Weekend Cooking

We spent a quiet Saturday evening at home and I had plans to take pictures and blog about dinner. Sometimes things don't turn out the way you planned. A fell asleep in the car on the way home from picking up our meat shipment and was quite cranky afterwards and demanded that I make "grandma's soup" (a Romanian soup with farina dumplings). This was in the middle of me making blood orange beurre blanc, searing scallops and keeping an eye on fries in the oven. So I made her soup but I used organic chicken broth from Trader Joe's and then made the dumplings. I had to forgo the step by step pictures due to lack of time. All the cooking made us hungry.

We wanted to do kind of a surf and turf dinner. We have had blood oranges and jumbo scallops in the freezer for a while. It is kind of a tradition to make blood orange beurre blanc this time of year. This French butter sauce is made with a reduction of an acid, such as citrus juice, vinegar, or wine, shallots and cold butter. I first learned how to make it when I went to culinary school and it really isn't that hard to make. I used this lovely recipe for Orange Beurre Blanc from Simply Recipes and I just substituted blood oranges for the oranges. I think everything turned out quite lovely. We made a small salad and had a glass of Chateau St Jean Sonoma County Chardonnay with it.

Jason grilled a Top Sirloin that we got from The Forager's. They are an on-line Farmer's Market of sorts that serves Northern California. We get our grass fed, pasture raised meat from them. We usually get their Mixed Meat package which is about 20lbs of meat. They meet you at a specific location once a month and the meat is frozen. We have had some great cuts of beef, lamb, pork, sausage, bacon and this time we got a duck.

I made a Chimichurri to go with the steak. Chimichurri is an Argentinean sauce used for grilled meat. It is made with parsley, garlic, olive oil, oregano, chili flakes and white or red vinegar. I again went to my go to recipe place...Simply Recipes. You can find the recipe here. I had made the sauce a few hours before we grilled the meat. We love having the flavors meld together. We had it with some organic purple and green kale from Farmer's Market and garlic fries from Trader Joe's. We drank it with a 2002 Dry Creek Valley Cabernet Sauvignon from Passalacqua Winery and a 2003 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon from St. Supery.

Today I am working on Pie Pops for dessert since we are going to dinner at a friend's house.