A belated Fathers' Day entry

Well, we had a Fathers' Weekend at our place. Since Fathers' Day is on Sunday and our church is at 9AM I wanted to do Rick's breakfast on Saturday. I went on a crazy shopping spree, went WAY over my food budget and planned of weekend of tasty treats.

On Saturday morning he received homemade waffles (I had to differentiate so you'd know I didn't just pop in Eggos!) that Nathan helped make. We topped them with fresh strawberries and actual whipped cream! (As in I bought cream, added sugar and vanilla and WHIPPED!) MMMMmmmmmm.

Then for lunch we had Club sandwiches - toasted - mmmm. We made strawberry lemonade (ok so I didn't sqeeze lemons - we used CountryTime mix) with stawberry daquari (did I spell that right?) mix to give it a fun color.

Dinner was steak!!!!
Oh, man! I totally rocked this! I read up on the internet on how to prepare steak and compiled various tips into a fool-proof method.

I'll share in a minute - but first a side note: It's so comforting to know that there is both rhyme and reason involved in food preparation! It need not be a mystery! Making a good pie crust for me used to be a gamble for me - sometimes it would work, sometimes not. A few years ago I found a great recipe (more like a tutorial) on pie crusts at allrecipes.com. It was an epiphany! Not only did they explain everything in a linear, detailed fashion that made my math mind cry out for joy, but they explained WHY!!!! Did you know that you should chill all your ingredients first? Wanna know WHY? Remember how all the cookbooks say "cut in butter until you have pea sized clumps"? Wanna know WHY? Well, this is the key to a flaky crust! You need big gobs of butter mixture (hard, that's why everthing is cold, not soft or it wouldn't have the strength and form to do it's job) to create little air pockets of fluffiness all over. Otherwise, if your ingredients are warm or if you cut the pieces too fine, you will have smooched your crust and said goodbye to flakiness. I love you, pie crust tutorial author!!!

Ok, back to steak. The best way to do it is a 2-stage method. First sear the outside over direct heat, then finish cooking over indirect heat. The directions below are for a gas grill since that's what we have. Go to this site to read about charcoal and indoor methods.

So here is what you need to do:
1. ROOM temp. meat (this took more than an hour out of the fridge for me)
2. Turn your gas grill up as far as it will go - and let it heat up. This would be 600+ degrees.
3. Rub your steaks on both sides with salt and pepper or your steak seasoning.
4. Sear those steaks! 2-3 minutes each side.
5. Remove from heat and turn down your grill (this achieves the effect of indirect heat) - leave it open to help it cool down a bit.
6. Brush olive oil over both sides of the steak. This adds that yummy "crust". I added some more seasoning at this point.
7. Put back on grill and cook till done. Medium is 140-150 degrees F.
8. Let the meat rest for five minutes so the juices will stay in the steak. If you cut in too soon the juice will just run out all over your plate.
9. Enjoy!

Ok, so for dinner we also had potato salad and strawberry lemonade smoothies.
Mmmmm. For dessert, Ashlyn and I had made an ice cream cake the day before. It was cookie, vanilla ice cream and fudge layers with a whipped cream frosting. Yum!

Then on Sunday Rick got Danishes for breakfast. Lunch was the same as Saturday. We had planned on another dinner and another dessert but we had gone so overboard (and it was almost 100 degrees) that we had plenty of leftovers to tide us over.

The dessert that we had planned was strawberry poke cake and we ended up making it for family home evening this week. Wow - such a great holiday!