Quick & Easy Lunch - Cheese Steak

As far as I can tell, Blogspot doesn't let you bold, italicize, or strikethrough words in the titles of posts. Which is a shame, because this is the second time I've wanted to. If anyone has any idea how to do this, please give me a buzz.

The proper title for this post should have been:

Quick & Easy Lunch - Cheese Turmeric Steak

Cheese steaks are one of my favorite lunches. Even now that I'm on a low-carb diet, and generally don't want to eat rolls, there is plenty of enjoyable lunchiness to be had with a cheese steak. All you need to do is leave out the hoagie roll (or, if you're one of those types, wrap it up in a big lettuce leaf. I have occasionally been one of those types.) and you're good to go.

So, I'm looking through my fridge and I see the following:

One (1) pot roast
One (1) bowl of chopped onion left over from dinner last night
One (1) green bell pepper
Several (3-n) mushrooms
One (1) bag of shredded cheddar

The pepper has seen better days, and it's time to use it. The pot roast has seen MUCH better days - I defrosted it to salt-crust, until I decided prime rib would be a better idea. It needs to get used today or get thrown out.

Note to people - Some food is obviously bad - when something is white and fuzzy, it is Bad. Some food is obviously good; when an apple has a firm, smooth skin and is heavy for its size [1], it is Good. And there's a whole world in between. Sometimes I know I'm lazier than I should be - I see a soft spot on a apple, and I automatically chuck it out. At times like that, I appreciate Victoria being a hippie - she'll fish it out, wash it thoroughly, cut the bad bit out, and eat the rest. Wasting 98% of an apple because 2% of it is bad is dumb. (I'm pretty particular about apples - I really enjoy the texture, the crunch that you get when you bite into one, and biting into a soft apple for me is like grabbing a glass of OJ when your taste buds expect milk - it turns something that should be delicious into something fairly disgusting.)

It's worth performing triage on almost any food. I had a piece of meat that was, as I said, past its prime. Not ideal. There were some fairly ugly looking bits on it - but not moldy bits. Also not ideal. So I activated my incredibly well-designed spoiled food detector and applied it. The meat still smelled normal. Good! I got out the cleaver, chopped off the bad bits, and had a perfectly usable piece of meat.

My point is, don't be afraid to use your nose, and don't assume that one dried-out bit on a piece of meat means that you've got a dead roast. One bad apple does not spoil the whole barrel. [2] (At the same time, if your nose does set off alarm bells, don't be afraid to chuck it.)

I found out recently that most supermarkets donate the produce and prepared food that's not attractive enough to sell any more, but which is still good enough to eat. This makes me really, really happy - it's easy enough to cut off the bad bits from vegetables, and I had always been horrified at all the stuff that never gets sold just getting wasted.


Not sure why we needed that whole aside, but there it is. So I've finished cleaning off this pot roast, I'm prepping it to chuck in the crock pot, but I'm fairly certain I'm not going to be able to hold out four hours for lunch. And I remember all the other stuff I had noted in my ingredients list.

At this point, I'd love to be like my hero, Alton Brown, (he's so dreamy!) and say "a pot roast makes great cheese steak fodder, because for a cheese steak, you want a moderately fatty cut - but it doesn't exactly need to be the top-quality part of the steak, because it's getting mixed in with a ton of spices and other ingredients anyway." But I don't really have any authority to say something like that - I haven't even done a taste test on my own, let alone with other people. Still, my gut tells me that the steak in cheese steak is like the tequila in a margarita. [3]

I've still got a cleaver in my hand and a powerful hunger in mah belly, so I start shaving the meat. (For an authentic cheesesteak, you really want your meat shaved so thin that only a deli-slicer can really do it. I settle for what I can do with my hands and a knife. Pro tip - it is MUCH easier to thinly-slice meat when it's frozen... if you do this often it's probably worth chopping up a frozen steak.) I get myself a nice lunch-sized portion of meat, some sliced-up onions, peppers, and mushrooms (fairly chunky pieces) and get a fryin' pan going with a little bit of oil. When it's sizzling real nice, (I'd love to get me an actual deli-style grill in the kitchen) I make some room and toss the steak on, along with a pinch of Kosher and a grind of pepper. The whole process, from the time the pan starts sizzling to the time lunch is on your plate, should take less than five minutes.

Four minutes in, time for the thing that makes this a cheese steak. Now, wars have been fought over the proper cheese to put on a cheesesteak, but to be honest, I don't care that much. There are a lot of great choices; right now, I've got Cheddar so that's what's going on. I reach for the cheese, and...

And I notice that there's a jar of turmeric sitting right there on the counter.

Here's my problem. I've come to really like turmeric over the last few days. But if there's one thing that I really wouldn't say about it, it would be "turmeric goes well with cheese." Frankly, I just can't imagine mixing cheddar and turmeric. I wish I knew enough about my own taste buds to tell you why, but for now you're just going to have to trust me that I can't imagine a turmeric cheese steak tasting anything but terrible. Heck, it sounds terrible - and I don't mean "sounds like it would taste terrible", I mean "the word turmeric and the word cheese do not combine in a way which is at all pleasing to the ear."

So I'm faced, basically, with Sophie's Choice right here. On one hand, I've got this blog, and Science, embodied by a jar of turmeric. On the other hand, I've got cheese, which is pretty much the well from which all that is good in this world springs. (Look it up.) Well, Gentle Reader, I hope you are happy to find out that I chose you, over basically my own soul.

And what do I have to show for it?

Actually, this was a really good lunch. I really didn't expect the turmeric to go as well with red meat as it goes with fish and rice, but as it turns out, it really brought out the flavor of this particular mixture of ingredients; the mushrooms in particular really stood out. I don't know if it's because they absorbed more of the earthy flavor of the turmeric, or simply because they mix better with turmeric's taste, but they really popped in this dish.

I really wish I had a wine-lover's vocabulary to use when it comes to spices; it's practically impossible for me to describe the way turmeric tastes. The only word I've really got is earthy. I'm not saying "turmeric is really hard to describe", I'm saying "my vocabulary is not up to the task of describing this relatively simple thing." Still, what I really felt was that the taste of the spice did a great job of mediating between the other four ingredients. Rather than four different tastes, slathered in cheese (which I LOVE, don't get me wrong) the addition of the turmeric made the whole thing more like a dish, four ingredients contributing to a single taste. Does that make sense?

Anyone got any suggestions for developing that (for lack of better words... which is the whole problem here, right?) nasal vocabulary? I would like to be able to describe things in slightly more depth than I am currently able to.


All in all, this turned out to be a serendipitous success, and definitely something I would try again. On purpose, this time. Maybe over rice.


[1] "Heavy for its size" is a concept that took me a while to wrap my mind around, so it's possible that there are those of you in more or less the same boat. Here's the easiest example. Go out and buy an apple. A nice ripe Honeycrisp. Oh wait, they're out of season now. Damn. Now I want an apple.
Where was I?

Right. Leave it in the sun for a few days - it gets soft in bits, it gets shriveled up - but these obvious signs of yuckiness aside, when you pick it up, it's now lighter than you'd expect. Some of the juicy deliciousness has escaped, and it is now Bad. See? That's an apple that is light for its size. So, all other things being equal, if two apples look about the same, and are about the same size, but one is noticeably heavier - that is probably the better one. Make sense?

[2] This is a neat saying. Back in the day, refrigeration was expensive or impossible, and apples are a seasonal fruit. So apple growers would seal apples up in watertight barrels, and drop 'em in the river over the winter. The bottom of an icy river is just about the right temperature to keep them good until spring - just barely above freezing. One problem, though - an apple that has already started to go bad emits ethylene, and ethylene accelerates ripening. So either you're a brilliant apple-storing genius who is using the environment to protect your goods... or you've just dropped your apples into a ready-made spoilage device for four months. You won't find out until spring, either way. Good stuff!

[3] Enough with the footnotes already. Okay - so Food Science and actual studies tell us that there is no point to using high-quality tequila in a margarita. Quite the opposite, in fact. Higher-quality liquors are smoother, have less 'bite'. Put an expensive tequila in a margarita, and the smoother taste tends to get drowned in the lime - people don't get to enjoy the expensive flavor, and at the same time, they don't get the 'bite' that they're expecting to tell them that there's alcohol there. However, CHEAP tequilas do both jobs fine - they stand out, because for $10 a bottle you're not getting subtle flavor, and they've got bite to spare. Go expensive for shots, but don't bother for mixed drinks.