Monday Night Dinner

I happen to live with one of the best steak chefs I know. My husband has a simple recipe to marinate his steaks which works with every cut - worcestershire sauce, cracked pepper and a dash of dried rosemary. After soaking up the flavours for a couple of hours, he fries it on a hot pan and like every good steak expert, turns it only one time. The result is a super moist inside and a beautifully grilled outside.



Our Monday night dinner looked like this - Australian Ribeye steaks (each 300g, purchased from Carrefour at $7 each which was a steal), mushroom soup, salad and a wonderful ciabatta from Simply Bread.



Not that we had that much time to cook on a Monday night after work, and after a jog. The mushroom soup had been cooked some weeks back, leftovers frozen, and simply thawed in half an hour. It was still yummy though - I had fried swiss browns, shitakes and oyster mushrooms together with onions, garlic, thyme and butter, and blended them with chicken stock and cream.



What really made the mushroom soup stand out though, was a few drops of white truffle oil that I splurged on during Christmas last year. Not cheap at $50 a bottle, but it definitely lasted the distance.

To accompany the beef, we used seeded mustard blended with macadamia nut - obtainable only from Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne. I usually stock up on the mustard during my annual trips to Melbourne.

No good meal is complete without (good) wine. This, however, was a Monday night, so drinking copious amounts of alcohol was not part of the plan. Neither the husband and I are able to finish anything more than 2 glasses of wine at any one time either. The solution to our rather limited tolerance comes in the form of 187ml bottles which is equivalent to 2 glasses - you can buy them from various supermarkets and petrol stations from anything between $7 to $9. Being the cheapskate that I am, our 187ml bottles in the fridge are all obtained from Qantas. Qantas is one of the few remaining decent airlines that actually give you the entire bottle during meals, and even offer to give you another bottle if they see you've finished the earlier one. They are also decent enough to give you a proper glass to drink the wine in, unlike Singapore Airlines which serves you wine in little tacky plastic cups. (Qantas also gives you Evian bottles to hold on to, unlike SIA which serves you water in the earlier-mentioned tacky plastic cups which results in spillage on your knees during turbulence. The food on Qantas is also WAY better than SQ , although that's a story for another day.)

Anyway, our poison for the evening was a Taylors Promised Land 2007 Cabernet Merlot, which was fairly decent.