Secret Ingredient Improv II: Cooking with Arnold Palmer

As you know Ian and I started our own version of Chopped. Every Friday one of us goes shopping and buys 4 secret ingredients for the other to use in an entree. We don't have a time limit but we do want dinner at the table at some point.

I did the first round and I really enjoyed cooking with ingredients that you don't normally put together, it needs a bit courage but it helps you understand your ingredients and develop a deep idea on how food flavors, textures, smells and color work together. It forces you to make something new which is what I really like about our improv cookings.

It was my turn to buy the ingredients. I had one in mind. It was tea. Yes tea. I know it is crazy but Ian always had this crazy idea of cooking with tea and he had theories of how to incorporate it into a stew. But, he never actually tried to do it, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to let him live his dream.

I bought these four ingredients:
Beef, cut in strips for stir fry
Brussel sprouts
sunflower seeds
Arizona lite half and half Arnold Palmer (a half and half mixture of black tea and lemonade)

I know it seems mean and I don't deny being an inherently mean person, but I thought he could easily make a stir fry with the beef, brussel sprouts and the sunflower seeds and cook noodles in the tea.

Ian will take you through his experience:

It's true. I have talked before about tea in cooking - it has an interesting bitterness that I maintain would be a good balance to herbs and vegetables in a stew, and also probably a decent base for a chicken marinade. Perhaps experiments with those ideas will be forthcoming in future posts. However, this is not what I had mind. This is not, strictly speaking, tea. This is a drink which contains tea, and also Splenda.

The Arnold Palmer (which I have just learned is the name of a half and half mixture of tea and lemonade in addition to the name of a golfer who enjoys drinking it) really put me off at first, and the fact that it was "lite" concerned me as well, as I tend to dislike the flavor of most artificial sweeteners. Sucralose, which is used in this, is okay though, and I was comforted by its presence, and the distinct lack of any of that ammonia-like aftertaste I associate with aspartame. Blehg.

However, after the initial shock, I tasted the Arnold Palmer, and realized it was very mild, and had a nice lemony flavor, and that it might serve well as a steaming liquid for the sprouts. It was too sweet to do a stew or a soup with, certainly, but as a steaming liquid, it wouldn't impart too much of its sweetness. I also added a touch of cider vinegar because the Arnold Palmer didn't have much acidity. And I threw some carrots in, because why not?

(Too late it occurred to me to make a sort of fresh lemony risotto with the Arnold Palmer as the cooking liquid, as we did have valencia rice available. Too bad - I think that might've been good.)

After thinking of what I could do with the Arnold Palmer, it was time to panic about what to do with the sunflower seeds. There's nothing wrong with sunflower seeds - they're tasty, and have a mild nutty flavor that would go well with a lot of things. But all I could think to do with them, at first, was to just add them to whatever I was cooking - just, you know, in there. But that's hardly in the spirit of "transforming" the ingredients. After a long time just standing about, thinking,

 I remembered that there was a bunch of fresh parsley in the fridge, and thought I might make a parsley pesto. After all, sunflower seeds sort of look like pine nuts, right?

Just added a bunch of the parsley leaves, some chopped garlic, a bunch of the sun flower seeds, some olive oil, and a touch of parmesan to a small food processor, and chopped in up to a paste-like consistency. This actually came out really well - in fact, I would just generally recommend sunflower seeds as a pine nut substitute for this purpose, since they are way cheaper than pine nuts, but still impart that nuttiness you want in a good pesto. This pesto came out tasting quite good, and I was pleased with myself.

What I hadn't done yet, however, was figure out what I was actually going to do with this pesto. I had no central concept, no idea about what I was really going to make with any of this. Despite its familiarity, despite the strange ingredients I had otherwise, it was the beef that ended up giving me the hardest time here. When she first revealed these ingredients to me, I thought Mariam was being generous by providing me with beef - I was half-expecting live crabs or bacon SPAM or something.

But it was cut in strips. Thin, stir-fry strips, and I didn't want to make a stir fry - not now that I had pesto. At this point, I silently cursed my wife for getting me strips - if she had just gotten me a big roast or steaks or something, I could have smeared the pesto on the top, and seared it. I tried to imagine a way to accomplish something similar with the strips, but could think of no decent way of doing it - I wasn't about to sit there and carefully put pesto on each of these strips. I wasn't really sure it would be possible to adequately sear such small pieces anyway without it taking ages.

So, confused and unsure still about where I was going with it, I did this:

Then I did this (that liquid is some of the Arnold Palmer, and otherwise, I think I put some black pepper, red pepper flakes, and allspice in there).

 Then I put that thing there on this thing over here:

And then, uh...mushrooms? I guess?

So if you can't really see where I'm going with this, it's because I didn't either. After trying to avoid doing stir-fry, I guess I just defaulted to some kind of quasi-stir-fry, because honestly, what else am I supposed to do with beef cut into strips that thin? I'll confess; the reason I didn't want to do a stir-fry to begin with is because I'm bad at them. I routinely overcook the meat. Unfortunately, tonight would be no exception. I basically just couldn't think of anything to do with this beef that I thought made sense with the other things I had already started - and I still  hadn't used the actually-really-good pesto I had just made.

With all of the other ingredients basically taken care of, though, the pesto was all I had left to think about. In retrospect, I should have tried harder to figure a way to make the pesto central to the dish - it really was the only true success of the evening, and if I had figured out a way to pair it directly with the beef, it could have been a fantastic meal. But again - stir-fry. So I got some bread and cut neat little rectangles, then slathered each one with some of the pesto:

Those were put on a baking sheet, and put in the oven at 350 degrees F to make some sort of pesto toast.

I then removed the meat and onions from the pan (and discovered that, of course, I had overcooked the beef - every time) and reduced the remaining juices and Arnold Palmer in the pan to produce some kind of sauce. Our dried mushrooms made another appearance here as well.

Hey, remember something I started way up at the top of this post? Something I started cooking almost at the beginning of this whole thing? What was that? OH GOD THE BRUSSEL SPROUTS. Yeah, so I overcooked those, too. In all the panic and uncertainty of everything else in the kitchen, I essentially forgot that the sprouts existed, and left them to steam and simmer for too long.

But the toast came out beautiful, so I guess I have that.

Anyway, I tried my best to arrange a plate that didn't look ugly. I mostly failed, but this was what it all looked like together:

So I present to you, Some Kind of Overcooked Beef and Onion Stir-Fry with Lemon-Tea Brussel Sprouts and Parsley Pesto Toast.

Back to me:

I start with the toast which was exceptionally good. Using the parsley and the sunflower kernels to make a pesto turned out to be a very good idea. The toast had the perfect crunch and taste. I will definitely make it again. As for the rest, I was sort of disappointed. The beef was overcooked and the mustard in the sauce had an unpleasant overpowering flavor. The vegetables were unfortunately overcooked as well. I didn't really like the taste of the vinegar in the vegetables. It made the vegetables seem old and not fresh. The plate overall looked pleasant to me. I think Ian's biggest problem was that despite having really good ideas he didn't really have the pig picture plan in his head. I hope next time I get a better dinner.