Thursday, October 24, 2002

Thon a la Provençale. So, it was back in the saddle Wednesday.  Sort of.  I was just tackling the one recipe, and it was a simple one.  As usual, though, I hadn’t had time to really reflect upon this recipe for Tuna Steaks with Wine, Tomatoes & Herbs, and working in my mind with the assumption fish=quick, there were a couple of factors I didn’t take fully into account: 1) marination time (1 ½ hours), and 2) baking time (an astounding 45 minutes).  Not a deal-breaker though, because I’d gotten home earlier than usual, and what is marination time but time to sit down on a couch? I trimmed the skin off the steaks – arousing much interest from the cats, who, however, were a bit confused when actually given small pieces of said skin.  Feline befuddlement – nothing like it.  Then I put the steaks into a dish with a marinade of lemon juice and olive oil, salt and pepper, covered them with a round of waxed paper, (still not getting over the subtle thrill of illusory confidence I get cutting a round of waxed paper,) and let it sit.  I snapped off the ends of the green beans sitting on the house.  Eric helped, and Cooper the Cat stole out of the ends pile.  They were some sucky, not snappable beans, because Food Emporium is where the devil goes when he can’t get down to Dean & DeLuca, but no matter.  Every once in awhile I got up and turned the steaks.  Eric was worrying that the tuna wasn’t overly fresh, and it’s true that it was a tad gooshy, but then, what do we know about tuna steaks.  Nuthin, that’s what. By the time the tuna had marinated for an hour and a half, I had the tomatoes, onions and garlic chopped, and made the determination as to what ingredients I was missing – tomato paste and meat glaze, plus paper towels.  Oh well – not critical.  Tomato paste was to “add color”, and I can do without color.  And a tablespoon of meat glaze, whatever that was – how important could it be?  “Depth of flavor”, JC says… who needs it? (Tomato paste is a small little bane of my existence.  I just can’t get a routine going by which I don’t wind up wasting nearly full cans of the stuff.  I freeze it, forget about it, wind up with a freezer full of year old scary tomato paste cans.  At Western Beef they only had big honkin cans of the stuff, and I just put it in a jar in the refrigerator, thinking what with the Project and all I’d use it up.  Two months and several spreading spots of furry mold later, here I am, paste-less.) I dried the steaks and browned them in very hot olive oil.  JC says to do it for a couple of minutes a side, but knowing JC and fish, I did it for less time than that – just enough for the steaks to get slightly seared.  Then I put them aside in a baking dish, turned down the heat in the pan, and let the onions cook for five minutes.  Then the tomatoes, garlic, thyme and oregano went in, and that cooked for five minutes more, covered.  I spread the tomato mixture over the tuna, covered the baking dish, and put it in a 350-degree oven for 10 (JC says 15) minutes.  I poured in some vermouth, turned the heat down a tad, and let it bake for another 25 minutes.  Meanwhile, I steamed the sucky green beans and diced some peeled potatoes to cook in butter and oil.  This all happened with relative ease, though I had too many diced potatoes for the remaining pan I had available at the moment, and they didn’t brown as well as they should have.  Plus, of course, diced potatoes just don’t roll easily like potatoes carved into smooth olive shapes do.  Fuck it. When the tuna was done (I took it out a little early), I put the steaks onto a plate, poured the tomato sauce back into the tuna sauté pan, and cooked it down over high heat.  This is where I didn’t stir in the tomato paste.  For the meat glaze, I scooped up a few bits of fat that I had neglected to skim off the beef stock in the fridge.  What the hell.  Once that was reduced, I beat in a paste of flour and softened butter, which does seem oh-so-too-too, until you do it and it really does make a difference, makes the sauce creamier and thicker, and stirred in some chopped parsley.  I spooned the sauce over the tuna and voila -- Thon a la Provençale. This is tuna the way my mother likes it – cooked within an inch of its life.  Far too dry for my taste, but the sauce fixed that up nicely.  The sauce was very good, just slightly fishy and very tomato-y, plenty of depth of flavor, meat glaze or no.  The green beans, as I mentioned, were sucky, but I tossed them with butter, so okay.  And the potatoes really went very well with it all.  This is one of those time when I did exactly the accompaniments JC suggests (except the dry white Reisling – Eric breaks out into hives when I suggest drinking white wine), and you know, the old broad knows what she’s doing. 8:58:05 AM    comment []