The Meat Goes On

And on, and on.  I probably should have thought this through, because now I have 4 pounds of beef that's going bad, with increasingly less desire to eat it.  Last night was a decent steak salad, but I think I was forcing it.  The avocado was probably the best part of the whole experience.

I tried a new approach to the slicing, making sure to orient the roast so I was slicing against the grain.  This makes the resulting slices much more tender, since you're not gnawing on long muscle bits but rather a whole bunch of shorter fibers.  And if you didn't want to think about meat that way, sorry for ruining the mystique, but it's true.  Another good discovery was that if you look behind the blade to see what's coming out, you can control the speed a lot better, and get much more even slices that don't fall apart in the blade.  So I got a big tub of fresh sliced meat, ready to be made into sandwiches.  Now all I need is motivation to eat them.

Thin-cut, delicious looking homemade roast beef.  And this is just half of it!

Slices can get pretty thin once you know how to work the slicer

Anyway, salad recipe below.

Steak Salad
 

• 1/4 pound top round, sliced 1/4" thick and cut into strips
• 2 cups spring greens
• 1/2 tomato
• 1/2 avocado
• 1/4 red onion
• 1/2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• 1/2 tbsp balsamic vinegar (good stuff, please - otherwise you're not getting the full experience)
• Sea salt and cracked black pepper

Prepare the greens, onion, and tomato.  Make sure the lettuce is dry, or else the salad dressing won't stick, and it's going to be a mess.  Slice avocado thinly just before plating, so it won't brown before you can get at it.

Toss greens, onion, and tomato with salt, pepper, oil and balsamic in a large bowl.  I find that the best way to do this is by hand, but only if nobody's watching.  A small bowl will result in greens on the table and on your shirt, so go big.  If you add the salt and dressing too early, the greens may wilt or lose their fresh taste - always dress your salad within a couple minutes of plating.

To serve, assemble the plate with all ingredients as you see fit.  Be creative!  Fan the avocado, or stand things up, or put everything in separate piles, or in a big tower.  If salads aren't fun to prepare, they're not going to be fun to eat, so enjoy it or you'll just be another one of those somber lettuce eaters, like a giraffe or the lonesome triceratops.

Steak salad.  Not bad, but I would normally prefer a different cut from top round here