Wednesday, April 1, 2009

R2R March


As a man with a near boundless appreciation of acronymic abbreviations (current favorites: LOLLUVIT, FTFY, GTFO and ROTFLMFAO), I was happy to join R2R or Recipes to Rival, a loose association of food bloggers which is more or less the post-1998 equivalent of a web ring. Each month, the members of R2R all cook the same recipe and release their success/failure to the blogosphere on the same date. Today is that date. This is no April fools. This month's challenge was something called "Steak Diane Flambe." If we go ahead and take a quick look at the name of the recipe, we realize very quickly that this is something that is way out of my zone: steak? No. Flambe? Hardly, I'm a Francophobe. Diane? Never 'eard of 'er. Then it came to me: Flambe = open flames. OPEN FLAMES. This realization reawakened within me the pyromaniacal thirteen year old that lit a plastic monster truck on fire and then sprayed it flame-thrower style with a can of WD-40 (sorry mom, but the ten year rule on this one is up!). I've got to be honest, the pictures we took of the flambe are not nearly as cool as the ones that I took of the flaming monster truck (those must be somewhere, right?), but I decided that Jim Beam probably tasted better than oil-based multipurpose lubricants.

Anyway, Kibbee stepped up to do the original version of the recipe with steaks while I went the ol' portobello-substitution route. Rachel and Angel stood by, fire extinguisher at the ready (this is false). Safety always comes first in my kitchen (also, apparently, false as I nearly relived the near-catastrophic paella incident). At the very least we ended up with some smiling faces:



{+} Here's my FTFY version of the recipe:


If you're interested, the official R2R post is here. Also, I can't resist signing off with a few more pictures:

Kribs lights the steaks:

Flaming mushrooms:

The sprouts we had with it:


Flame on,
Peter

6 comments:

Mary Bergfeld said...

Your "steaks" look wonderful. I'm sure they were as good to taste as they are good to look at.

JMom said...

Awesome that you got to photo the flames! Your steaks look really delicious and I bet they paired up really well with the brussel sprouts.

Andrea at Nummy Kitchen said...

What a creative take on R2R! Your portobello steaks and brussels sprouts look so delicious, and I love the story about the flaming monster truck, sounds like something that would happen at our house :)

Fearless Kitchen said...

This looks delicious - it's a very exciting way to deal with mushrooms. (Open flame is really the way to my heart.)

Temperance said...

Those flames are nice! actauly all the pictures are pretty good, I think I might be jealous. And the end result looks great! so good job!

Lori said...

Great job Peter. Welcome to R2R. Hmmm,(In a Freudian tone) so you set your toy truck on fire? Just kidding.