A note on sauces

Sauce can be a wonderful addition to any dish. Be it a top sirloin, chicken, ham, or pasta sauces can enhance any dish. However sauces can swamp the food you’re cooking and you may lose the textures and flavors of the main part of your dinner if you’re not careful.

The Apartment Chef’s 5 Rules of Sauce:

1. Sauce is not soup. That means your meat or pasta should not be swimming in liquid!
2. Watery runny sauces are gross.
3. Patience is your friend. All sauces take time.
4. Lumps = BAD
5. Harmonize: Like in music you can harmonize with flavors. Citrus and red pepper goes well together. Apple cider and tomato paste don’t go well together.

Now that you’ve tried to think about what apple cider and tomatoes taste like together think about this classic flavor combination:

Red Wine Sauce:

1 C Red wine (whatever you have around)

1 C beef stock

1 tbs honey

1 tbs molasses

2 tsp flour

Salt and pepper

Mix the red wine, beef stock, honey and molasses in a small to medium sauce pan over medium heat.. Now comes the technical part, this is where your sauce can go very very wrong. Grab your whisk and start whisking. While whisking start adding flour a little bit at a time. A very little bit. Any more than a tiny bit and you’ll end up with lumps (see rule 4 for my feelings on lumps). Once all the ingredients have met in the pot you can slow down your whisking. Now comes rule number 3 have patience. It will seem like the sauce is still watery but let it bubble and reduce for the next 20 minutes mixing every once in a while and voila! You have a thick, flavorful, glossy sauce!

This particular sauce is great over a strip steak or a nice sirloin.

We’ll talk white sauces another day.

Free steak!

It's not every day that free steak shows up on your door. But you know what they say. Don't look a gift steer in the mouth. I'm certainly not complaining!
The whole story is this. I came home from work at lunch after having made an emergency grocery store run (I had a very empty fridge and had reverted to not eating enough again) and there was a big white cooler on my doorstep with a hazmat placard on the side. The placard was a hazard class 9 which could be just about anything. So needless to say I was a little concerned and approached with caution. What I found was a cooler of Kansas City Steak Company steaks on my doorstep. The problem? They were addressed to someone else, who hasn't lived here in over 3 years. I contemplated taking the cooler inside and not telling anyone at the company I had received a miss addressed box of steak. Unfortunately my conscience got the best of me (damn all that Catholic school training) and I called the company when I got back to work. When I relayed my story to the lovely lady who answered the phone she said "Congratulations you have steak!" It was like Christmas in October!
Currently I have 8 burgers, 6 sirloins, and 8 strip steaks. Now I need to figure out what to do with it all! I'm thinking a free steak party is in order!!
I've already cooked up 2 sirloins and they were quite good with just a little Mrs. Dash steak seasoning on the grill pan and some A1 on the side.
Here's KSCS's website. They might not be free for you but they were so nice to me I thought I'd give them a plug. Plus I can endorse them because the meat is quite good
http://www.kansascitysteaks.com/