Whip It Up Week 1: Meat and Potatoes
When RA and Nic announced their Whip It Up challenge — in which participants make and blog about one new recipe every week for eight consecutive weeks — I signed up without a moment’s hesitation. To me, it was a no-brainer: Not only would I get to try new recipes, which I love to do, but I would also have one less post idea to come up with every week for a couple of months. Win-win!
Tuesday night, Tim and I sat down and consulted the Internet for this week’s recipe. Our criteria was pretty straightforward: I didn’t really care what we made as long as it was delicious, and Tim wanted red meat. Before too long, I found an intriguing recipe for Italian Beef Patties with Balsamic Cream Sauce. It had a slew of 5-star ratings — always a good sign — and it was fairly different from anything we’d ever made before. We had our main course.
Now on to the sides. Tim wanted mashed potatoes, but I suggested we try out the Pioneer Woman’s Crash Hot Potatoes. I’d been wanting to try them for a few weeks, and it was new recipe night after all, so my potato idea won out. To get something green into the mix we decided on some steamed edamame, and with that we were set.
One quick trip to the grocery store later, and we had the makings for what promised to be a delicious dinner.
Kosher salt came to the party, too; it just missed the photo shoot.
While the potatoes cooked . . .
I prepped the meat patties — beef, eggs, cheese, seasonings, and all.
When it comes to cooking, I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty.
And then . . . well, then we waited for the potatoes to cook. And waited. And waited some more. I knew that in order to get my timing right I didn’t want to start cooking the meat until the potatoes were in the oven. I did not know that I would be waiting four years for the damn potatoes to just cook already. (Y’all. I was hungry. And I tend to get a little grumpy and impatient when I’m hungry.)
When it became clear that the potatoes were in fact going to take close to four years to become “fork tender,” I threw together a snack, poured myself a drink, and continued to wait.
When the potatoes were finally ready, we prepped them according to the recipe and slid them in the oven thinking “These had better be some damn good potatoes.”
They turned out to be more of a general layer of potato bits than nicely separated individual crushed potatoes like the recipe called for, but it was the best we could do, and I figured they’d taste pretty much the same anyway, so I wasn’t worried.
From there on out, everything went much more smoothly. I cooked the meat until it was almost done . . .
then — while keeping the meat warm in a separate, covered pan over low heat (I figured this way it would finish up cooking without either drying out or becoming lukewarm. I figured correctly.) — got the sauce started.
If you’ve read the recipe, you’re probably wondering what I’m doing with a pan of mushrooms. Well, I’ll tell you. Tim and I are not onion eaters. Tim has a painful allergic reaction to them, and I just think they’re foul tasting. So whenever a recipe calls for onions we either leave them out completely or find something to use in their place. One of the commenters on this recipe said she’d successfully added mushrooms and garlic to the sauce, so I decided to follow suit by replacing the onions with the mushrooms and garlic. This was one of the best decisions I made all night.
Once the mushrooms and garlic were thoroughly sauteed, I poured in the cream and balsamic vinegar, stirred, and let it all warm up for the recommended 2 minutes.
Mmmmmm . . . the sauce. OMG the sauce.
And with that, we were ready to eat! And it was only . . . 9 pm. Damn potatoes.
Here’s how the meal looked all plated up:
Not the most aesthetically pleasing meal, but it’s the taste that counts, right?
And after we ate:
Smalls is on spill-clean-up duty.
My overall reactions:
Were the recipes easy to follow? Yes. Both recipes were very straightforward and easy to execute. The only hard part was waiting on those damn potatoes.
The other small flaw was that the sauce could have used more than 2 minutes to warm up — it was a bit lukewarm when we ate it. However, I don’t hold this against the recipe, as stove heats vary, and we also doubled the recipe (we like leftovers) and probably should have taken into account that it takes longer to heat up twice as much sauce. Even lukewarm, though, it was damn good sauce.
Did it taste good? The potatoes, not so much. They were fine, but not nearly worth the wait. Overall I found them to be a bit flavorless and unexciting. As you can see from the photo above, I couldn’t even be bothered to finish mine. Tim said his were better when he mashed them up with his fork and ate them with the extra sauce on his plate. The moral of the story: We should have had mashed potatoes all along.
The beef patties were very good. A bit like a fancied-up hamburger patty, but more exciting than that sounds. I liked the little flavor bursts the Parmesan cheese added to every bite.
And the sauce . . . oh my gosh, the sauce! The sauce was, by far, the highlight of the meal. It was amazing and delicious and flavorful and just so very good. And it reheats well, too! I love every last thing about this sauce.
Would I make it again? I don’t think I’ll be making the potatoes again. I have plenty of other delicious potato recipes that offer much more reward for the time and energy spent cooking. I’ll stick to those in the future.
I’ll probably make the beef patties again, but I will definitely be making that sauce again. It’s such a simple sauce, and yet the flavor is so rich and delicious. I can see it going well with any number of things — chicken, pork chops, steak, mashed potatoes. I think this sauce and I are going to have a long and happy future together.
comments
14 Responses to “Whip It Up Week 1: Meat and Potatoes”
Leave a Reply
-
Search
-
Categories
A little Tipsy blog Book Challenge 07 Books Dance Family Feeling Blue General Happiness Get Active. Get AWESOME! Have Red Pen, Will Edit hiking Holidays Home Improvement Job's Daughters Kitchen Adventures Mr. Tim's Adventures in Teaching NaBloPoMo 07 Nostalgia Photos & Videos Pike's Peak Adventure Puppies Random Scrapbooking Smalls Sunday Spain Summer Abroad Tap Things that make me laugh Tim tv and movies Uncategorized Up on my soapbox Wedding Wednesday-Bensday Wednesday Smalls 'n Bensday
What I've Been Reading
Oh, I’m so sad about the potatoes! I wonder why they took so long AND fell apart. Bummer.
That balsamic cream sauce sounds very interesting and delicious. I will have to pass this one under JG’s nose to see what he thinks.
I am still amazed by how much you cook. For dinner last night I had a bag of raw mixed nuts, a banana, and a meal shake from the corner deli on the way back from the gym. This is not me trying to be healthy, this is just not having a big appetite after the gym and knowing all i had in my kitchen was popcorn and soup. Oh, and about 5 bottles of wine.
I made the potatoes a few weeks ago and I liked them. But I added more herbs and such than she called for I used oregano (bc it went with the chicken we had) and kosher salt and black pepper. And we loved them. So perhaps you could try them with more herbs. And I cut my potatoes in half since I knew they would just be a mess on the pan anyway. It cut the cooking time way down.
The “Whip it Up” header is misleading, I thought you and Tim were going to be getting high off nitrous oxide. *sigh*
Whew! Lemme just say I adore Pioneer Woman. But after reading about those potatoes I don’t feel bad about being the only one who don’t think all her recipes are “Just Fabulous”!!!! or “My husband and kids loved it”
I’ve tried 4 of her recipes. Maybe you and I did something wrong??? lol
Anyway, when you mentioned Tim helping, I got a mental image of that one time you blogged about his beer and ice cream invention.
I too made those crash potatoes and ended up with basically potato bits – I don’t know HOW she got them to stay together. Maybe they weren’t actually fork tender when she made them??
That’s sad about the potatoes. I love a good potato recipe.
The sauce sounds delicious (despite the mushroomynes), and I love a sauce that reheats well!
I’m sad you didn’t love the crash hot potatoes, I made them last week for Chris and I and we totally loved them. Of course, we used a ton of olive oil and pepper… which makes anything taste great in my book. I wonder why yours took so long to cook?
I made the potatoes too and I was kind of meh. I guess I didn’t boil them long enough because they weren’t all that exciting. I usually just toss my red potatoes with lemon juice, parsely and butter.
Those crash potatoes SOUNDED so good, but I think in reality they don’t seem to live up to the hype. The pots de creme though, those are SO FUCKING YUMMY.
That sauce looks good even if it is missing the awesomest ingredient ever. You guys are so weird.
That sauce looks AWESOME. Yum!
I have mixed feelings about Rachael Ray, but she is all about cutting your potatoes up before boiling them. That cuts the cooking time significantly!
I usually cut up potatoes when boiling them. Otherwise, I’m suffering the same fate that you did.
That sauce looks and sounds fantastic!
(and my apologies for not joining in on the whip it up fun. )
Oooooh I’m hungry now and it’s almost my dinner time. I know my dinner tonight is not going to be that good. I want you to cook for me tonight, please. Actually, I don’t even know what I’m going to cook, which means it definitely isn’t going to turn out very well. Oy. You cook, I will bring the ice cream.
[...] use half-and-half rather than heavy cream (I would have done this, but I had leftover cream from last week’s recipe that needed to be used up) and swap out the meatballs for chicken if you wanted and it’d [...]