Truffled Filet of Beef Sandwiches
- By Katie Roche
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- 26 Jan, 2019
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Ok so when I was flipping through the book to confirm that this would, indeed, be the best (most do-able) Ina book for a cook-through, this was the particular recipe that had me like..."That is over the top." And I don't mean over the top in the way Ina does when she's like, "It's so over the top, your friends will SWOON." I mean, that's kind of true, but I mean t over the top because it's a sandwich made out of a giant chunk of filet mignon. A sandwich. With filet mignon. A ONE HUNDRED DOLLAR ROAST BEEF SANDWICH. And ok, the meat was actually not $100 but it was still expensive and we were making a sandwich out of it. When the butcher asked what I was doing with it and I told him, I got some side-eye.
I'm getting ahead of myself here. This was a Martin Luther King weekend project. We decided on a whim to drive up to Indiana to surprise my sister and nephews. I confirmed availability with my brother-in-law ahead of time, and then found out when we arrived that he was actually taking his final exam for his MBA. He's been working on it for two years straight with no breaks between classes, and now he is, as we've been calling him, a Master of Bizness, so it turns out we had a good reason to celebrate with expensive beef. He is, aside from being a Master of Bizness, the one who made me this website and encouraged me to just go for it...lots to celebrate about that guy. He is the best. Anyway, being in suburban Indianapolis allowed us to do our ItemQuest at a ridiculously bougie grocery store in Carmel called Market District.
We rolled up to Market District with a car full of rain-dampened children: we had just taken them on a questionable ice skating outing at an outdoor ice rink in 34-ish degrees and rain. The lady working the rink tried to tell us we couldn't skate but we had called ahead and driven 45 minutes just to get there so when we pleaded our case, she acquiesced. We powered through most of an hour on, again, QUESTIONABLE ice and the kids did great - when "Uncle Cottin" (Dan) is there to basically tow you at top speed around the rink, ice skating is super fun. Not that I've ever experienced this. LOL. So Market District is one of those stores that has everything you've ever needed all in once place. These types of stores are rare, but there is a Starbucks, a sushi counter, a deli, a hot food bar, a cheese counter, a butcher, a wine cellar, olive oil and vinegar taps, a popcorn and candy counter, and then all the regular aisles of whatever else you might need. A dream. We had our butcher experience (sorry I'm using your high quality beef for a sandwich, sir, but this is AMERICA...he was actually nice, but I did feel judged), and got the rest of our stuff - just some Parmesan, black truffle butter (which they had, #casual), arugula, and a baguette which I hit my sister with just to see if it was good. I don't know that it really tells you much about quality, it just seems like it would. If you're wondering what truffles are, the best explanation I can give is that they're basically expensive mushrooms that impart a savory quality to foods. We also picked up some scallops as an appetizer, since they were on sale. Score.
I'm getting ahead of myself here. This was a Martin Luther King weekend project. We decided on a whim to drive up to Indiana to surprise my sister and nephews. I confirmed availability with my brother-in-law ahead of time, and then found out when we arrived that he was actually taking his final exam for his MBA. He's been working on it for two years straight with no breaks between classes, and now he is, as we've been calling him, a Master of Bizness, so it turns out we had a good reason to celebrate with expensive beef. He is, aside from being a Master of Bizness, the one who made me this website and encouraged me to just go for it...lots to celebrate about that guy. He is the best. Anyway, being in suburban Indianapolis allowed us to do our ItemQuest at a ridiculously bougie grocery store in Carmel called Market District.
We rolled up to Market District with a car full of rain-dampened children: we had just taken them on a questionable ice skating outing at an outdoor ice rink in 34-ish degrees and rain. The lady working the rink tried to tell us we couldn't skate but we had called ahead and driven 45 minutes just to get there so when we pleaded our case, she acquiesced. We powered through most of an hour on, again, QUESTIONABLE ice and the kids did great - when "Uncle Cottin" (Dan) is there to basically tow you at top speed around the rink, ice skating is super fun. Not that I've ever experienced this. LOL. So Market District is one of those stores that has everything you've ever needed all in once place. These types of stores are rare, but there is a Starbucks, a sushi counter, a deli, a hot food bar, a cheese counter, a butcher, a wine cellar, olive oil and vinegar taps, a popcorn and candy counter, and then all the regular aisles of whatever else you might need. A dream. We had our butcher experience (sorry I'm using your high quality beef for a sandwich, sir, but this is AMERICA...he was actually nice, but I did feel judged), and got the rest of our stuff - just some Parmesan, black truffle butter (which they had, #casual), arugula, and a baguette which I hit my sister with just to see if it was good. I don't know that it really tells you much about quality, it just seems like it would. If you're wondering what truffles are, the best explanation I can give is that they're basically expensive mushrooms that impart a savory quality to foods. We also picked up some scallops as an appetizer, since they were on sale. Score.
So this gets covered in butter, salt, and pepper and roasted at 500 for, Ina says, 22 minute if you want it to be rare. We got a little bit bigger of a piece in order to have enough for guests, and used a meat thermometer to cook it to medium rare, since rare meat is a bit of a polarizing food situation. (I'm #teamrare in case anyone was wondering. I can roll with medium rare, or maaaaybe even medium, but well-done is a no-go.) So we popped this in...
And heyyyy, look at that! It's beautiful, so beautiful. That hung out to rest under a some foil while we prepared the rest of the sandwich ingredients.
So here's the truffle butter. If you're dying to try it (I know you probably aren't), and don't know where to buy it, Ina suggests D'Artagnan's website but I tried that when I thought I was going to be making this in South Carolina, and you have to order $40 of product as a minimum! Get out of here with that!!! Does anyone even do that? I guess people like Ina probably do, but especially now that I'm out of Alaska, I'm done with order minimums and I'm SUPER done with paying more than like, $5 for shipping. I'm glad I didn't have to hunt this product down in South Carolina, but if I were looking, I'd probably go look for it at Lowe's. Just look in the fancy section and don't ask anyone to help you find it, because I'm 99% sure they'll hear "truffle" and think you're talking about chocolate and then not know how to help you. I had a whole conversation about this pitfall of Lowe's with my coworker the other day. He is from New York, so he gets how much of a struggle bougie grocery shopping is in these parts, and we both agree that Lowe's has good product selection but their employees have little to no product knowledge.
The buttered bread, which Dan so kindly halved hot-dog-style for us. (I wonder if Ina eats hot dogs??? Prob only Hebrew National if she does. Those are the only ones worth eating anyway. But just cherish with me the mental image of Ina eating a hot dog. LOL.) I'm not so great at halving things - I do a very uneven job - so I just let him do that. I also let Duston slice the meat. In general, if I can delegate cutting tasks, I do.
Here we have the finished sandwich. The beef slices are a lil thicc, but we all know we're here for the beef anyway. Remember that commercial about beef and how they used that one song from the Nutcracker? I don't know if anyone else remembers that but now whenever Dan takes me to the Nutcracker, I call that part the Bring Home the Beef Song. (I think the fact that Dan wanted to take me to the Nutcracker in the first place, coupled with the fact that my only associations with it were to beef explains why my parents say he gave me "culture". If you know my parents, you know they raised us on lots of rare beef and absolutely zero ballet.) So here is the Beef, Brought Home.
Since a lot of cooking had gone down already, there were a lot of dishes and we decided to eat on paper plates. We ate it with the roasted tomato caprese (see a couple of posts ago about that one) and were joined by our friends Will and Nikki and their daughter Grace, who are unequivocally the best people to invite to pretty much any party. The first time I ever met them, they came over to my sister's house to celebrate my birthday and obliged me by showing up in their pajamas (with party hats on!!!), pretty much cementing them forever in my heart as kindred spirits.
We all did enjoy this...it was delish, especially the beef. But the beef we all had (hardy har) with the sandwich was mainly that, as the butcher (and all of us) already knew, it shouldn't have been a sandwich. You can't just SANDWICH FILET MIGNON, Ina Garten. You can't DO that. I know you could use your fistfuls of money as salad greens or as the substitute for arugula in this sandwich but that doesn't mean you can put fancy beef in a sandwich and convince us that it's the right thing to do. The truffle butter was a nice accompaniment, truly, but I think the prevailing feeling was that we'd all rather have just eaten slices of the beef, maybe with a side of potatoes and a nice salad. You know, the way fancy beef is meant to be eaten. Start a letter campaign...she needs to take her own advice and go Back to Basics because this wasn't basic. I don't know if she knows what the kids mean when they say something is "extra" but it's EXTRA.
We all did enjoy this...it was delish, especially the beef. But the beef we all had (hardy har) with the sandwich was mainly that, as the butcher (and all of us) already knew, it shouldn't have been a sandwich. You can't just SANDWICH FILET MIGNON, Ina Garten. You can't DO that. I know you could use your fistfuls of money as salad greens or as the substitute for arugula in this sandwich but that doesn't mean you can put fancy beef in a sandwich and convince us that it's the right thing to do. The truffle butter was a nice accompaniment, truly, but I think the prevailing feeling was that we'd all rather have just eaten slices of the beef, maybe with a side of potatoes and a nice salad. You know, the way fancy beef is meant to be eaten. Start a letter campaign...she needs to take her own advice and go Back to Basics because this wasn't basic. I don't know if she knows what the kids mean when they say something is "extra" but it's EXTRA.
For this post, I wanted to combine two summertime flavors into the crisp recipe one of my oldest Alaskan friends passed on to me years ago. Rhubarb, if you're unfamiliar, is a reddish stalk that kind of resembles really big celery. It's very tart and is most commonly paired with strawberry. I've rarely seen it star in its own show dessert-wise, but my friend Kylee has been making rhubarb crisp for years and it's the best crisp I know of. Blueberries are usually in season in late summer; I have not been home for a blueberry season since Dan's last deployment in 2018 so in order to make this recipe I actually used blueberries from a friend's parents' farm in upstate SC! They're a little sweeter than the blueberries I'd have picked at home, but they worked well. I'm going to pretend like I was actually picking blueberries at home in Alaska for the purpose of showing you what that would look like.
I was getting all ready to write this post, going through my process with photos starting in my kitchen when I realized that a lot of my friends probably don't know what fireweed is or where it comes from and this recipe actually starts far, far away from my kitchen. This will be the first of a few posts highlighting iconic Alaskan ingredients. I've wanted to do this for a while because my home inspires me in so many ways, writing and cooking particular among them. Fireweed is a wildflower that is rather ubiquitous in southcentral Alaska and is often considered a gauge for how long summer will last. It is said that when the blooms reach the top of the plant, winter is six weeks away. Whether or not that's accurate, fireweed is found all over in late summer in Alaska. Here is some I spotted in mid-July by Eklutna Lake:
If you know Dan and me very well, you probably know by now that if our life were a sitcom, he'd low-key be the funniest character. Because that is true, I thought I'd include his bottom ten with accompanying remarks before giving the actual bottom ten. His are hilarious, but aren't as legitimate as mine because he actually tried way fewer of these than one might think. I realized as he was flipping through the book that my old coworker Cam probably ate more of these foods than anyone else did. The overarching theme of Dan's song of Ina Garten hatred is not the actual taste of the finished product but more how asinine he finds that particular recipe to be. So here you are, Dan's bottom ten.
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
You guys asked for my top ten from the blog, so here we go! And I'm thinking that what you *really* want is actually the bottom ten, so I'll go ahead and give you those next week. That post will probably be A LOT funnier. While preparing to write this post, I had Dan flip through the cookbook to give me HIS top ten and he was all disgruntled as he did so and only came up with eight that he even liked at all. "I'm not a picky eater!" he insists. Yeah ok. Although to be fair, I've seen some cookbooks I would only make, like, one thing out of and plenty I'd make nothing out of, though sometimes that's because I find the chef so annoying. @ the Pioneer Woman. I just don't trust someone who puts sour cream in spaghetti and then bakes it. Plus all her recipe intros are about, like, Ladd or Tadd or whatever the heck her husband's name is "coming in from the fields starving for dinner". If I came in from working in a field and you tried to give me sour cream spaghetti, I'd be like, "How about a hot pocket instead? Thx." Anyway, this is not Dan's blog so these are not his top ten. You can ask him which ones he liked, but you'll end up in a long convo about how much he hates Ina Garten. Anyway, these are not ranked or anything, they're just in order from the cookbook.
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
It was Sunday afternoon and I thought to myself, "What a perfect time to make jam!" I mean, how positively quaint: just sitting in my home in suburbia, finished with weekend chores, relaxing with some knitting...why not? Why not make some jam? I mean, obviously my afternoon-kitchen-activity was directed toward jam-making because it was next up in the book BUT whatever, I was kind of excited! Also, this is the last recipe in this book!!! I'm still in the process of deciding what I'll do now, so if there's something you'd like me to make and tell you about in my own fashion - you know, with lots of tangents and jokes - please do let me know! I'll likely continue to tackle Ina content, but may start including some recipe faves and/or foods people text me about a lot! I get a lot of cake questions, a LOT of frosting questions (because meringue buttercream is bae and I've got everyone in my social circles who eats my food on board), and a lot of fish questions. So look for more food to come, even though this is the last recipe in Back to Basics.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
I was glad Ina gave me something easy for this week, because I was packing for Alaska and just *did not have the time* to mess with hunting lobsters or weird cheeses from the internet or whatever. ItemQuest was fairly straightforward, just took Dan a trip to the liquor store next to the Publix for some limoncello. I grabbed this particular lemon curd in the British aisle of Publix; I think last time an Ina recipe called for lemon curd I bought it from Trader Joe's and it was DISGUSTING. I mean, truly awful. I would like to recommend making your own lemon curd if you have the time and the inclination. Ina's lemon curd recipe is phenomenal and it is one thing for which I can say she is truly correct: homemade is BETTER and store-bought is not at all as good. The most beloved cupcakes I have ever made were filled with Ina's lemon curd, and had the lemon curd mixed into the meringue buttercream frosting. HIGHLY RECOMMEND!!! Anyway, the rest of this was fruit that I had on hand, mint, and Greek yogurt which we did have to buy because I don't, as a rule, eat Greek yogurt of my own free will. It's chalky and disgusting.
Dates are something I honestly never even thought about until I did Whole 30. I have mentioned my Whole 30 experience several times over the course of this journey through Back to Basics, but if you're new to reading the blog, this is what happened: I did Whole 30 one time, just to prove that I could, because salvation-by-diet apologists were obsessed with it as the newest fad in righteous eating practices. It was a terrible experience; on top of hating every minute of it for myself and finding exactly zero wellness benefits, I also hated it for Dan who was not allowed to eat popcorn for 30 days. Dan is in love with popcorn; his addiction to it is almost at the level of my addiction to coffee. He gets rage-y without it. But anyway, Whole 30 recipes are big into dates as sweeteners and some of the things you can eat, like Lara Bars, are made with dates. Dates are impossibly chewy. I ate more of them in that 30 days than I ever wanted to, and now when I see them in recipes I can't help but think of that Whole 30. Fortunately for me, I got to begin this recipe by chopping TWO CUPS' worth of dates. Oh, they also kind of look like cockroach bodies, so there's that. The only thing I actually had to get at the store for this was oranges! I had everything else on hand, even Cointreau, thanks to many previous Ina recipes.
Alright so, I'm not the Muffin Man. I don't really make a whole lot of muffins, for a lot of reasons, one of the main ones being that on the rankings of breakfast foods they definitely do not crack the top five, maybe not even the top ten. If I have an option for a bagel or a waffle, I'll pick one of them over a muffin every single time. I also prefer cereal, cinnamon rolls, or *cue eye roll* avocado toast. I've just never risen from my slumber and been like, "You know what would really hit the spot right now? A MUFFIN." But!!! In recent months, since my friend Logan came into my life, I've been making muffins a lot more frequently because he really loves them. So the last blueberry muffins I made were from a 99cent Betty Crocker mix packet which he brought into my house and asked me sweetly to make, because they're what he grew up with and along with many preservatives, they are full of nostalgia for him. Here is Logan and me, preparing to mix the muffin batter. Out of respect (and to make up for the disrespect of rolling up with muffin mix), he wore one of my aprons. I will treasure this picture forever.
You guys...Ina has "a thing" about commercial granola bars. Her beef with them, apparently, is that they say they contain real fruit and nuts but that all she sees when she looks at the labels are like, ten different kinds of corn syrup. I'm going to go ahead and guess, just based on this, that none of the lunches her mom packed for her growing up contained any Fruit By the Foot. And surely if we introduced her to Gushers, she would die. This is a real shame. I also feel like this disdain for corn syrup is maybe just a tad self-righteous, coming from the woman whose frosting recipe calls for literally six entire sticks of butter. At that point, what's a little corn syrup to you really? People's nutritional hills-to-die-on really fascinate me (and also kind of annoy me sometimes) and the ones about sugar might get me the most. I feel like, at some point, sugar is sugar and whether you're baking with honey, white sugar, brown sugar, molasses, maple syrup, etc you're still probably making something that's not amazing for you so, in terms of sugar, why not just be in for a penny in for a pound, amirite? So while I'm on this topic, before I even get to the actual point (please, I know you're here for the tangents), I would like to just let anyone and everyone know that I'm absolutely not interested in your "healthy substitutes" for things that taste good in their original form. I do not WANT a chocolate chip pancake made out of bananas and grains you harvested in your field this morning. If I want a banana I will eat one, and if I want a chocolate chip pancake I will eat one, and that's that. And DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT come @ me with "cashew cheese". Just don't. I don't even think I should honor that concept with an explanation of why it's so wrong. If that's not self-evident, I can't help you.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
At first I saw the pictures of this and thought, "YAY!!! Cinnamon rolls!" And then a couple of weeks ago, I actually tried making cinnamon rolls for the first time and realized that my inability to roll/shape/slice yeast doughs is still a thing. AND THEN I read this entire recipe and realized these get filled with raisins. So here we go!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!