T-Bone Steak & Spinach Smashed Potatoes

(I am posting two nearly identical pictures because I find it so fascinating how two pictures, less than a minute apart, can be taken and show the difference between each steak… the second picture, below, the juices have started to ooze out, though I didn’t prick the steak.  Interesting…)

Some of you may have guessed this already, but… I moved.  From my beautiful apartment in Manhattan (with no grocery stores and lots of ordering from Fresh Direct) to a not-so-beautiful, undisclosed location in Queens, but near a decent amount of ethnic grocery stores with fresh produce for a good price.  I’m not prone to sharing personal details on my food blog (laugh all you want, but really, what I generally post doesn’t even touch the tip of the iceberg when it comes to me + sharing personal details…), but suffice it to say, through the moving process, I have had no time to cook, no desire to cook, and have just been flat out exhausted, too much to go out to eat at new places nor to bother even unpacking my cookware. 

There are going to be some major changes to this blog… but for now, my farewell dinner @ the apartment.  (Technically, it was nearly a week before we officially moved out, but it was my farewell to having an oven.  Yes, that’s right folks; I no longer have at my disposal an oven, nor a dishwasher.  Sigh!) 

Did I ever mention that I received a cast iron pan from Azriha for Christmas?  Well, I did, and it is easily one of my absolute necessities in the kitchen now.  Of course, I won’t be using it as much for now, but ah well…  onwards to the dinner.

For a while now, I’ve been “dry-aging” my steaks, loosely adapting Grocery Guy’s method, seen here.  Basically, when I get steak, I immediately remove it from the packaging, rinse any grit or random bits off, then dry completely using multiple, multiple paper towels.  (I didn’t say this was an environment friendly recipe, but you can always use dishtowels, I suppose.  I just find something dirty about that, I’m not sure why, even when they’re clean.) 

Here is where I deviated – by accident, honestly – from GG’s method.  He salts his steaks, then sets them in the fridge to dry… I forgot to salt them the first time and just season them before I add them to my pan.  Either way works, whichever you prefer, though I do think salting them first would help preserve them, but I don’t know, it makes me think they might be saltier when I cook them.  Or maybe I’m just silly!  After salting or not salting them, place them flat in a large container (I used my huge glass lasagna dish) with layers of paper towels underneath and on top.  Sometimes I put something on top of them to help absorb moisture; either way, I keep flipping them, about once every 12-24 hours or so, changing the paper towels each time.  After a few days, when I’m sure it’s good and dry…

I heat up my cast iron skillet to super duper hot and crank the oven to 475 degrees.  Once the pot is literally screaming (but not smoking), I season the steaks (skip this step if you already did that before you aged ’em), drizzle a teensy bit of olive oil on them, and then throw it in the pan.  According to Alton Brown, 30 seconds on each side without moving them at all, then flip.

Our steaks were so big, I couldn’t fit them both in the pan at one time.

After the 2nd side has cooked for 30 seconds (I stand there and count), carefully, using thick oven mitts, I stuck the whole pan in the oven and cooked for 2 minutes on each side (using the timer this time).  This gives you a really good medium rare steak (depending on how thick your steak is, of course).  I pulled them out and set them aside to rest on our places while I finished up our side dish…

Spinach mashed potatoes.  I got this idea from Rachel Ray, who mentioned that adding greens to mashed potatoes makes it bigger and fills you faster but with more healthy stuff instead of heavy potatoes.  I thought it was brilliant, so I boiled a few red skinned bliss potatoes and proceeded to mash these with the skin on by hand (which, by the way, is way harder than I remember, without a masher of which to speak), but deviating from what I think her recipe was (I usually just leave FoodNetwork on and half-listen; either I go and look up the recipe if it sounds yummy, or I make an approximation, and this was an approximation), I added a whole lot of heavy cream (the rest of that pint going to make whipped cream for the semi-homemade strawberry love cake), butter, a bit of salt & pepper, then added baby spinach, covering it with the hot mashed potatoes and letting it wilt a bit before I stirred it up, incorporating the spinach into the mashed potatoes.  It was almost like creamed-spinach-mashed-potatoes, since I added so much cream, but so good.  Okay, so it wasn’t quite healthy for us, but it tasted darn good. 

As always, happy eating!!!