Being [Stuck] There
    Chili and grilled T-bone steaks.
    My dad was a good cook. He only had two notes, but he played them well. From-scratch chili and T-bone steak marinated all afternoon in Worcestershire sauce, black pepper and smashed garlic, “kissed,” as he described it, by the bars of a very hot grill.
    Although he allegedly made other dishes, everything tasted like chili or marinated T-bone steak. Dad had other food favorites, but if he really wanted something besides chili or steak he’d cajole someone else into fixing it.
    My repertoire is more varied than my dad’s but I slip into food ruts that can last awhile. Rice is one of these ruts. One evening, when the refrigerator was stuffed with left over rice dishes and Mom went directly to the freezer for a TV dinner, I ate and enjoyed cold cooked rice with herb dressing and chopped green onions.
    Mom likes rice, she says, “Just not as a steady diet.”
    Sometimes a food rut will be worn by experimenting with an idea for a month or so before springing it on a special gathering. Two summers ago I had a month-long horseradish seizure that got a little tiresome but yielded excellent results.
    I like fish. Some species I even love, like halibut steak marinated in lime juice and cracked pepper. Fish can easily overwhelm me, though. If it is at all fishy my taste buds ache even before I eat it.
    Salmon steaks are one of those always available but not always fresh fish products that I like very much, but only if they’re not fishy. Mom loves salmon and we have it whenever it’s on sale, so I regularly concoct marinades to attempt to counteract fishiness. One day I reasoned that a 24-hour refrigerator marinade of lemon juice (6 lemons), 3 heaping teaspoons of pure, prepared horseradish (not in a base sauce) and two teaspoons of dried tarragon would do the trick, whether the steaks were fishy or not. As it happened, salmon went on sale a month previous to a celebration dinner we were hosting. I decided to preview the marinade, and the dish, several times before the event. At one serving I even made the leftover marinade into a delicious sauce, using the cornstarch milk method.
    The typical hotness of pure, prepared horseradish mellows considerably by the time the fish is grilled and the gravy simmered, imparting a unique flavor to the fish, barely recognizable and very agreeable.
    I used horseradish in a variety of applications that month, including the previously published Meat and Potatoes Salad, substituting it for the curry, leaving out the cinnamon and pistachios and using beef instead of vegetable broth and olive instead of peanut oil. Very successful.
    You’ll notice my marinade was not oil-based. I rarely use oil based marinades, unless I have a particularly lean cut of meat. It hardly seems necessary, unless the meat is tough. I have found oil-based herb dressings successful with beef shanks. A friend of mine also marinated some venison steaks in Italian dressing and grilled them. Good food! These are exceptions, though, not the rule.
    Unfortunately, by the time the dinner event occurred, my mother and I mistrusted the excitement over what had become, to us, an ordinary entrée. One of our guests who had told me he would “eat anything” when I surveyed the invitees to make sure I served something everyone liked, confessed to me that he usually doesn’t like fish, but this fish was “extraordinarily good.”
    I didn’t believe him. That’s the down side of food ruts.
    Food ruts are inevitable if you savor food as well as eat it. Consider yourself lucky if your household contains a co-cook or two who will occasionally push you out of the kitchen in exasperation. I once got into a breakfast bread rut that my whole neighborhood collaborated in stopping...but that’s another column...

- posted by Gail Rae @ 12:18   email...this post