"Fast food" surf and turf with aspargus...and chips

Wednesday night is pub night. After getting home, reading the kids a bedtime story and putting them to bed there’s not much time for dinner. The pub food is generally defrosted, microwave and/or deep fried crap so a quick supper is generally the best option.

I don’t generally plan a meal when time is tight, it’s more a question of what’s available. On this occasion we had a fine selection of ingredients that needed eating before passing their use-by dates. The particular fridge dwellers that required rehoming were a sirloin steak, some asparagus and some king prawns. Now asparagus and prawns are a good match, prawns and steak are modern classic in a sense but asparagus and steak? Not so sure…What I decided upon was to make best use of the commonality of flavour relationships between the little triangle of ingredients.

When you think of good steak sauces and good asparagus sauces there’s quite a similarity; steak and Bearnaise, asparagus and Hollandaise, buttery sauces, mustard flavours and such like so perhaps this might actually work quite well together.

However, enough thinking, time was very much of the essence and a quick turnaround required. The children went upstairs at around 7:15pm so having some foresight the oven was turned on to heat up during storytime. Back downstairs at 7:30 and needing to leave the house by about ten to eight, time was relatively tight. What you are about to experience is some great fast food! Recipes can be written in many different ways but my fast chronological method is illustrated below. The race is on…

19:30pm

Pan on the hob, melting some butter

19:31pm

Stir in flour starting the basis of a white sauce
Kettle on boiling some water for the asparagus

19:32pm

Gradually stir in some milk to make the white sauce, slowly

19:33pm

Season steak with salt, pepper and a little olive oil rubbing in
Pop oven chips in

19:34pm

Stir mustard, cheese and a dash of vinegar into the white sauce

19:36pm

Pop outside, pick some fresh tarragon from the garden
Keep stirring

19:37pm

Pop steak onto very hot griddle
Add boiling water to pan for asparagus

19:39pm

Flip steak

19:40pm

Flip steak
Stir sauce, add tarragon, king prawns and dash of paprika

19:41pm

Flip steak and turn 90 degrees to give grid shaped browning marks
Give oven chips a shuffle

19:42pm

Flip steak for last time
Add asparagus to pan

19:43pm

Remove steak to plate

19:44pm

Drain asparagus

19:45pm

Plate up

19:46pm

EAT

19:55pm

GO TO PUB…..

This was a tasty filling supper but wasn’t of course an amazing gourmet delight. However, this sauce was a good little discovery. With Asparagus season on its way I feel it worth mentioning. Very basically, it breaks down as follows:

Make a béchamel base sauce. I always go for the rule of more butter, less flour when doing this. When you add the flour to the butter, it’s bound to be lumpy later on unless it has the consistency of cream before the milk is added. You can soon rescue a situation of having added too much flour by melting a bit more butter in. The butter is also the prime initial flavour ingredient so bear this in mind when making it.

Once you’ve added most of the milk in, add a dash of white wine. Not too much otherwise it will become a white wine tasting sauce, just enough to sit in the background.

Then melt in a little cheese, again, not to make it cheesy to give a less powdery and more creamy texture and to allow a bit of a glaze to the surface.

The final two key ingredients are mustard and white wine vinegar. These two things will give it a flavour slightly reminiscent of a hollandaise and needed to be added carefully, dash by dash.

Herbs and spices are the final things. I used fresh tarragon and paprika. Tarragon is a lovely flavour but must be added right at the end or you’ll lose the flavour. Paprika gives a little hint of spice and really adds to the colour making it look less bland.

I added prawns to this but I wouldn’t really consider them part of the sauce. You might as well pour the sauce on prawns as its complementing them and they’re not really a flavouring ingredient.

The final mix has flavour, a nice bit of acidity but isn’t overly spiced or flavoured such that it overtakes the flavours of what it’s served with. Above all else though, it’s quick. I hope you enjoy…