The Au Poivre Incident

With every January comes the desire to eat healthier – less calories, less fat, more wholesome goodness. For me, the motivation is the few pounds I brought back from Paris last May, followed by the “oh my God I got cancer so I’m going to eat like crap because I feel so damned bad for myself” weight, and culminating with the extra ounces Santa brought me for Christmas. (And don’t ask me how I’m the only person in the world who gained weight with cancer.)

Nothing crazy, but the jeans are feeling a little tighter and now is as good a time as any to do something about it. What else are new year’s resolutions for anyway?

So I pulled out my copy of Rocco DiSpirito’s “Now Eat This” cookbook, where Rocco makes comfort food more diet friendly. Seriously, 150 recipes re-made to be less than 350 calories per serving. This book is great, I don’t know why I don’t use it more often.

I started last Friday when I made chicken cacciatore for dinner. It was delicious – B devoured it. Then I made the Jamaican jerk chicken. Also great, although my chicken took a little too long to cook so my vegetables were cold and overcooked by the time the chicken was ready. Okay, so it was great tasting if not perfectly prepared.

And then I decided to make steak au poivre. Let’s just say that things have been going a little too well for me in the kitchen, and I was due for a disaster. Oh, boy was I due.

I did everything exactly right. I swear it. But things didn’t go so well… Let’s just say the kitchen got a little smoky when I started cooking the steaks. Okay, no problem. I’ll just turn on the exhaust fan. (Still trying to figure out where it exhausts to, but that’s another story.)

So the steaks are fine, fortunately I was aiming for medium rare for B and rare for me so I didn’t have to keep them in the skillet for too long. They had a nice char, and the smoke would clear eventually. Right?

But then it came time to make the sauce. Step one: add two tablespoons of brandy to the hot skillet with one teaspoon of freshly ground pepper, and let it reduce.

Reduce or evaporate? Or shall I say, burn off? Pretty much the second the brandy hit the pan it was gone. Not knowing what else to do, I quickly added the evaporated skim milk and corn starch and started whisking away.

The sauce started to boil very quickly, and apparently I have not done the best job cleaning this skillet because the liquid did one hell of a job deglazing the pan. Let’s just say char is a nice flavor on a piece of steak, but not so nice as the dominant flavor of a cream sauce.

And that’s not all. Once the sauce loosened up all that burnt on crap from prior uses, it started to burn, replacing the old burnt on crap with new burnt on crap. And it smoked.

And really smoked, it did.

While I was trying to tame the sauce in the kitchen, B was opening all the doors and windows and setting up a fan to suck the smoke out of the condo and out the sliding glass door. January is not the time for dining al fresco, at least not in Boston when it is 10 degrees outside.

All was not lost though. The steak was actually cooked quite well (with a nice char, ha ha ha) and tasted delicious. And even though I begged him not to, B still insisted on using the sauce – poured it all over his steak, as a matter of fact. (Mental note, don’t bother buying filet mignon if your husband is going to smother it with burnt cream sauce.)

So... does anyone have any advice on how to clean a cast iron skillet coated with burnt on cream sauce? Scratch that, anyone have any advice on how to cook with a cast iron skillet without burning the house down?