Ed Hart - EdHart.me - Page 30 of 30

Do you ever feel like you’re in a rut?

It seems like Laree & I have been in a “steak night” rut for quite a while. In fact, it seems like since school started in the fall, that we haven’t gotten caught up and that our Saturdays have been packed with either projects that didn’t get done during the week or with some of the activities that we’re over-committed to that my usual ritual of thumbing through the latest issue of Bon Apetite for recipe ideas has gone totally by the wayside. So, as you can probably imagine, we get to 5:00 on Saturday evening & we are looking at each other saying, “What do you want to do for date night?”

Sure, we’ve been through some ruts before, like the “Chinese Take Out” rut and the “Let’s Just Have Fish Again” rut, but those are usually short lived. But it seems like this fall we’ve really been through a long rut… Steak Night. I guess part of the longevity of the steak night rut is that we both really love a good steak and if you’re going to have a fall back routine, throwing a steak on the grill isn’t a bad one. But after what seems like many weeks now, as much as I love steak, I’m starting to yearn for a different experience, or at least something to kick it up a notch.

And so, again around 5:00 on Saturday, when I finally remembered to think about our Date Night I had my yearning for something different. And again, no time to prep. The conversation goes something like this:

“Have you thought about what you want for date night?” (as if to say, “hey, I’ve been racking my brain and haven’t come up with anything”. Yea, right!)
“Hmmm, I don’t know… Let’s think…”
“Well, we could always do steaks again.”
“You know I always love a good steak.”
“Ok, let’s just do steak. What do you want with your steak…”
And so it continues…

And again, I find myself at the neighborhood grocery store wandering around, with no plan, thinking about what would go with steak that we haven’t already had too many times. And so, I had an idea that turned out pretty good and kicked it up a notch.

First, I have to say that in addition to our steak rut, we’ve been in a sweet potato rut. It’s like the domino effect. We love steak and so that’s the fall back plan. And in my opinion, nothing goes with a steak quite like a sweet potato, they become the secondary fallback plan. I usually like to bake a sweet potato in the oven at 400 degrees for something like a hour and 15 minutes until it’s totally mushy inside. Kind of the standard approach. Did that last week.

This week we’re still going to do sweet potatoes, but tonight I’m going to cut them in chunks and season with cinnamon sugar and rosemary. There’s a nice fall balance there to go with the season. I’m going to drop my chunks from 2 sweet potatoes (after I’ve skinned them) into a large freezer bag. I’m using canola oil tonight instead of my usual olive oil, because I think the olive oil clashes a little with the cinnamon. Then I’m going to season liberally with both the cinnamon sugar (just cinnamon is fine too but I want to get them extra sweet) and rosemary leaves. Then I’ll place them on a baking pan in the middle rack of my oven and bake them on 400 degrees until they get a dark brown crispy crust in places, usually about 25 minutes or so. Keep watching them so you get the texture and color how you like. This part is totally personal preference. Don’t forget to shake the pan a couple times during cooking, just to rough them up a bit.

asparagus-with-pancetta — Asparagus with Pancetta

Since my mom always taught me to have something green, and because green contrasts so nice with the orange of the potatoes and the brown char-grilled steak, I’m adding asparagus to tonight’s lineup. I love oven roasted asparagus with a little olive oil, kosher salt & cracked pepper, but tonight I’m going to add a little twist. I picked up some pancetta in the deli section. Pancetta is basically an Italian bacon and it’s pretty expensive per pound, but I’m just getting enough, sliced paper thin but not falling apart, to wrap around the stems of my asparagus, probably something like 3 oz or 15 slices. This is going to lend a nice subtly smokey flavor to my asparagus. I’m simply going to roll them around the stems of my asparagus – they’re not big enough to wrap the entire asparagus and that’s not the look I want anyway – sprinkle them with kosher salt & fresh cracked pepper, and bake them when my potatoes are done for about 10-15 minutes, again depending on how much you want them done. I like them before the asparagus starts to turn brown from baking and still have a little crunch to them.

As for the steaks, that’s simple. I usually buy supermarket steaks and I prefer ribeyes, but I’ll take a New York Strip too and if the cut is good, maybe they’re an inch thick. Grill those guys over a layer of gray charcoal for 4 minutes on each side for medium rare (my preference) or 5 minutes for medium (Laree’s preference). Remember, different grills cook differently and it depends a lot on the thickness of the steaks. Just find your sweet spot and remember it.

I’ve started the potatoes as soon as i got back from the store and could get them cut up. They take the longest. Then I can lend Laree a hand getting the kids down early. I know my coals will take about 25 minutes to get good and hot and that’s good for some talk time with Laree. I’ll plan on putting the asparagus in just before I actually start cooking the steaks. We’re hungry & have a little time to kill, so I’m thinking appetizer!

Here’s something you may want to try, or take the idea and run with it. I’m going to surprise Laree with an antipasto board tonight. Since she loves pickled stuff, I’m going with a sweet and sour idea. Some sweet baby gherkin pickles, some kalamata olives (both out of the jar) and some extra sharp white cheddar cheese squares (the supermarket was a little weak on artisan cheeses tonight). I arranged these guys in nice little piles on a wooden cutting board for a nice rustic look. Make sure to put the pickles and olives on a paper towel first to absorb the juice. We don’t want a big puddle on the cutting board taking away from the effect!

Add a red wine with some kick to it like a Cabernet Sauvignon and a bottle of San Pellegrino or whatever sparkling water you prefer, a couple candles, and whatever playlist you think fits the mood (tonight mine is Norah Jones and Alison Krauss) and make it a Date Night!

“Death comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes.”
-John Donne

There are some times and experiences that seem so poignant that, although you are an active participant in the moment, it feels almost as though you are intruding upon some kind of sacred ground. Today was one of those experiences for me, and this is why.

Today was Thanksgiving, for many a poignant day in and of itself. A time of family gatherings, fellowship, food and football for some; for others perhaps a day of loneliness and sadness; for many though, it’s more like a mixture of the two, like something that is both sweet and bitter at the same time, like a fall day in which the beauty of autumn leaves hanging on trees and blowing through the air with their red and orange and yellow hues is at once stunningly beautiful and peaceful and yet is a reminder that the cold deadness of winter is near and that the day is somehow suspended between a world that is both living and dying at the same time.

And on this day we gathered at my mother’s home for Thanksgiving dinner: My family with our four rambunctious children, my sister and her husband with their 2 week old child, my other sister, who brought my dad, and some friends with their children whom we had invited over. Anyone looking through the windows at our gathering around the table, bursting at the seams with children running around and filled with talking and laughing would probably think we were like some Norman Rockwell painting in some magazine somewhere. And maybe at that specific moment we were really like that. But like Thanksgiving, it can be really like that and really different from that at exactly the same time.

Now dad, you should know, has Parkinson’s disease and hasn’t been doing so well this year. In fact, a couple of days ago, he took a pretty nasty spill that landed him in the hospital. Parkinson’s is a merciless disease, one that slowly sucks the life out of it’s once strong, independent and vigorous victims, and does so in such a way that those who care and love must behold it’s awful, certain, steady progress, to the point where simple things like unbuttoning a pair of pants to go to the bathroom become insurmountable tasks.

But the thing that most struck me, this Thanksgiving Day, was fingernails. And why would I expect anyway, if dad couldn’t pull up his slacks or button his trousers, that somehow he’d be able to clip his own fingernails? His were in terrible shape, long and jagged, and I wondered how long it had been. So after the laborious trip to the bathroom but before we got back to the table, we sat quietly in the foyer by ourselves, and I clipped the aged, yellowish fingernails of someone who could no longer manage but had at one time held me in his own once strong hands. How could I help but think who might be there to clip mine if the tables were turned. It was one of those perspective changing thoughts about what kinds of things are important in life.

Later that evening, we brought home our own crew of four now extremely tired, rambunctious children and began the process of getting ready for bed. And that was when I noticed another pair of fingernails on my son. So there, in my own bathroom this time, we sat and I clipped the dirty, overgrown fingernails of a tired child who couldn’t manage that well on his own, and even if he could, probably wouldn’t think to do so.

It was then, after clipping the dirty, overgrown fingernails of both my father and my son that it really struck me that whether it’s a disease or injury or simply the natural course of life, there is no way of avoiding the reality of age and sickness and death and that at that moment, I myself was suspended in that same world, blown along like those same leaves by the wind, a world which is both living and dying at the same time.