Recipe: Stuffed Steak
I meant to post this on Saturday, but my upgrade to Windows 7 didn't go quite as planned and I ended up spending the weekend involuntarily offline. However, I still want to share the easy and (relatively) quick recipe that I made for my friends on Friday night. There are a fair amount of ingredients, but it's really tasty.
You need a crock pot, a stove, and a pan (preferably 2). There are three primary elements to the meal. The onion-and-tomato topping, the steak itself, and the pepper stuffing.
The steak should be thin-cut raw sandwich steak, or thin-cut pieces of beef intended to be quickly cooked on the stove. This kind of cut is usually relatively tough, so it needs to be marinaded. A simple marinade of steak sauce and lemon juice for a few hours should be sufficient, but it depends on the quality of the meat you purchase.
- steak sauce
- 2 standard-size packs of thin-cut sandwich steak
- lemon juice
Put the steak into a gallon plastic bag, dump in enough steak sauce and lemon juice to coat the steak. Zip and fold up the plastic bag around the steak, then refrigerate on a platter to prevent leakage.
Then make the topping.
Put 1 tub of margarine into a microwavable bowl. Add worchestershire sauce, hot sauce, lemon juice, paprika, old bay*. Melt in the microwave, stir. Taste, adjust ingredients to taste. Pour into warmed crock pot (on the hot setting).
- 2 baskets of cherry tomatoes.
- 2 onions
Quarter the onions into a petal shape, then peel apart. Place into crock pot. Stir. Cover.
Depending on your crock pot's settings, times may vary, but around the time your onions taste sweet and your tomatoes look wrinkled, it's time to prepare the stuffing.
* If you aren't from the Maryland area, this may be difficult to come by. However, you can google a recipe to make old bay yourself with relative ease. It's just a spice mixture popular in the region.
- 1 sandwich baggie full of cut bell peppers*
- 1 carrot
- 1 cucumber
* My family is friends with farmers, so we have a lot of bell peppers and tend to slice them, then freeze bags with mixes of the three main colors mixed in. I used 1 sandwich bag worth, which was probably about a pepper and a half.
Cut the vegetables. Use a julienne cut--slices should resemble match-sticks and be about 1/4" wide and about 3" long (I cut the cucumber and carrot in half, to be about the size of my bell pepper slices).
Warm a skillet or pan on your stove, wiped down with olive oil to prevent sticking. Add your vegetables. Season with standard green herbs: oregano, basil, parsley. Also add paprika. Stir and flip until vegetable juices begin to accumulate in the bottom of the pan.
Remove the steaks from the fridge and cook on the stove in another oiled pan (I used a griddle because they're bigger and it's a lot of steak in terms of surface area).
Take a finished steak and place on a plate. Using tongs (or normal utensils, but the tongs make it much easier), place julienned vegetables in the center of the steak, crossing the thinner section of the steak. Wrap the steak around the vegetables and secure with toothpicks (I recommend using two). Repeat until plate is full or you're out of steak. Then spoon the onion/tomato mixture from the crock pot on top of the vegetables and serve with a knife and fork.
This was enough to feed three people, but they also work as hors d'œuvres though they aren't bite-sized. Perhaps tapas would be the better term?