can see in the pic above there is no greenery on the plate. The swiss chard at my grocery store was downright rotten. They had very little left and what was left was pretty much not edible. The good news is though that they did have escargot ready for the oven with a butter/garlic/herb mixture already added to the shells. The crab stuff prawns were also premade at the grocery store. Remember I was going for low maintenance for this meal.

This was the first time I have ever made lobsters myself. And I ran into a little problem. My largest pot is a 12 quart pot. That is not big enough for these beauties:


I want to expound a bit about the lobsters we had. Being in St. Louis, lobster is not on the menu very often except for very special occasions as it is normally extremely expensive. Well, we found TheLobsterGuy.com and these lobsters turned out to be pretty reasonable and more than that they were phenomenal. The lobsters were billed as being 1.5 pounds and they were every bit of that if not more. We ordered them on December 28th for December 31st delivery. They came with instructions on how to care for the lobsters up until cook time as well as a hand written note thanking us for our order. I don't pimp a lot of products here but this outfit deserves the props. Highly recommended. Now back to the meal itself.

Knowing that I didn't have the hardware to handle these bad boys I went to a local wholesale restaurant supply store and picked up this 60 quart monster (my 20 pound beagle in the background for perspective):

This problem was a little bigger than the lack of greenery for the meal. While this pot would easily accommodate the four lobsters my stove could not accommodate the 15 gallon pot:


Missed it by about an inch and a half. While I was not happy about the situation, my eight month old was ecstatic:

He played in that pot for a couple of hours. He really enjoyed himself in it. I almost don't want to take the pot back, but I just can't justify keeping it considering the price. Since he likes the pot better than the horse we got him for Christmas (in the background of the first pic) I suggested to Mrs. GrillinFool that we take back the horse and keep the pot. She didn't like that idea!?!

So, what to do about boiling these lobsters? We talked about firing up my grill outside and putting the big pot on that but I think it would've been hard to keep the temp up considering it was about 35 degrees and windy outside. So we pulled out my 12 quart pot and got a couple smaller pots which did the job:

The big pot took on two lobsters and the other two took a lobster each.

For the sides I cut up enough red potatoes to cover a baking sheet. I put them in a bowl, slathered them with garlic, olive oil, black pepper and a few pinches of coarse salt and put them in the oven for 45 minutes on 400:

The right third of the potatoes I added some fresh rosemary:


Here is a shot of the other two sides ready for that 400 degree oven. The prawns went in for 15 and the escargot for 10:

With 12 minutes remaining on the biscuits, the prawns in the oven, the escargot about ready to go I dropped these into the pot. ***Warning: picture of Dead Lobsters Walking:


Despite the lobster being very similar to the cock roach in terms of their species, I had a hard time with the notion of boiling something alive. So I split their heads in two to put them out of their misery about 10 seconds before dropping them in the pots.

For the two smaller pots all I added was a large pinch of salt to each. For the larger pot I added two large pinches and a bag of crab boil for my FiL and I. I did not sample one of the lobsters cooked in the pot without the crab boil so I have no idea if it made a big difference. I will say this that everyone said theirs was delicious so it would seem that I couldn't go wrong either way.

The smaller pots came back to a boil pretty quickly so I pulled those lobsters first. The larger pot having two lobsters dragging the temp down required a little more time. Here we have all four lobsters on the cutting board waiting to be plated. The ones on the right were just removed from the water:


Here are the prawns out of the oven:


And the escargot. One fell over and leaked all the butter and herbs out:


Of course we did it up right for NYE so the wife broke out the Lennox and the Waterford. Or as my FiL calls them, "the fancy eatin' plates." The wife likes to break out the fancy stuff for events like this. As long as I'm not doing the dishes, as none of this stuff can go in the dishwasher, I'm OK with that:

And yes, those are actually nut crackers that we use for lobster (and crab legs). We just don't eat it lobster or crab enough, considering we live smack in the middle of the country to, to justify the proper gear here. The nut crackers and a good fork work just fine:


And the wine pairing is one of my faves - Pierano Estates Chardonnay - which is a rich buttery chard that played off the vast sums of butter that we consumed that night beautifully:


And of course the final plating before we luxuriated in some luscious lobster meat:



The obligatory, what would I do differently the next time:

1. I would measure the space between my stove top and the hood over my stove and get a pot that would fit in that space.
   
2. I would probably add the potatoes a little earlier so that I could broil them for about 5 minutes and get a nice crunch to them. I didn't want the lobster to cool and become rubbery so I had no time for that.

Other than that I doubt I would do anything differently...Oh, and we are definitely doing lobsters again next year and the TheLobsterGuy.com will get our business again...

Click here for the rest of the process