Good morning. I found a short little piece of skirt steak at the market and it cost me $10 to take it home. I salted it hard and seared it in a cast-iron pan, and then finished it off the heat with a couple of tablespoons of cold butter, tilting the pan so it foamed along the sides and I could spoon the fat repeatedly over the crusty beef.
I let the meat rest on a cutting board while I made the recipe for guacamole (above) that Florence Fabricant scored from the chef Josefina Howard back in the ’90s. Then I made a quick salsa of halved grape tomatoes, diced red onion and seeded, sliced jalapeños dressed with lime juice, salt and pepper, and a simple crema of mayonnaise thinned with buttermilk and a little more lime juice.
There were some flour tortillas in the fridge, so I pulled those out, along with a hunk of Monterey Jack that I shredded onto the cutting board, next to the steak. I poured some of the fat from the pan into my crema, which broke it slightly — and deliciously — and then wiped out the pan so I could make quesadillas with the cheese and sliced steak.
These, topped with the guacamole and salsa and drizzled with the crema, were among the best things I’d eaten in a week of fine meals, and I commend them to you this weekend, a kind of series of no-recipe recipes with an actual recipe embedded within them.
Featured Recipe
Guacamole
Alternatively, you might take a run at these Baltimore-style crab cakes that Pierre Franey brought to The New York Times in the late ’80s. I modify the recipe slightly, taking a page from the New Orleans chef Mason Hereford to gently combine the crabmeat with crushed saltines before adding the spices and “wet” ingredients to the mixture. Then, like Hereford, I sauté the cakes and serve them on toasted, buttered English muffins with shredded iceberg lettuce and a drizzle of sauce. Hereford uses a tangy buttermilk dressing. I generally go with a remoulade instead.
You could make sausage smash burgers this weekend. You could make a baked Camembert salad. It’s great weather where I stay for dal makkhani. Also for beef stew with prunes.
And you should absolutely make, perhaps as a rehearsal for Valentine’s Day, chocolate fondue. It’s foolproof: hot cream over chocolate in the pot. Assemble your dippables — whole strawberries, wedges of clementine, hunks of poundcake, shortbread cookies — and go to! Chocolate fondue is perfect weekend food.
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Now, the only connection to food is that the action takes place in a tony French restaurant, but Ginia Bellafante’s recent article about Truman Capote being cast out by his once adoring socialite friends, in The Times, and Maureen Dowd’s profile of the actress Calista Flockhart, who plays one of them in the new FX series “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans” (also in The Times), sent me into the archives of Esquire magazine to read the Capote short story that led to the dispute, “La Côte Basque, 1965.” It is vicious.
There’s new fiction from Patrick Langley in The New Yorker, “Life With Spider.”
Check out this Delcy Morelos exhibition at Dia Chelsea in New York, “El abrazo.”
Finally, you know what? Here’s Boz Scaggs, “Lido Shuffle.” One more job oughta get it. I’ll see you on Sunday.
