Eat Palio Anywhere!

First: my friend Spencer from U of Mich started a little side biz that has to do with food and cooking. Since those happen to be 2 of my 3 favorite things (wine), I thought I would share this info with you in case you wanted to check out some of his stuff:

www.chefsuspence.com

He is making some great things with local fresh ingredients. Not sure if he can ship anywhere at this point, but check back with him.

On to the important stuff: Palio. Palio is my favorite restaurant. Located in downtown Ann Arbor. I have traveled a lot, ate at some amazing restaurants, and Palio still ranks up there on my list (I didn't mean for that to sound like I am obnoxiously bragging. But I am :) Ha!) They have tons of fresh pasta dishes, Tuscan style entrees, Italian wines....it's great. (* Also note: if you took my advice and purchased the Main Street Ventures cookbook, you will find many great Palio recipes in it!)

They have this dish at Palio called the Fileto Di Manzo which is a filet of beef on top of goat cheese, on top of a slice of tomato, on top of a portobello mushroom! It's delicious. Then it has some fancy sides. But I wanted to recreate this dish, Abby style, to easily make at home. It is an awesome dish to do when having company over that you want to impress.

P.S.: there is no way to make this vegetarian so don't even as me. And it's not low-fat. So, you dieters can just wait until the next post for something magical. And for the lactose intolerant, I suppose you could take out the cheese. But I suppose you could eat garbage too.

Cheesy Factor (1 no cheese, 10 all cheese): 3
Time Factor (1 shortest, 10 longest): 5
Dummy Factor (1 easiest, 10 hardest): 7

Abby's Fileto Di Manzo
4 6oz. beef tenderloins (filet)
4 small portobello mushrooms, stems removed
4 goat cheese slices (or package of softened goat cheese, plain flavor)
1 large tomato, sliced thickly
Olive Oil
Balsamic Vinegar
bag of yellow pearl onions (or 16 total if can buy individually)
8-10 yellow dutch creamer potatoes (or baby yukon golds), cut in half length wise
16 stalks of asparagus 
Fresh Thyme, chopped
12 whole cloves of garlic

Preheat oven to 400 deg. On a sheet on tinfoil, put the potato halves, pearl onions, and garlic cloves. Drizzle with olive oil, season heavily with salt and pepper, and sprinkled with chopped fresh thyme. Toss to coat. Fold tinfoil over ingredients to make a "packet" and seal. Put in oven for 50 min. While potatoes are cooking, preheat grill. Over cutting board, loosely snap a piece of asparagus. Where ever the asparagus breaks, cut all other asparagus stalks at that point. Then spread the top portion over a piece of tinfoil. Drizzle with olive oil, and heavy salt and pepper. Toss to coat, and set aside.

Rub the steaks with olive oil, and season with salt and pepper. Grill steaks to order (I use a meat thermometer or the finger test- will elaborate more later). While steaks are grilling, heat 2 Tbl olive oil and 2 Tbl Balsamic vinegar in large fry/saute pan over low heat. Season portobello mushrooms with salt/pepper and cook in pan until somewhat soft, but cooked through. If they finish soon, cover pan and remove from heat, but try to keep them warm.

When potatoes are soft (stick fork in them to make sure before taking out of oven completely), take out, keep sealed and set aside. Set oven to broil, and broil asparagus for 8 minutes (10 minutes if thick pieces). Take out immediately.

Arrangement on plate:
       Middle of plate: place the portobella mushroom, top down, then spread thick layer of goat cheese on top of it. Place tomato slice on top of goat cheese, followed by filet on top of tomato.
       Surrounding filet/mushroom: on the outside of the plate, place a potato half, pearl onion, and garlic clove, alternating them in the circle around the filet. Then place a piece of asparagus on each side of plate, making a square around everything. (So each plate should get 4 potato halves, 4 pearl onions, 3 garlic cloves, and 4 pieces of asparagus).

The key to this dish is timing everything out so that nothing is done super early and gets cold, and nothing is done super late so everything gets cold (especially if you don't have a separate oven and broiler). Plus, the presentation is awesome. But keep this in mind:

Potatoes: roughly an hour
Steaks: roughly 15-20 min
Mushrooms: roughly 10 minutes
Asparagus: less than 10 minutes
Assembly: 5 minutes

But other than the timing, it's an easy dish as far as the cooking goes. If you aren't a whiz in the kitchen yet, and you want to make this meal, I would write out a schedule with times next to the steps above so you can make sure to stay on track and don't get flustered.

For the steak finger test, here is a little trick: touch your thumb to your pinky finger. Then with your other hand, press down on large, lower portion of your thumb. That's what well-done steaks would feel like if you pressed down on them while they are on the grill. Thumb to ring finger would be medium-well, thumb to middle finger would be medium. Thumb to fore finger is medium-rare to rare.

I wish I had a picture of this dish as it is super impressive....hey, Gallas, can you post a pic on here from your phone???

Thanksgiving Casserole.....A Little Past Thanksgiving

I've been a bad blogger. BAD BLOGGER! I have no excuse other than work, a flooded house, holidays, etc.

The holidays were great, as usual. We went to my husband's dad's house this year and it was a full feast. When people tell me they had "so much food" at their Thanksgiving dinner, I want to laugh at them. They don't know what "so much food" means until they have had Thanksgiving with the Filipinos. We had all the traditional Thanksgiving foods, plus all the Filipinos foods (lumpia, BBQ, pancit, etc.) PLUS prime rib, crab legs, cheesy potatoes (courtesy of yours truly), and, of course, 9 millions lbs of rice. It was an impressive spread, let me tell you. The only problem is, I am the type of eater that has to try everything. So, naturally, after Thanksgiving I felt sick for a few days. Anorexia was not an option at that point, it was a necessity. (Kidding, kidding).

This recipe really does nothing for you right now, for the record, considering it is meant to make the day after Thanksgiving. I meant to put it up the day of Thanksgiving, but, of course, forgot. It's basically just taking all your Thanksgiving leftovers and throwing them into a  trough. But not really.

I am not going to put a "recipe" up here for this because I don't know what your leftovers consist of. But you will need a casserole dish or dutch oven.

Preheat oven to 350 deg. In your dish, layer your leftovers (at least 2 layers of each is best), but making sure the top layer is mashed potatoes. Also, I HIGHLY recommend putting a very thin layer of gravy in between every layer, or at least every other layer.

So my casserole would go something like this:

Stuffing
Gravy
Turkey
Gravy
Mashed Potatoes
Green Bean Casserole
Stuffing
Gravy
Turkey
Gravy
Mashed Potatoes

Then you poke some holes in the top layer of potatoes with a fork, stick in the oven for 15-30 min (depending on how deep your casserole is and how many layers you have). And voila!