It's what's for dinner

But tonight as I was making dinner, I managed to acheive perfectly minced shallots. Whooo!

Dinner was steak au poivre, as prepared on America's Test Kitchen a couple of weeks ago. I did a bang up job on it, and the whole affair took less than half an hour, including veggies and a vinagrette for some field greens. (OK, I bought the field greens already meshed together at Whole Foods, so all I had to do for the salad was make the dressing.)

So I have to make one comment about cooking shows. A lot of the more obscure people who have them, like the losers on the Food Network in the middle of the day, the ones who aren't household names, they like to cook with tongs. That's right, horrible metal tongs, the tool most likely to bruise whatever you're cooking.

Now, tongs have their place in the kitchen (getting corn on the cob out of boiling water is one of those places)but to be honest I don't even have metal tongs. I don't like them, and I think anybody that wants to use them in place of, say, a spoon, is just a weirdo.

If you can't work with a spatula, you have no place trying to tell other people how to cook. Period.

Anyway, my little bits of shallot went into a mixture of chicken and beef broth, which reduced while the steak was cooking, then that went into the pan to deglaze, along with some lovely heavy cream, brandy and later, lumps of cold butter.

When the sauce was done, I tasted it and I just about fainted from happiness.

There's nothing like butter and heavy cream to make a sauce great.

In other news, my least favorite person in Washington is leaving his post. That would be White House press secretary Ari Fleischer. I don't really expect that his successor will be much less dispicable, but I can hope.

before - after