For those of you who prefer your meat red, use the same principles as with the Date Night Chicken. Buy the best quality steak you can afford– make sure it is prime, has a good amount of fat marbling, and has no silver skin. You can use any cut that is suitable for a medium-rare temperature like (in order here from most ideal to most affordable) New York Strip, Rib-Eye, Flat Iron, or Skirt Steak.
Here we go…. get a pan so piping hot that you can steam your face and clear your pores over it. Turn that fire on and just forget about your pan while you do your prep. Preheat oven to 500F.
Salt and pepper all sides of your steaks. Roughly chop onions and any other veggies you want to add to the dish. Cauliflower, squash, peppers, greens, whatever, and you can add tomatoes towards the end of roasting like we did for the chicken dish if you’d like. Explore your inner gardener.
You can cook your veggies separately like we did for the chicken or you can dirty up just one pan…. stand by for those instructions.
Unlike the chicken, add very little oil to your hot pan because the steak will release fat quickly over the high heat. Carefully add the meat fat side down, away from you so it doesn’t splatter in your eye causing temporary blindness.
Next, get you sear on, toots! Use tongs or a spatula to push down on the meat, repeating on all sides until it has a universally decadent milk chocolate color.
Hey! Watch it! Your kitchen’s going to get rather smoky so it’s best to turn on your hood or open a window before this occurs– no need for your date to get all kinds of jumpy because the fire alarm went off.
Remove meat from the pan and pour out all the fat, but leave in the little bits stuck to the bottom. Return the pan to the high heat and add just a little clean olive oil. Toss in your flavorings like garlic cloves (this time peeled but left whole and smashed), chopped onions, and herbs if you’ve got them.
Go ahead now and put in your leafy greens or other chopped vegetables you want to add and saute until their juices come out and release the fond (little money bits leftover from the steak).
When your veggies have a caramelization starting to form or your leafy greens begin to wilt, return the steak back to the pan over the vegetables and into that 500F oven it goes. Cooking time depends on the size of your cut and how rare you and yours like things. Generally speaking, a 10-12 ounce steak needs to cook about 6 minutes in the oven for rare, 9 minutes for medium rare.
If you’re cooking past medium, you might as well go to Mc Donald’s.
Check your temperature by cutting into the middle of the steak and observing the redness keeping in mind that it will continue to cook as it rests outside of the oven- which is an important point: let the steak rest once it has been removed from the oven. 4-6 minutes is good. Cut thinly and dress with sea salt. Serve with romesco sauce or ranch dressing or anything else you take a fancy to. Dig in!
