Drunken Cows with a Twist
Originally published at little black duck. You can comment here or there.
I like meat.
½ bottle of full bodied red-wine (a Cabernet or Shiraz or Syrah or something without “White” in the name)
2 Tbsp sugar
1 Orange (because you need 3 Tbsp of the Zest)*
½ tsp Cinnamon
½ tsp ground Nutmeg
A handful (or 10) whole cloves
2 Ribeye steaks, about half inch thick (we used bone-in rib steaks with some lovely marbeling)
Things you will need at hand:
A baking pan deep enough for your steaks and two and a half cups of marinade
A small sauce pan
A spoon
A wine glass
*WTF is Zest? Trust me, I didn’t know either. Zest is that colored bit of the orange or lemon lime. You can easily get yourself some zest with a potato peeler and steady hands. It’s easier than skimming a pond. Plus, it leaves the fruit nearly intact for some other nefarious need, like Sangria.
In your wee saucepan, boil up the wine and the sugar, turn down your heat and smell the wine simmering happiness for about ten (10) minutes. Pour yourself a glass from the remaining wine to celebrate.
Turn off your stove and add to your wee saucpan the Zest, Cinnamon, Nutmeg and Cloves. Let them all get to know each other while you track down a backing dish just big enough for your steaks. Because in my home there are two people putting dishes away and neither can come to a consensus as to what goes where, this took me half an hour, which was plenty of time for the marinade to cool.
Arrange the steaks artfully in the dish and take a picture for your scrapbook. Pretend your steaks are Jennifer Beals while you splash down the marinade. Another picture may be necessary. Let everything reflect upon their deliciousness in the refrigerator for several hours or overnight. Our steaks meditated for three hours.
In a very hot skillet (or a on grill I suppose), allow your steaks to actualize the deliciousness for about four minutes on each side (for medium-well). Generally, I like my steaks medium rare, but in this case it did not matter. They could have been medium well, and they couldn’t have been less tasty. The steaks came out super tender and very juicy.
Serve with the sides of your choice, or totally be like me with creamed mashed potatoes and steamed green beans. We would have served asparagus with a homemade hollandaise sauce, but when I made this about two minths ago, the asparagus was woefully out of season.