Meat and Mushrooms

[kiya]

I am having one of my intermittent, "Meat! Must have meat! Wrapped in dough!" signs of northern European heritage. We are going to attempt to calm it down with Chinese dumplings, which are close enough to the craving to reduce it to muttering for a little while.

Am also feeling like doing the flattened steak dish that I've been wanting to try for a while. I'm pondering, oddly enough, that doing so might help my stress level; I like cooking with people and feeding people, I find it a very social and calming activity. And I've been thinking about making this dish for some several months now, and while it's not exactly a high-stress 'this has to happen' thing, getting it out of the queue would be kind of nice. So possibly with the stealing of whispercricket (for some reason, 'gelfling' doesn't seem to be a name on my flist) and arawen's kitchen this weekend, since there will be people there. To do social cooking with, and to feed the results, presuming said results come out well. Will have to see if there's anything obvious to make to go with it. And get materials. And a meat mallet.

I'm feeling deeply pleased at the moment at the Slavic recon list I'm mostly lurking on, as someone made an offhand comment that fits in with a bit of my current bit of puzzle-solving cosmological analysis, so now I have one possible interpretation of ancient thought that meshes nicely with an interpretation of the thoughts of my blood-ancestors, so even if it doesn't work for anyone else, it works really well for me.

Have installed the most recent Firefox because my old Mozilla was flaking on alhandra's pages (and a few other people, but this was the one that finally drove me over the edge). Fear my technoluddite rage. "Upgrades" . . . hah!

Comments

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

Yay for fixedness. *looks happy*

May I make a suggestion on happy meat-mallet pounding tools? If you're willing to spend a little more money, you can get a very nice and heavy one at Williams-Sonoma (that's where I got mine) or probably Crate and Barrel or someplace like that, with a Really Big head and no annoying tenderizer spiky bits. The flat-headed ones really work the best, and having a big head means that you don't tear up the meat as much when it squeezes out around the edges of the pounding. And being heavy means it'll do most of the work for you.

Ha. Goes along with my favorite kitchen adage: if there's any doubt as to what will dent, the pot or a person's head, throw out the pot. (; )

Mmm. Meat wrapped in dough. Yum. Too bad I'm having valenthe over tonight, or I'd be tempted to do that myself. I'm making beef stewish stuff instead.

*hugs again*

[kiya]

This sounds like excellent advice. (said dish, not that I can find the cookbook at the moment, involves if I'm remembering right rendering two pounds of steak Thin. It is, additionally, period for my as yet unstarted SCA persona.)

There shall be hunting of appropriate mallets, yes.

[ardaniel]

This is another case of Good Eats being useful. He did an ep on paillards and chicken Kiev and other Flat Meat Items, and his suggestions on pounding meat flat were really useful.

http://www.goodeatsfanpage.com/Season8/flatmeat/flatmeat.htm

(That has a couple of small screencaps of his culinary pounding item of choice, as well.)