tea berry-blue

We don’t often cook from recipes at The Fougner Farm, but this week, my mother tried two recipes from two different magazines.

On Friday night, we had a Grilled Striped Bass with Indian-Spiced Tomato Salad from the August 2011 Food And Wine. The recipe is here.

The striped bass was pretty conventional, although delicious. The tomatoes were seasoned in a way that I hadn’t really ever considered seasoning fresh ripe tomatoes before, and it was a nice surprise– really excellent. The oil/spice/tomato juice at the bottom of the bowl made an excellent dressing for the fish. We ate it with rice and cole slaw (which doesn’t really go, but we were cutting up some cabbage for the chickens). The tomatoes are definitely worth a repeat.

On Saturday, we made the cover recipe from Bon Appetit‘s July 2011 “Grilling Issue,” the Salt & Pepper Bone-In Ribeyes. I can’t find that recipe on the BA or Epicurious website, so I suspect they have a delay before posting new recipes.

We had it with a steakhouse-style salad following in the pattern of the signature salads at Bryant & Cooper– chopped tomatoes, green beans, gorgonzola, bacon, and a little thyme in oil and vinegar. We marinated the beans for a while. The Bryant & Cooper salad also has shrimp on it, we didn’t do the shrimp as it is a bit much. We also had grilled corn on the cob with a pink-peppercorn and sea salt butter and some fresh raw cucumbers.

The steaks were delicious but my mother found that, having followed the magazine instructions exactly, her medium rare steak was not as rare as she likes it. My rare steak was excellent and cooked perfectly. The steaks on the magazine cover are garnished with grilled scallions, although there isn’t a recipe for these inside the magazine. We made them anyway and they were delicous.

Cooking from recipes is fun because I always find that I learn techniques that I might not have thought of on my own, or food/seasoning combinations that go outside the flavor profiles that I normally think of. However, I suspect out of these recipes, we will probably use the tomatoes again but not necessarily the grilling techniques. The steaks were so lightly seasoned that I wouldn’t quite consider that a recipe.

If you read Nommable on my LJ, please also take the time to read gildedage's recipe, Sunday Morning Scramble! Yum!

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