Ingredients:

• 3.5 pound Beef top round for roasting
• onions
• carrots
• celery
• garlic
• fresh herbs – such as thyme, rosemary, bay leaves, sage
• olive oil
• sea salt and pepper

I think I bought a bit of a different roasting meat, which was $17.80 per kg. I think I got something that was about $23 so it was about 3 pounds. Anyway, the steps are really simple. Preheat the oven to 475 deg F. Just chop up the veggies and place them into a roasting pan. He says not to peel them, but I did. I left the garlic cloves in their paper though. For my herbs I chose rosemary, bay, and sage. Add some olive oil to the roasting dish. For the meat, leave it outside of the refrigerator for about 30 minutes. Then massage it with the olive oil, sea salt, and black pepper. Place on top of the vegetables. Once the oven hits 475 put your roast in the oven, and lower the temperature to 400 deg F and bake for just an hour. Baste it half way through, and added water to the veggies if they seem to be getting dry. Take it out of the pan, and let it rest for 15 minutes. Cover it with aluminum foil.

Now this where my timing is way off. I had to cook it for over 30 minutes more at 400 deg F. Luckily I bought a meat thermometer that day, because after an hour, my meat was still room temperature in the middle. Not good. Now, I kind of wish in his cookbook that he told me how thick his roast was, and what the internal temperature should be, because I wouldn’t know if I didn’t have my thermometer which tells me the type of meat, and what the temperature should be for each level of doneness. Would’ve been great for him to add it here.

Now I have a couple of guesses as to why my roast took so much longer

• My roast was too thick
• I didn’t use a proper roasting pan. I used a aluminum foil roasting pan which probably doesn’t keep as much heat as a sturdier metal pan. This was stupid of me because I had just bought a roasting pan that day, but didn’t feel like washing it first. I’m also not sure how good of a pan it was, and was thinking about returning it.
• I didn’t baste it half way through
• I should roast it fat side up. I noticed that when I flipped the roast, the oil started bubbling and liquifying really quickly. The temperature of the meat roast quicker this way too.

Oh well, 1.5 hours later I had my roast. It bled quite a bit when I took it out of the pan to rest because I stabbed it a bunch of times with my thermometer. I thought I cooked it pretty well though and it was probably a medium. The taste was excellent, and I could really taste the rosemary getting into the meat. The meat was very tender (even as left overs), and could really appreciate the that the vegetables gave it. The roast was only really seasoned with salt and peper but flavours from the herbs definitely seeped in through steam.

I forgot to make the gravy as he suggested, so I faked one using the liquid from the pan. I was suppsoed to add all purpose flour, which I didn’t have, suprisingly. I used corn starch instead and dumby me forgot to melt it in hot water before adding to the liquid leading to clumps! I also added red wine as he suggested. Remarkably the sauce was pretty good, even though it was a half assed (didn’t skim the fat, used corn starch, didn’t strain it, etc.) attempt at what I was supposed to do from his instructions, and it also had clumps. The sauce was very rich and tasty anyway. He also suggestes making horseradish sauce among other things to go with your roast. I ate mine with Tyler’s Velvet Potato Puree, and I loved my meal, and so did my parents!

I bought a Wusthof Classic 8-Inch Carving Knife specifically for this day! I love that knife.

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Level: Easy

Fajitas! We had a party in the USA last weekend, and we made Fajitas. We quickly searched for a fajitas recipe, and we came across Tyler Florence’s fajitas recipe on foodnetwork’s website. His recipes never fail.

I didn’t really read the instructions of this recipe (again), so I didn’t realize I should prep and marinate the meat the night before. I only had the meat marinated for an hour, and without the cumin (because I didn’t have it). I also used extra virgin olive oil instead of canola, because I didn’t have canola oil. lol. The meat in the end still turned out really juicy and tender.

Prep time is kind of long if you are slow at chopping like me.

Our fajitas was served with MePlusFood Salsa and Chunky Guacamole. mmm that was one delicious meal. 4.5/5 for this recipe.

Tyler Florence
Fajitas
Recipe as written by Tyler Florence on foodnetwork website:

Cooking time: 45 minutes

1 orange, juiced
2 limes, juiced
3 tablespoons canola oil
2 clove garlic, minced
1 jalapeno, seeded and minced
1 tablespoon fresh cilantro, finely chopped
1 teaspoon cumin
2 1/4 pounds skirt or flank steak, trimmed of fat
1 green bell pepper, thinly sliced
1 red bell pepper, thinly sliced
1 yellow bell pepper, thinly sliced
1 red onion, thinly sliced
12 flour tortillas, warm
Guacamole
Salsa
Kosher salt and Freshly ground pepper

In a small bowl, whisk together marinade ingredients. Place steak in a shallow container, and pour marinade over it. Refrigerate, covered, 8 hours or overnight to tenderize meat.

Drain the marinade from the meat. Grill the steak in a ridged grill pan over medium-high heat for 4 minutes each side. Transfer the steak to a cutting board and let stand.

In the same pan with the steak juices, add the bell peppers and onions. Saute the mixture for 3 minutes until the vegetables are limp. Thinly slice the steak against the grain on a diagonal.

Spread some guacamole on a tortilla, top with a few slices of steak, peppers and onions and salsa fresca. Roll up the tortilla to enclose the filling.

May also serve with sour cream and shredded cheese.

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Selecting ingredients for making meatballs from meplusfood on Vimeo.

So here’s what we came home with from the grocery store.

Making meatballs from meplusfood on Vimeo.

MePlusFood Meatballs (about 20 meatballs)

500 grams of Lean Ground Beef
500 grams of Ground Lamb
1 egg
Pecorino romano cheese & Pecorino romano cheese - grated
few sprigs of rosemary
some fresh oregano
bread crumbs
salt and pepper
olive oil

1. Pluck the leaves off of the rosemary sprigs, and oregano. And give it a rough chop.
2. Put all of the ingredients (except the olive oil) into a bowl and mix with your hands until all of the ingredients are well combined
3. Roll them into golf-ball sized balls. Our recipe made about 20.
4. Heat a pan to medium-high and add some olive oil.
5. Preheat your oven to 400 deg F.
6. Line a baking dish with aluminum foil to reduce clean up later.
7. Quickly brown the meatballs for about a minute on each side.
8. Place the meatballs on your baking dish.
9. Place into the oven for about 15 minutes.

1 Jar of Prego Tomato Sauce
2 stalks of celery lettuce
button mushrooms
1/2 red onion
1 medium tomato
1 Tbsp Sugar
some oregano
1 tsp Garlic Powder

1. Chop up the vegetables
2. Saute the vegetables in pot for a bit.
3. Add the tomato sauce
4. Add the sugar, oregano, and garlic powder.
5. Let simmer for 10 minutes.
6. Serve with the meatballs and some pasta (in our case Vermicelli)

Check the gallery for our final plated dishes…3 ways. Which one wins?

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In the end the meatballs were pretty good, and I’m sure if it wasn’t past midnight when we grocery shopped they would be better. These are actually the first meatballs that I ever made from scratch, and it wasn’t very hard at all. I’d probably do it again, and really use two different cheeses instead of Romano & Romano. Hope you enjoy the recipe!

So who watches Top Chef? No? Bite me. Well I watch it on occasion after a long day at work while eating a hot bowl of instant noodles because I’m way too lazy to make something and looking at delicious food is usually enough. Season 5 had Chef Fabio Viviani on it and that guy cracks me up.

“This is Top Chef, not Top Scallops!”

Hahaha, so good. Anyway since I can’t afford to eat out everyday both for financial and health..nancial reasons, I hit up the local bookstore today here in Ameritown and bought his book: Cafe Firenze Cookbook – Food and Recipes from the Tuscan Sons (the other son being Jacopo Falleni).

*Ikimasho! La Biscetta Perfetta , I assume means The Perfect Rib Eye from the sub text in the book, and I gotta say, I’ve never made a steak at home that tasted this good. The dish is mainly two parts: 1 part Rib Eye, and the other is the Rosemary and Garlic infused Olive Oil (extra virginal.. haha no, I’m not 15.. seriously). The steak itself required two herbs, Sage and Thyme, that I’m not entirely familiar with. Sure I’ve had it before and I’ve thrown their dried, spice rack counterparts in my own version of pasta sauce in an attempt to make it more Italiano, but doing that every “Monday, Tuesday, Thursday” doesn’t really mean I know what it tastes like in food.

I chopped up a bunch of these two green, leafy plants and sensually rubbed that into the raw meat along with some freshly ground black pepper. Erotic, I know. Now I let that sit until it reaches room temperature, which before reading this recipe, I didn’t know you should let meat do. While the meat warmed up, I got started with the extra virginal Olive Oil. This involved cooking garlic and Rosemary (another one of those plant things again) in the oil until the Garlic Cloves were soft enough to smash into a paste. Once mashed, you drain the now less virginal Olive Oil from the Rosemary and Garlic and cool it down in the fridge.

Here’s where I had to take a tangent from the instructions in the book and had to improvise a bit. **I don’t own a grill in my apartment for 1, so I grabbed a pan, heated it up and let my meat have it for 3 minutes. Sprinkled some Kosher salt on it and flipped it over for another couple minutes. Sear, Salt and SFlip! It’s like Recycling but better.

End result a slightly rare steak. Hahaha. I do like raw steak, but I was going for medium rare. Bah-well, I will leave it on the pan for longer next time. The dish itself tasted great to me, and that infused olive oil with the grilled lemon squeezed all around it made the dish for me. Each bite was awesome and blasted my senses with the crazy aromatic Sage and Thyme combo, who knew?

You might be wondering what I ate it with, since the pictures just look like a slab of meat on a plate.. well being 2 parts Asia, I ate it with… rice. Yup, if this was an item in my restaurant, it would read: La Biscetta Perfetta served on… a plate.. with rice and paired with.. orange juice. So F. King delicious, you don’t even know.

*I’m not Japanese, but Janet is.. and I needed a new way of getting into this paragraph instead of using “So..”

** It’s not a poor choice of words, you perv =)

Cafe Firenze Cookbook
Food and Drink Recipes from the Tuscan Sons
La Biscetta Perfetta