Today’s been a good day. A very good day. For my writerly work, I mean. I’ve been skipping around certain pretty enormous shifts I had to make to my manuscript, and when I woke up this morning, I knew that today was the day. And that I didn’t want to stop until the job was done.
And it is! So, yay me! Except now I’m ravenously hungry, and committed to cooking dinner tonight for the three of us who are home for the evening; and other than a lifetime’s supply of condiments in the fridge, there’s not much in the way of ingredients.
The one thing going in my favour is that I do have a packet of rump steak I bought mid-week that hasn’t gone on the nose yet. Plus there’s a saddish bag of rocket in the veggie drawer that can be revived with a bit of a soak in icy water. So combined with another handful of things I think I can pull together, I’m going to have a red-hot go at cooking a cheat’s family-favourite meal. Added bonus? It’s super quick. And super yum!
Oh, if I can be buggered and have the ingredients to hand, I prefer to make my own pesto to go with this. Won’t be an option tonight! So if there’s only a nasty jar of store-bought pesto available, pimp it up a bit with extra (very good) extra virgin olive oil, fresh black pepper, and more parmesan and chopped pine nuts stirred through.
THINGS YOU’LL NEED
– 250 gr rump steak with its fat
– 2 tablespoons pine nuts
– 4 tablespoons of pesto – thinned out with a little yummy olive oil
– 4 handfuls of rocket, well washed and drained
– 1/3 a cup of shaved or grated parmesan
– Balsamic vinegar
HOW TO DO IT
– Put a metal bowl (large enough to eventually accommodate steak) in the oven and turn heat onto 50 degrees.
– Brown pine nuts in a little olive oil in a frypan large enough to fit the steak. Remove from heat when nicely brown.
– Cut the fat off the steak, then cut the fat into tiny pieces – no bigger than a matchhead. Then add to the frying pan and render and crisp up – stirring occasionally. Might need a lid, because it can spit a fair bit! Remove from heat when done and put in a separate bowl.
– Place steak between two sheets of baking paper, and pound it with either a rolling pin or the flat side of the meat mallet until it’s 1cm thick.
– Season both sides of steak with salt and pepper, then sear in the frypan on high heat for 1 minute either side – it should still be pink in the middle.
– When done, put steak in metal bowl in the oven, covered by foil and let it rest for a few minutes.
– Spread a good dollop of pesto onto two plates, and top with a couple of handfuls of rocket each.
– Take steak out of the oven, slice it on an angle and arrange on top of rocket.
– Pour juices from metal bowl steak was resting in into frypan, and mix in a tablespoon each of olive oil and balsamic vinegar, then pour a couple of tablespoons of sauce over the steak and rocket.
– Scatter pine nuts over steak, then the reserved bits of crispy fat.
– Finish with parmesan.
